12 Days of a Tech Support Christmas

From: "H.A. Kippenhan Jr." (KIPPENHAN@fndcd.fnal.gov)

This blatantly copied from a holiday greetings card from (surprise) The Bristol Group.

'Twas the night before rollout
And all through the .org
Not a message was moving, as dead as a morgue.
No mail, no faxes, not even the Web.
Forget ping and telnet, it was deader than dead.
I in my Levis, you home asleep snug,
had settled in for an all night de-bug.

There were collisions and timeouts and packets a-splatter
As I pored o'er the screens to see what was the matter.
I reset the routers and fiddled the tables
Relayed the frames and wiggled the cables.
I arped and I sniffed. I rebooted the host,
Changed the root password, ate some cold toast.

I needed help soon. This was now clear
Or I'd be sub-netting elsewhere in the new year.
Why not call Bill? Or maybe ring Scott.
Would they be in? Probably not.
Not Cisco, nor HP, not Cabletron too.
Who does one call at quarter past two?

So I came to call Bristol that cold Christmas Eve.
Got Floyd on the line and said "don't you dare leave!"
After listening closely he said, "It's not us."
"but I'll do what I can." And made not a fuss.

He checked the host tables and the SNMP.
The portmappers and Nis stuff, the SMTP.
He queried the proxies, leaned on the LAN,
spoofed the monofrads and ISDN.

He unstacked the Etherswitches,
grew the backbone a stub.
Finally announcing, "It's just a bad hub."
He closed my call with "This has been fun.
Merry Christmas to all,
and to all a T1 !"