Phones

Today was something of a wash.

I had planned to swap 10GB of RAM from one beastly machine into another, to do a really fair comparison between them when they were each loaded to the gills. Sadly, there was some sort of socket incompatibility which meant that I couldn’t use the 2GB DIMMS that Intel is lending us. Oh well. I thought that a DIMM was a DIMM … but apparently not.

I broke out the corporate Amex and bought a 500GB FireWire drive, so that we can begin to test our software *before* releasing it. Previously, we’ve released software that publishes large volumes of data, having tested out the small and mid-sized cases … but lacking the infrastructure to exercise the large ones. Hopefully, this was a good idea.

Then I got on the phone with this dude from up North. Said dude has been sending in support requests piecemeal every couple of hours throughout the holiday weekend. I decided to just call him, rather than try to respond to all those. Bad move. First piece of information he gave me was that the machine was behind a firewall, not connected to the network, and in no way would I be allowed to log into it. Just not possible. We were on the phone for two and a half hours, with me offering one command at a time for him to laboriously and incorrectly type and misinterpret. “I run this on the portal?” “no. The node. Type it in the terminal you’ve got open on the node.” “Terminal?” “Yes. The terminal you opened just 45 seconds ago.” “What does this ‘terminal’ program do?” “AAAAAAAAAA Stabbity stab stab stab!”

I took to emailing the commands to him, so that he could mistype them (cut and paste? Nah). I would send the message and say “I’ve sent the message.” Silence would ensue. “Have you received it?” “Yes.” “Please type that command into the terminal.” “You’ve mentioned this ‘terminal’ before, where do I find this program?”

After about two and a half hours, on a whim, I tried to ssh into the hostname that I heard him muttering. It asked for a password. I went for broke: “What’s the root password?” He told me. I was in. He had mispelled “cluster.private” as “cluster.privat” in the initial setup. I fixed that, the system started working. I congratulated him and got the hell off the phone.

Later in the afternoon, I learned that I’m going to travel up there next week to complete the install. All he was *supposed* to do was verify that the wires were plugged in correctly, so that I can do the install when I arrive. He decided to go the extra mile.

I’m *so* not getting those hours back.