techrecovery | You are TECHS, you should KNOW BETTER! (Reply)

1. I spent over half an hour with a doddery old satellite tech the other day on the phone, trying to get him to telnet onto the sat modem to check its BER reading. This involved putting the IP equiv of its MAC, plus gateway and subnet, into the winXP LAN settings. Simple enough. Only it still wouldnt connect. We faffed around in bafflement for some time, until he exclaimed: "Oh hang on a sec... I havent put the ethernet card into this laptop! That won't help will it!?"

*shoots self*

2. Tech calls in today to ask me why, when one PC worked on the link the client had, he couldn't get five PCs on a hub to do the same. "I've put all the same IP details in, and the first PC on the list works fine. But the other four wont connect. I got the subnet in as 255.255.255.252, and I've given the other PCs an IP following on from the one that works (these were PUBLIC IPs, need I add), why wont they work?"

"Uhh, sir, you only have a /30 - you only get one spare IP. You have to use DHCP for the rest and a hub won't do that you need a router or a server"

"oh ok. Is there any way around this then?"

*revives dead self, shoots self a second time*