On Name The tip of the working week brings with it magical potentialities for enjoyable and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates every Friday with a recent incantation of On Name – the reader-contributed column that tells your tech help tales.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Rohan” who informed us of an incident from the late Nineties when a good friend operated a bulletin board on a machine that ran IBM’s OS/2 Warp working system.
That field was crashing continually, so Rohan’s good friend requested if he might repair it.
Rohan visited his good friend’s dwelling and sat down in entrance of the OS/2 field. He watched it boot, load a number of packages, then crash. Then boot, then load packages, then crash.
The cycle appeared like it might repeat till the warmth demise of the universe.
Rohan shortly discovered why. “The default habits for OS/2 was to reboot after which restart any packages that had been operating on the time of the reboot/crash,” he informed On Name. So the BBS field was behaving as supposed, and Rohan couldn’t determine the way to repair it.
However he knew a bloke – let’s name him Jim – who was an OS/2 guru and keen to assist.
“After seeing the boot loop, Jim sat in a chair and considered it,” Rohan recalled.
“After which – and I’ll always remember this – he sat within the chair, put his head in his palms, started to rub his temples as if summoning the next energy of OS/2 information, and slowly started to talk.”
In that unusual techno-trance, Jim uttered the next:
Rohan did as he was informed, saved the CONFIG.SYS file, and rebooted the OS/2 field.
“Like magic, the evil boot loop was damaged, the system was usable, and we had been in a position to appropriate the problem inflicting the crash and boot loop,” Rohan wrote. And when Rohan returned dwelling that evening, he instantly modified the CONFIG.SYS on his system to keep away from an identical doom loop. “I didn’t move go nor acquire $200. I modified my CONFIG.SYS,” Rohan informed On Name.
“To look at a person sit in a chair, rub his temples, and slowly emit the phrases as he did was like watching witchcraft,” Rohan informed On Name. “It was unforgettable.”
Have you ever seen a techie in a trance? Or a sysadmin forged a spell? Share your magical story by clicking right here to ship On Name an electronic mail so we are able to take into account your mysterious message for a future Friday. ®