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To deal with my ongoing problem at work, I got into the office at 7 A.M. That was the time I was told that Brian, the computer literate guy in our Georgia office, gets into work. There were two reasons that I wanted to get such an early start. Reason one is that I just want to get them back up and running. I mean, I could feel the resentment coming from those people because I was the percieved reason that they couldn't do any work. I say "percieved" because hey, I didn't cause the lightening! But, by the same token, I could have been better prepared for something like this. Reason two is that I had a software demo scheduled at 9:30 A.M. for myself and the president and vice-president of the company. I knew the demo would be at least 3 hours, so I really wanted to get things solved by then.
So I called down to Georgia immediately at 7 A.M. Brian wasn't there yet. Crap! Well, he called me about 10 minutes later and I explained the situation to him. I told him the most fool-proof way to configure this box would be with a serial cable. A serial cable that they didn't have. So I sent him out to the local Office Depot with very specific instructions to get a RS-232, male-to-female, 9-pin serial cable. Wow, that's a lot of hyphens right there. He said he'll call me back when he gets the cable.
Sigh. I wait. He calls back around 7:50 A.M. I walk him through setting up a terminal emulator to open ap a telnet session through the newly acquired cable to the console port of the firewall. We finally are able to reset the box back to the factory defaults. When he logs back into the box after the reset, he starts reading startup messages to me that I had never seen (or heard) before. Suddenly, a light goes off over my head. I know what happened yesterday. Even though the firewall's name, model number, and everything else are identical, the internal software version is different. Improved, even. Made, oh-so-much better. Except that it can't load a configuration file from an older version. Because, really, why would you want to do THAT? Why include that capability when it is obviously much more efficient to have someone re-type in lines and lines of long, confusing encyption information, pre-share setups and lots and lots of DNS, DHCP, and untrusted IP address strings? But that's what I had to have him do.
And it took him until, oh about 9:30! Not that I fault him, of course, because it was hard typing for anyone, let alone someone who wasn't a true typist. So I had to keep politely extricating myself from the demo I had set up so I could call down to GA and walk him through the last of the hook up. He connected the ethernet cables and suddenly I could reach the box from the outside and finished the last of the config. And then there was much happiness and rejoicing from our friends south of the Mason-Dixon line.
For those of you that are interested (and really, why would you be), the software demo went really, really well. I think that this software package is going to be the one we chose. There's nothing like a total migration to a completely different enterprise software package. No really. I mean it. I love doing that. I've done it for three different companies now - with three different packages. It is such a cool challenge to slip an entire new package under the fingertips of the workers while the company continues to do business. And there is an amazing reward apart from the financial aspect of doing your business better and more efficently. The joy that long suffering employees feel after finding that a process that took them 20 steps (12 of which they jury-rigged themselves) to complete will now take 4 and with NO double entry. By the end of the project I look like A god to these people if I can get rid of their accursed double entry.
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