Another Hasty Morning

     I have a class to attend and it starts an hour earlier than my usual -- and at a location father away.  But it may serve double duty: I'm hoping to get a Hidden Frontier vignette out if it.

     Actually made some progress yesterday, and on the "Robinson Crusoe" project at that!  (Just in time for Friday?)  Despite a frustrating start -- described below -- and a bad scare thanks to a backwards-functioning bypass switch -- "on" means "device online," not "bypass on!" it all worked out in the end, last I knew.  There may be forty-'leven e-mails on my work account complaining otherwise.

     Network issues ate up my day and not the solving of most of them; not only is that "by others," most of it was happening hundreds of miles away at Corporate HQ, where very frustrated IS/IT types recently discovered they had ad-hocked and extemporized themselves into a serious, ugly tangle and have been struggling to untangle it ever since, with occasional deleterious effects on access to e-mail, the external Internet and other unsubtle issues.

     My networking puzzle was simpler: the device I needed to bootstrap (along with my laptop, back and forth) in order to upgrade can be accessed via a modem over dial-up ("What's that funny noise?"*), a direct serial connection, or a network port.  Naturally, you want the fattest pipe, so once I had everything to the point where I could connect, I plugged them both into a dumb hub and fired up the software.  I'd skimmed through the manual and expected smooth sailing.  Nope.  Would not connect.  The default address in the software was 127.0.0.0 (!) and there was no clue what it ought to be anywhere in the manual when I sat down and read through.
     Finally gave up and went to serial (after a hunt for the one "transparent" USB-to-RS232 adaptor), getting the job done at a crawl with a few glitches but succeeding eventually.  Poking around, I discovered the "default address" in the device itself wasn't.  It's blank.  E-mail from the manufacturer confirms this is normal: you have to connect via one of the other two methods and set the ip address.  Good to know.

     Over the top again today, what-what?
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* A long, long time ago, when everything was amazing and Usenet wasn't a forgotten spam-sump, the Internet went "bong-ba-bong-screeeeeeeee...." when you connected to it.  No, really, it did.