Timmins.net

I have many interesting stories regarding turnups. Here is one more.

I should note that this is not the worst one. Not by far. Interesting, but I can live with interesting. The ones where there's pressure on and screaming customers with unreasonable demands (note "demands" rather than "requests"- if I can turn them down it's one thing.) I can do without those. These ones are more the "spice of life". I'm not even sure if that was eupemistic or not. I'm too tired to care.

So today, I've:

* Driven through rush hour traffic to go to Flint.

* Dealt with a dual T1 circuit that wasn't – AT&T dicked me somehow on this. I think they're doing something fucked up in their DACS. I see the circuit go up and down but it won't pass data. But there's two, and one works, so that's okay.

* Did the neatest backboard work in my life. It was otherwise beautifully done, new construction. It's just how you'd want it.

* Explained to a customer that the phones they INSISTED on using have two serious limitations beyond the ones that I warned them about previously. The first one is that they use cisco's power over ethernet. The second I'll mention later.
(Cisco's power over ethernet is based on an early draft of the PoE spec. Basically Cisco, and I think Foundry support it. Dell PowerConnect does not. That's what the customer had. My recommended/supported phones have a model that supports 802.3af PoE. The ones they insisted I use do not. They only support Cisco PoE. Guess what: The phones I spent the last 2 weeks configuring (my recommended models take about 5 minutes per phone or so to configure, their models take 20+ minutes) don't even power on. They don't have AC adapters, or any way to power it on. I'd just walk away and leave it at that, but it's an urgent care. And they're moving in to this newly constructed building TOMORROW. So we embark on a quest to try to find a cisco PoE switch in Flint starting at 8pm. He rattles his contacts. I rattle mine. Nada. He has a customer site nearby with a cisco aeronet AP. He yanks that to do my testing.)

* Somewhere during that nonsense, I end up stepping in carpet glue that was on the floor. I had to unglue myself from the customer's floor, and spend 20 minutes with mineral spirits and water cleaning my boots. Good times.

* Of course, the phones don't work right on his network. The firewall is eating my TFTP configuration. This is issue #2. The phones they want only support a TFTP configuration. My supported ones do HTTP. So we had to go and get one of his servers, and install tftpd on it. Small problem, it had kubuntu on it, but no monitor. So I go out to my car and get my projector. We use a projector as a monitor to set up the machine.

* I have to modify my configs so he's no longer on the redundant proxies, and is set specifically to a gateway. If it goes down, so do they. But I had no choice. Again, supported hardware works perfectly. His stuff, not so much. He's now got to manually go to all phones and change the TFTP server to something local on his LAN and we'll be all set.

Time I got there? 5:20pm
Time I left? 12:35am

But this isn't even a bad turnup. Seriously. It works and the customer's happy.