May 29, 2003
A Hard Day's Night
Why I love my job -- the easy money of overtime.
Upgrading the LAN with new t-carriers. For configuration purposes they want them on a separate WAN card and send me a pair pulled from retired routers. I place them in the slots, but not seated -- it is generally not considered good form to seat cards into hot slots, PCM-CIA and hot-swappable hard drives notwithstanding.
Powering down the router means dropping the LAN -- not something you are allowed to do to the 9-5 folks. Which means some easy overtime for me (see picture to the left:)
Come in at time and a half, power router off, (top)
seat card, (middle)
power router on. Piece of cake. (bottom)
Plug into LAN, pull a DHCP address -- yeah, LAN's up.
Try getting my e-mail. No. ummm.... Ping server? No. Oh POOP!
Support telnets into router, looks around, seems as if the routing tables didn't load. Power down/power up. Still no go. Pull new WAN card from router 1, place in router 2. Router is working. Huh? A WAN card that is not even configured stops the router tables to not load?
I do not accept that I have found the tourble unless I can put the trouble back. So I power down, put the 'defective' card back in, power up. It works. Everything works. The equipment just wanted me to work even later so I wouldn't get home to blog and sleep. That was yesterday.