Na moj prvi posao izvan koledž u 1991, Bio sam sretan da raditi tvrtka sa proizvodnim 13 mjesta, not including its corporate HQ in New Jersey. I joined just when the company was rolling out a new ERP system. We were a small IT department of about ten people altogether, two of whom Did Not Travel. Part of the project involved replacing IBM System 36 boxes with HP hardware and HPUX. Everyone used green tubes to access the system.

Projekt role zajedno, a ja sam poslan na Baltimore s novim suradnik, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, provjerite je li O / S je trčanje, instalirali ERP sustava, konfigurirati ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (To je bio posao iz snova, posebno dolazi ravno iz fakulteta). Before we could really get off the ground, trebamo raspakirati sve zelene cijevi, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Za neki razlog da ja nikada ne razumiju i zapravo nikada nije mislio pitati na vrijeme, smo je neki ugovorna tvrtka doći zajedno i pokrenuti kabel u cijeloj biljci, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Tako, došlo je do "patch box" s desecima od unlabeled kabela u "učionici" i to snaked oko zgrade na raznim mjestima u zgradi.

Radili smo naš put kroz nju tijekom vikenda, testiranje svake žice, stavljanjem na priključak (pazeći da je ravno vs. prešao), osiguranje su bitne postavke na zelenim cijevi i pisači su točni, labeling wires, pazeći da "Getty" was running correctly for each port and probably a thousand other things that I’ve suppressed since then. It all came together quite nicely.

Ali, there was one important cable that we couldn’t figure out. The plant in Baltimore had a relationship with a warehousing location in New Jersey. Some orders placed in Baltimore shipped out of that location. There were two wires that we had to connect to the HPUX box: a green tube and a printer. The green tube was easy, ali pisač pretvorio u noćnu moru tri tjedna.

Ako ne znate, ili su ga potisnut, koje se bave sa zelenim cijevima i pisača na taj način, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-bit, 7-bit, paritet (ni / ak / ništa), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, cijev ili pisač i dalje pokazuje stvari, ali to će biti ukupno trtljanje, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Naravno, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Postavili smo prvi od mnogih brzih poziva s NJ Gvido (prosijed računalo mrzitelj koji su vjerojatno nam psuje na ovaj dan). We got the green tube working pretty quickly, but we couldn’t get the printer to work. It kept "printing garbage". We would create a new RJ11 connector, switching between crossed and straight. We would delete the port and re-created in Unix. We went through the arduous task of having him explain to us the pin configuration on the printer, nikada stvarno siguran ako je to radi ispravno.

To je oko vremena za ići uživo, sve u Baltimoreu se zuji, ali ne možemo dobiti prokleto pisač u NJ raditi! We’ve exhausted all possibilities except for driving back up to NJ to work on the printer in person. To avoid all that driving, napokon smo ga zamoliti da nam faksom što je sve kad je "smeće", u nadi da možda tamo će biti neki trag u tom smeću koje će nam reći što radimo krivo.

Kad smo dobili faks, we immediately knew what was wrong. Vidjeti, naša metoda ispitivanja da li mi je konfigurirati pisač ispravno je da izda "LP" Naredba ovako:

lp / etc / passwd

U osnovi, we printed out the unix password file. It’s always present and out of the box, always just one page. You standard Unix password file looks something like this:

kovač:*:100:100:8A-74(ured):/home / Smith:/usr / bin / sh
:*:200:0::/home / gost:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Međutim, do krajnjeg korisnika, je "tiskanje smeće".

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