It's been a while since CDFW, one of my correspondents, shared more on his battle with computer network demons, dragons and wizards. He recently wrote me a follow up. I'm sharing it here for those with an interest.
CDFW starts:
"One of the things I'm trying to do today is to solve the networking problems I've got with {his company}. I've already related some of those woes. They've only gotten longer and more drawn out and more inscrutable.
"The guy that introduced two new routers to my network without either asking me or knowing how to make them work has not been able to make them work properly. Neither have I been able to find solutions in the five times I've consulted with network people. I am studying these two routers I had nothing to do with, trying to understand the magical spells needed to make them work.
"Since the things I've tried with the gui haven't worked, I thought I'd download the command line manual for the router. Perhaps there are secrets revealed therein that can solve my problems. Perhaps in invisible ink.
"The AOS (Adtran Operating System) is what drives these little plastic boxes. Like most routers, you can telnet in, type in ridiculous numbers of nonsense words to drill down to the place to make settings. Of course, to get anything accomplished you already have to know the magic words, as it does nothing to give you hints. So I figured I'd download the manual, and at least I could look up the magic words.
"The manual is available as an Adobe PDF document. I figured, OK, I'll download it and print it off, then I'll have it handy.
"I think, though that I won't print it, after all.
"The manual for the operating system for this router is 2048 pages long.
"At random, I look in ethernet port settings. One of the commands there -- on page 847 -- is the "channel group mode" setting. This explains how to turn the channel group mode on or off for a particular channel group number (in the range of 1 to 6), and that's all it explains.
"Hmm. I wonder what a channel group is and whether I need one. Or have one. Or have one that is blocking what I'm trying to do. I look up "channel group" in the index. It has one reference: page 847.
"OK. This may take a while. And I'm going to need some garlic necklaces."
You know, I read things like this and truly come to appreciate that I no longer even think about doing something hardware-wise anymore. If truly pressed into it I'll attempt to plug something into a wall. But only under adult supervision...
I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.
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