Job de collegio in prima mea 1991, Felix essem, cum ad opus vestibulum 13 locus, not including its corporate HQ in New Jersey. I joined just when the company was rolling out a new ERP system. We were a small IT department of about ten people altogether, two of whom Did Not Travel. Part of the project involved replacing IBM System 36 boxes with HP hardware and HPUX. Everyone used green tubes to access the system.

Lorem ipsum demissi immunde volvitur nova et cooperatorem, Jeff. Our job was to power up the Unix box, fac o / S procurrentem, ERP ratio install, configurare ERP, train people on the ERP and do custom work for folks on the spot. (Hoc est somnium officium, praesertim recta de collegio). Before we could really get off the ground, opus EXPEDIO omnem viridem fistulae, put them on desks and wire them. And the best part was that we had to put the RJ11 connectors on ourselves.

Qua de causa etiam non numquam quaerere et tunc intellexerunt, nos ante aliquot contrahentium cuneus venit per funem et currere per herbam, but we didn’t have them put on the connectors. Ita, there was a "patch box" with dozens of of unlabeled cables in the "computer room" et haec snaked circa aedificium ad varia loca in ædificationibus.

Per modum operati ex decursu auctor, tentans singulis filum, induendo COPULATRIX (condita certus fuit recta nos. transgressus), impendendum in viridi aliquantulus occasus vera erant fistulae et impressoribus, labeling wires, making sure that "getty" was running correctly for each port and probably a thousand other things that I’ve suppressed since then. It all came together quite nicely.

Sed, there was one important cable that we couldn’t figure out. The plant in Baltimore had a relationship with a warehousing location in New Jersey. Some orders placed in Baltimore shipped out of that location. There were two wires that we had to connect to the HPUX box: a green tube and a printer. The green tube was easy, sed ebdomada typographum convertetur in tres-tantibus.

Si id non sciunt, aut oppresserit, de viridi et impressoribus modum fistulae, there are various options that you deal with by setting various pins. 8-frenum, 7-frenum, paritatem (etiam / impar / nullus), probably others. If you get one of those settings wrong, fistulam vel typographum adhuc ostendit effercio, sed erit summa INANIS STREPITUS, or it will be gibberish with a lot of recognizable stuff in between. Utique, these pins are hard to see and have to be set by using a small flat-edge screw driver. And they are never standard.

Nos posuit ad primum multa vigent vocat cum Guidone NJ (a colorum fortasse computatrum osor qui maledixerit nobis ad diem hanc). We got the green tube working pretty quickly, but we couldn’t get the printer to work. It kept "printing garbage". We would create a new RJ11 connector, switching between crossed and straight. We would delete the port and re-created in Unix. We went through the arduous task of having him explain to us the pin configuration on the printer, si non vere certus bene ageret.

Vivamus tempus est ut, fremunt omnibus in Baltimore, sed potest non adepto ad operari maledixit procer in NJ! We’ve exhausted all possibilities except for driving back up to NJ to work on the printer in person. To avoid all that driving, we finally ask him to fax us what he’s getting when it’s "garbage", sperans quod maybe erit aliquid in fila, ut purgamentum quod indicabunt nobis quid sumus malefactoribus.

Cumque venissemus in Fax, we immediately knew what was wrong. Videte, our method of testing whether we had configured a printer correctly was to issue an "lp" sicut hoc praeceptum:

LP / c / passwd

Basically, we printed out the unix password file. It’s always present and out of the box, always just one page. You standard Unix password file looks something like this:

Faber:*:100:100:8LXXIV A-(muneris):/Home / fabri:/usr / bin / SH
:*:200:0::/Home / hospitis:/usr/bin/sh  

We had been printing out the password file over and over again for several weeks and it was printing correctly. Autem, ad finem user, it was "printing garbage".

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