I’m in a new element

I learned a small lesson in humility today. I was load testing a telecom application and something went wrong. Part of the test was simulating a few dozen calls per second passed through a MSC. All of a sudden my call rate drops to zero.

Well, I’ll dump all the logs I possibly can, restart and figure out what happened while the next run is underway.

I back up the logs, restart, and it doesn’t work. Now the fun begins! I poured over the configurations. I shelled into both ends and set up sniffers, I saw that call attempts were going out but not getting there. I checked the routing and saw everything was okay. I spend a lot of time reading to make sure that the routing is fine since I’m not very familiar with it. Two hours from the start of the incident I call one of my coworkers.

“Did you try the command display-linkstat:;?”

So I did. The link was down. A quick call to IT showed that the cable was disconnected and it’ll be up in just a minute.

When I did tech support there were a lot of little incidents that I wondered how people didn’t know. Things like changing your IP to a static one for a LANparty, or manually registering a DLL on Windows, or compiling a program from source on Linux. I can do these things without thinking because I immersed myself in this kind of tech for fun. Those people I helped only used it as a tool, just like I only use my test networks as a tool. I think I understand those guys a little better now.