Where In The World Is Sum1?

Quebec City, Quebec

Date: Week of March 4^th


Locale: Quebec City, Quebec


         This week finds me in Quebec City, Quebec for a class with the Canadian Coast Guard.  Quebec was hit by a major snowstorm the week before I arrived, so it  was quite cold while I was there, as well as being completely white.  As a result, other than going to and from work, I didn't get out much.


         The class went well for the most part.  For the most part?  Yep, I'll explain in a minute.  There was only one Base Radio and one Site Gateway/Router available for this class, so a lot of it was show n Tell.  Except when this occurs, I don't do the showning n telling.  I've done it so many times I can do it blindfolded.  Almost.  So I had them entering the commands to configure each piece of equipment.  During the second day of class, one of the students asked if deleting the boot.cfg file would delete the IP addresses in the Site Router.  I replied, "No, but rather than try and explain it, let's show you."  I then directed the student who was doing the hands-on operations to delete the boot.cfg file.  We then rebooted the router (since that was necessary), and imagine my surprise when it started to do what we call an 'Endless reboot'.  What I mean is, the router would boot, then reboot, then reboot, etc.  I was shocked, because I'd done this before, and it never happened.  I knew what we had to do to correct this, but when we tried doing that, it didn't work.  Now I was really puzzled.  It was the end of the day, so they left, and I knew I wouldn't be able to relax that night until I had it fixed, so I went to my hotel and got my bag of cables and adapters.  I came back, and within 30 minutes I had the router 'fixed'.  I called a co-worker about this, and he explained that ever since a firmware upgrade had been done in a previous release, this would occur (the constant reboot), if the Boot.cfg file was deleted after the router had booted from it.  The next morning I went over the steps I'd done the night before, so they would know how to correct this if it happened to them.  It was about then that I realized the reason we couldn't correct the issue the previous night, was that they were using laptops with a French-Canadian keyboard.  As such, even though the alphabet is displayed correctly, the numeric and special character keys didn't send the same ASCII text code when pressed.


         As I mentioned earlier, it was so cold while  I was there that I didn't get out much.  It wasn't below zero (other than one night), but the wind blowing across that snow made it feel a lot colder than it really was.  I tried walking to a nearby Pub (less than a half mile away), but the wind cut right through my winter coat.  I gave up after having walked maybe 300 yards.

 
Old Quebec City


Partially Frozen St. Lawrence Seaway

In Closing

         I will spend the weekend at home in Central Illinois, then fly to Austin Texas on Monday.  Til next time, be good to yourselves and those you love, and WRITE!




Jim Dorrell