KodiaX987
Nov 11, 2011, 05:22 PM
TL;DR: Everything I do that remotely touches on networking always ends up breaking apart in my hands for reasons that mystify myself and everyone I know.
I guess I'm the sort of person whom Satan decided to single out as a personal target. I can put a computer together just fine. I can keep my installation running smoothly for a long time. Hell, I managed to make a box tough out Windows Millenium for two years with nary an ill effect.
Give me an RJ-45 cable however, and my life becomes like the movie Final Destination.
I have every trouble in the world dealing with my office network. I'm the only person to whom this happens. For the longest time, I could not connect to the office VPN and the tech tried everything on it before giving up. I was given a new workstation later on, only to see the problem repeat itself despite a fresh installation. Then came the added complexity of connecting to different client machines using several different VPN softwares. All my coworkers could get the two most popular ones working just fine. On mine however, SonicWALL would work two or three times after install, and then would never be able to connect anywhere again. I installed a virtual machine only to run on SonicWALL, with the same results. The tech ended up making a clone of his own VM and giving this one to me. What do you know: SonicWALL took the shit after barely a day. My tech is utterly convinced I did something to the VM, some sort of manipulation for the thing to stop working on my machine. But I hadn't. I had connected once to verify it worked, then shut down the VM and turned it on the next day to go fetch a file on a customer's server.
I am the only one who needs to input his password everytime I connect to the sources repository, even if I check the "save password" box. When I run the software we're developing, I'm the only one to experience various seemingly random connection/SQL/application server errors that no one can explain. And this happened on both latest machines I was given. Only recently did the office solve my Wi-Fi woes - they switched to a new management/software protocol or whatever it was and I was asked to test if it worked. To my astonishment, I connected. I had good reason to be surprised: for the past year, my machine had been the only one to fail to connect to the wireless network and no one could understand why.
At home, it's not much brighter. I've gone through seven routers so far and I need to start shopping for an eighth. Here is how they all went:
1: Linksys Wireless - Couldn't wireless its way through a gyproc wall.
2: Linksys 4-port - Randomly entered into a panic mode and refused any and all connections, including to its internal admin page, until it was unplugged for a full minute.
3: D-Link DI-624 Wireless - Crashed and self-rebooted at such breakneck speed that I was banned from a chatroom for join-flooding at 2:00 AM while I was asleep.
4: Inexq 4-port - Modifying the virtual server parameters caused the router to immediately crash.
5: Homemade m0n0wall box - Both NICs physically failed after a week.
6: Bell Sympatico router-modem combo - Oftentimes lost connection for no apparent reason, was unable to save port forward settings.
7: Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL - Supposedly the holy grail of routers. My fucking ass. One of the physical ports became inoperative, and then the device spontaneously reset itself to factory settings after giving me a dazzling light show worthy of a deadmau5 concert.
I keep hearing people going "router (x) sucks balls, get router (y), it's the last one you'll ever need in your life." You can't believe how often I've heard that. I listened to equal amounts of love and hate for Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, Buffalo, you name it. Everyone I know has used the same router practically all their life, for several years without failure. I go through a router a year on average. To this day I have never been able to find one that works perfectly. There is always a glitch, some way to instacrash it and it happens to be on the feature I need at the moment.
I don't even listen when people suggest devices to me anymore. I know that whatever I grab, it'll be another fistful of dollars down the drain, things will work fine for a while and then the router will take a giant shit for no apparent reason. It doesn't matter what they tell me. They can say the router is impervious to nuclear bombs for all I care. In the list above, a bunch of them were claimed as "the last router I will ever need, period." They oftentimes were the worst performers of the bunch, becoming flat out inoperative after a few months. The best ones, go figure why, were the spare shitboxes I borrowed from friends as a quick fix and which then proceeded to last for an unexpectedly long time until I got fed up with whatever feature I was needing on them and didn't work and never had worked.
I don't even try to do what the office techs suggest anymore. I simply invite them to sit at my workstation and have at it. So far, I have a perfect record of them working upwards of an hour of setting things up only to leave with no solution and a bunch of miscellaneous installers and diagnostic tools on my machine.
Nobody can comprehend the extent of what happens between me and network devices, myself first of all.
As far as I'm concerned, networking is black magic. Plain and simple. It works because of reasons that escape my rational thoughts. It stops working from one day to the next and I'm clueless why. I've stopped trying to understand; I know I'd be fighting a worthless cause.
If you read this all the way to the bottom, well, thanks. I hope it's made you feel lucky and cherished for a while. Maybe when you plug your next network in and it works well on the first go, you'll get to appreciate it a little more.
I guess I'm the sort of person whom Satan decided to single out as a personal target. I can put a computer together just fine. I can keep my installation running smoothly for a long time. Hell, I managed to make a box tough out Windows Millenium for two years with nary an ill effect.
Give me an RJ-45 cable however, and my life becomes like the movie Final Destination.
I have every trouble in the world dealing with my office network. I'm the only person to whom this happens. For the longest time, I could not connect to the office VPN and the tech tried everything on it before giving up. I was given a new workstation later on, only to see the problem repeat itself despite a fresh installation. Then came the added complexity of connecting to different client machines using several different VPN softwares. All my coworkers could get the two most popular ones working just fine. On mine however, SonicWALL would work two or three times after install, and then would never be able to connect anywhere again. I installed a virtual machine only to run on SonicWALL, with the same results. The tech ended up making a clone of his own VM and giving this one to me. What do you know: SonicWALL took the shit after barely a day. My tech is utterly convinced I did something to the VM, some sort of manipulation for the thing to stop working on my machine. But I hadn't. I had connected once to verify it worked, then shut down the VM and turned it on the next day to go fetch a file on a customer's server.
I am the only one who needs to input his password everytime I connect to the sources repository, even if I check the "save password" box. When I run the software we're developing, I'm the only one to experience various seemingly random connection/SQL/application server errors that no one can explain. And this happened on both latest machines I was given. Only recently did the office solve my Wi-Fi woes - they switched to a new management/software protocol or whatever it was and I was asked to test if it worked. To my astonishment, I connected. I had good reason to be surprised: for the past year, my machine had been the only one to fail to connect to the wireless network and no one could understand why.
At home, it's not much brighter. I've gone through seven routers so far and I need to start shopping for an eighth. Here is how they all went:
1: Linksys Wireless - Couldn't wireless its way through a gyproc wall.
2: Linksys 4-port - Randomly entered into a panic mode and refused any and all connections, including to its internal admin page, until it was unplugged for a full minute.
3: D-Link DI-624 Wireless - Crashed and self-rebooted at such breakneck speed that I was banned from a chatroom for join-flooding at 2:00 AM while I was asleep.
4: Inexq 4-port - Modifying the virtual server parameters caused the router to immediately crash.
5: Homemade m0n0wall box - Both NICs physically failed after a week.
6: Bell Sympatico router-modem combo - Oftentimes lost connection for no apparent reason, was unable to save port forward settings.
7: Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL - Supposedly the holy grail of routers. My fucking ass. One of the physical ports became inoperative, and then the device spontaneously reset itself to factory settings after giving me a dazzling light show worthy of a deadmau5 concert.
I keep hearing people going "router (x) sucks balls, get router (y), it's the last one you'll ever need in your life." You can't believe how often I've heard that. I listened to equal amounts of love and hate for Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, Buffalo, you name it. Everyone I know has used the same router practically all their life, for several years without failure. I go through a router a year on average. To this day I have never been able to find one that works perfectly. There is always a glitch, some way to instacrash it and it happens to be on the feature I need at the moment.
I don't even listen when people suggest devices to me anymore. I know that whatever I grab, it'll be another fistful of dollars down the drain, things will work fine for a while and then the router will take a giant shit for no apparent reason. It doesn't matter what they tell me. They can say the router is impervious to nuclear bombs for all I care. In the list above, a bunch of them were claimed as "the last router I will ever need, period." They oftentimes were the worst performers of the bunch, becoming flat out inoperative after a few months. The best ones, go figure why, were the spare shitboxes I borrowed from friends as a quick fix and which then proceeded to last for an unexpectedly long time until I got fed up with whatever feature I was needing on them and didn't work and never had worked.
I don't even try to do what the office techs suggest anymore. I simply invite them to sit at my workstation and have at it. So far, I have a perfect record of them working upwards of an hour of setting things up only to leave with no solution and a bunch of miscellaneous installers and diagnostic tools on my machine.
Nobody can comprehend the extent of what happens between me and network devices, myself first of all.
As far as I'm concerned, networking is black magic. Plain and simple. It works because of reasons that escape my rational thoughts. It stops working from one day to the next and I'm clueless why. I've stopped trying to understand; I know I'd be fighting a worthless cause.
If you read this all the way to the bottom, well, thanks. I hope it's made you feel lucky and cherished for a while. Maybe when you plug your next network in and it works well on the first go, you'll get to appreciate it a little more.