Sa aking unang trabaho out sa kolehiyo sa 1991, Ako ay mapalad na upang gumana para sa isang kumpanya na may manufacturing 13 lokasyon, 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.

Ang proyekto Rolls kasama at ako ay nagpadala down sa Baltimore na may bagong co-manggagawa, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, tiyakin ang O / S ay tumatakbo, i-install ang sistema ng ERP, i-configure ang ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (Ito ay isang panaginip na trabaho, lalo na pagdating tuwid out sa kolehiyo). Before we could really get off the ground, kinailangan naming ma-unpack ang lahat ng mga berdeng tubes, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Para sa ilang mga dahilan na hindi ko maintindihan at hindi kailanman talagang naisip na tanungin tungkol sa oras, kami ay ilang pagkontrata kumpanya sumama at magpatakbo ng mga cable sa buong planta, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Kaya, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" at mga snaked sa paligid ng gusali sa iba't ibang mga lugar sa gusali.

Kami nagtrabaho aming paraan sa pamamagitan ng ito sa kurso ng isang weekend, pagsubok ng bawat wire, paglalagay sa isang connector (tinitiyak na iyon ay tuwid vs. tumawid), tinitiyak ang bit setting sa mga berdeng tubes at mga printer ay tama, 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.

Pero, 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, ngunit printer ang naka sa isang tatlong-linggong bangungot.

Kung hindi mo alam ito, o pinigilan ito, pagharap sa mga berdeng tubes at mga printer na ito paraan, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-kaunti, 7-kaunti, pagkakapare-pareho (kahit na / kakaiba / none), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, ang tube o printer pa rin nagpapakita ng mga bagay-bagay, ngunit ito ay magiging kabuuang mga walang kuwentang, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Talaga, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Kami-set up ang una sa maraming mga mabilis na tawag sa NJ tao (ng isang kulay-abo hater computer na kung sino marahil curses sa amin upang sa araw na ito). 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, hindi kailanman talagang sigurado kung siya ay ginagawa mo ito nang tama.

Ito ay tungkol sa oras na maging live, lahat ng bagay sa Baltimore ay humuhuni, ngunit hindi namin makuha ang sinumpa printer up sa NJ upang gumana! 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", umaasa na siguro ay magkakaroon ng ilang mga bakas na sa basura na magsasabi sa amin kung ano ang ginagawa namin mali.

Kapag namin nakuha ang fax, we immediately knew what was wrong. Tingnan, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" command na tulad nito:

LP / etc / passwd

Talaga, 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:

panday:*:100:100:8A-74(opisina):/tahanan / smith:/usr / bin / SH
:*:200:0::/tahanan / guest:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Gayunman, sa dulo ng gumagamit, it was "printing garbage".

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