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Sep. 12th, 2004 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ganainmIt's been a long time since I wrote anything here -- sorry, I've been working my ass off. (Caution: geekiness ahead). Set up my first Nortel phone system with PRI lines; I'd worked on one before, but it had been set up by someone else already and I just filled in a few blanks. This one I had to do from scratch, and it compares to the usual single-line phone work as a relational database compares to a shopping list. Imagine my relief when it worked right away, allowing me to concentrate on the voicemail system and the cordless phones, which are actually more challenging, given that one has to work in different ways at different times and the others basically suck.
Vignette: driving to the Wine and Song party Friday night with my wife Nita and our friend Sally, taking the opportunity to tell Sally, who used to be a cable splicer for what's now a Stupid Bloated Corporation, about rerouting the T1 line for this customer:
"We'd already reterminated it once, which improved things--that is, it worked, which it didn't at all before--but the next morning they said it was dropping frames, so my boss said, 'Take it off the tie cable' -- it was on this Cat 3 25-pair, which should have been good enough, but maybe it wasn't -- 'and pull a 4-pair Cat 5 through the pipe across the stairwell, and terminate it right on the building vertical wire and on a block on the rack.'
"I said, 'I thought the building owners didn't want any pipe there.'
"He said, 'It's already there, the electricians put it there and ran coax through it, so we might as well use it.'
"'And when the building owners get their panties in a knot and say, "Take it out"?'
"'Then we have more work!'
"So that's what I did, and at first it didn't work at all, but then I transposed the transmit and receive pairs, and then it ran, and ran perfectly clean. Which is strange to me, because I always thought T1 was pretty robust."
"I can tell you from experience," said Sally, "that in the street, T1 is pretty finicky."
"Really? But it's got 48 volts there, it ought to be like a tank--"
"More than 48!"
"Really?"
"It knocked me clear across a vault one time." (I learned later it's over 50 volts, positive on one wire and negative on the other, so if you grab both of them you can get a fair jolt.)
About this time we got to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coyote5302 and deedeebythebay's house, so we had to wrap it up. "It's great to be able to talk about this with someone," I told Sally.
"Thank God you don't talk about it with me," said Nita. "Unless I'm having trouble falling asleep."
Vignette: driving to the Wine and Song party Friday night with my wife Nita and our friend Sally, taking the opportunity to tell Sally, who used to be a cable splicer for what's now a Stupid Bloated Corporation, about rerouting the T1 line for this customer:
"We'd already reterminated it once, which improved things--that is, it worked, which it didn't at all before--but the next morning they said it was dropping frames, so my boss said, 'Take it off the tie cable' -- it was on this Cat 3 25-pair, which should have been good enough, but maybe it wasn't -- 'and pull a 4-pair Cat 5 through the pipe across the stairwell, and terminate it right on the building vertical wire and on a block on the rack.'
"I said, 'I thought the building owners didn't want any pipe there.'
"He said, 'It's already there, the electricians put it there and ran coax through it, so we might as well use it.'
"'And when the building owners get their panties in a knot and say, "Take it out"?'
"'Then we have more work!'
"So that's what I did, and at first it didn't work at all, but then I transposed the transmit and receive pairs, and then it ran, and ran perfectly clean. Which is strange to me, because I always thought T1 was pretty robust."
"I can tell you from experience," said Sally, "that in the street, T1 is pretty finicky."
"Really? But it's got 48 volts there, it ought to be like a tank--"
"More than 48!"
"Really?"
"It knocked me clear across a vault one time." (I learned later it's over 50 volts, positive on one wire and negative on the other, so if you grab both of them you can get a fair jolt.)
About this time we got to
coyote5302 and deedeebythebay's house, so we had to wrap it up. "It's great to be able to talk about this with someone," I told Sally."Thank God you don't talk about it with me," said Nita. "Unless I'm having trouble falling asleep."
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Date: 2004-09-12 11:39 pm (UTC)I had too much on my plate for W&S this last week, but I hope I can see you there next time.