Katika kazi yangu ya kwanza nje ya chuo katika 1991, Nilikuwa na bahati ya kufanya kazi kwa kampuni ya viwanda na 13 maeneo, 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.

mradi Rolls pamoja na mimi nina teremshiwa Baltimore na mpya ushirikiano mfanyakazi, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, kuhakikisha O / S alikuwa akikimbia, kufunga mfumo ERP, configure ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (Hii ilikuwa ni kazi ya ndoto, hasa kuja moja kwa moja nje ya chuo). Before we could really get off the ground, sisi zinahitajika kinafafanua zilizopo yote mabichi, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Kwa sababu baadhi ya kuwa mimi kamwe kuelewa na kwa kweli kamwe mawazo ya kuuliza kuhusu wakati, sisi alikuwa alikuwa na baadhi ya kampuni ya kuambukizwa kuja pamoja na kukimbia cable katika kupanda, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Hivyo, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" na hizi snaked kuzunguka jengo kwa maeneo mbalimbali katika jengo.

Sisi kazi njia yetu kwa njia hiyo katika kipindi cha mwishoni mwa wiki, kupima kila waya, kuweka kwenye kontakt (maamuzi ya uhakika ni moja kwa moja vs. walivuka), kuhakikisha mazingira kidogo juu zilizopo kijani na Printers yalikuwa sahihi, labeling wires, making sure that "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.

Lakini, 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, lakini printer imegeuka kuwa ndoto ya wiki tatu.

Kama huna kujua ni, au kuzimwa ni, kushughulika na zilizopo kijani na Printers kwa njia hii, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-bit, 7-bit, parity (even/odd/none), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, bomba au printer bado inaonyesha mambo, lakini itakuwa taarifa gibberish, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Bila shaka, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Sisi kuanzisha ya kwanza ya simu nyingi haraka na guy NJ (marakaraka kompyuta hater ambao pengine laana yetu kwa siku hii). 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, never really sure if he was doing it correctly.

It’s about time to go live, everything in Baltimore is humming, but we can’t get the cursed printer up in NJ to work! We’ve exhausted all possibilities except for driving back up to NJ to work on the printer in person. To avoid all that driving, we finally ask him to fax us what he’s getting when it’s "garbage", matumaini kwamba labda kutakuwa na baadhi ya kidokezo katika takataka kwamba kutuambia nini sisi ni kufanya vibaya.

Tulipofika faksi, we immediately knew what was wrong. Kuona, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" amri kama hii:

lp / nk / passwd

Kimsingi, 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:

smith:*:100:100:8-74(ofisi):/nyumbani / smith:/Usr / bin / sh
:*:200:0::/nyumbani / mgeni:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Hata hivyo, kwa mtumiaji wa mwisho, it was "printing garbage".

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