On Call The effort and application of tech support people are often forgotten, which is why each Friday The Register offers a new instalment of On Call, the reader contributed column that reminds us all of the moments in which you triumph after being asked to unravel the asinine.
This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as “Ron” and told us that he spent much of the 1980s and 1990s working at a PC manufacturer famed for building machines to order in the Great State of Texas.
Ron worked on the Unix team at the PC-maker and told us his role was a jack of all trades who could fix the network one day, arrange backups the next, and write a driver if asked.
The users he served included salespeople who, when they managed to secure an order, used their company-provided PCs to log on to an application running on a Tandem mainframe.
That app would parse each order and create a unique five-letter code that informed the provisioning system what hardware and software were to be installed in each new machine. Another application that also ran under Unix would then create and install the appropriate OS image for each new PC.
As the box-maker made boxes at significant scale, that Unix system drove over 100 PC assembly stations.
Ron had made that possible by altering its kernel so it presented 100 virtual network interface cards, each with its own IP address.
The system worked for years – even after Ron moved to another employer.
And then one day, around 15 years after Ron left the building, a former friend and colleague called.
“Our Singapore production line is down, software isn’t being installed, nobody knows what to do.”
Ron remembered the hostname of a server in Singapore, shared it with his mate, and learned that his info helped support staff to identify the machine and fix its burned out power supply.
Ron told On Call he was a little amused that nobody on site knew what was going on. He was also not impressed to receive no thanks for this assistance. But he thought little of it – until five years later when he received a LinkedIn message from a stranger.
“They told me a server had been found in a closet in the PC-maker’s home city with a huge note on it: ‘DO NOT EVER TURN THIS SERVER OFF – CALL RON x12345’.”
Nobody knew what the server was, or did, and this time Ron’s memory failed him – he could not recall what the box did, or its password.
“I laughed my head off, told them I had no idea, suggested they learn how to boot a Unix box into single-user mode and wished them good luck.”
Ron never heard from his former team again. But he notes the PC-maker is still in business (see – this story isn’t about Compaq) so either the box was fixed, wasn’t needed any longer, or was somehow replaced.
Have you been asked to fix tech you installed in the dim, dark, past? If so click here to send On Call an email so that we can jolt readers’ memories with the tale of your feats. ®