How To Contact Your Sysadmin In An Emergency

		How To Contact Your Sysadmin In An Emergency


So today I got up, logged in to turing, read my mail, futzed around
the old hovel, had breakfast, etc.   I figured everything was ok with
the little network I take care of since it was ok at 1am.

Sometime later I took a shower and when I returned to the vicinity I
was surprised to see that there was a message on my answering machine,
telling me that the server was seriously hung. My connection to the
develswitch had been rudely terminated by a blast of line noise.

I phoned work to tell them I'd be in shortly.  When I arrived, I found
out what had happened:

(1)  User A, encouraged by my email informing her that the new bug-fixed
release of the software she uses had arrived by uucp and been installed
by me over the weekend (I think I said "go for it!"), had tried it out
on a client machine, completely locking the poor thing up (i.e. to the
point where ping wouldnt).

(2)  After phoning me and getting a busy signal, but wishing to continue
to go for it, User A tried to duplicate her problem on the server, with
complete success.  At this point other users became aware of the problem
in the most obvious way imaginable.  

(3)  User A, becoming alarmed at the situation she had caused, phoned
me repeatedly and became very nervous at the busy signals, figuring there
was something wrong with my phone.  She phoned Bell and asked them to 
check and see if my line was ok.

(4) The Bell operator tapped into my line and got an earful of carrier
instead of conversation and told User A that there was indeed something
terribly wrong and they would look into it.

(5) User A departed unhappily for lunch, and User B, who is on a diet and
doesnt eat lunch, phoned me and left the message on the answering machine.
Step (4), for those of you who are still following this tale, had apparently
caused the modems to decide to pack it in for this connection.

So until the Bell operators become more sophisticated, one can use this
clever technique to contact people who boorishly stay logged in on their
sole phone line for too long when you would like to talk to them, modulo
the race condition between your calling them and their phoning back in
to the machine.

		- Beverly Erlebacher 

Ha, ha, ha. Take me back to [ the alphabetic list ] [ the date-ordered list ].