software
ON CALL
The sleepless night after a colleague’s misplaced pager turned a six‑line script into a 2,650‑line C rewrite.
Working in tech support often goes unnoticed, especially when colleagues neglect shared duties, leading to lost sleep. Each Friday, The Register publishes On Call, a reader‑contributed series that highlights the effort required to keep systems running.
This week we meet Tim, a reader who recounted how, while employed by a telecommunications firm, he condensed roughly 2,650 lines of C code into a six‑line shell script.
He accomplished this after being tasked with repairing a data‑transfer program that oddly contained a custom implementation of the classic File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
“Writing the script took eight hours, most of it tracking down the source code of FTP so I could see if it would do what I wanted,” Tim wrote.
The incident occurred before the World Wide Web became the primary means of online information retrieval. To locate the necessary code, Tim turned to a Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) to query remote databases.
“In those days, there was no Linux and AT&T had licensed the Unix source code to universities with the struct proviso that it never be made publicly available,” Tim explained. “It took me quite some time using WAIS to track it down – the security could have been better – and read the code.”
With the required code secured, Tim wrote the script, which executed overnight to gather data from the telco’s switches, clean the raw information, and upload it to a mainframe.
“It would automatically page me if it couldn’t connect to a switch or mainframe after three attempts,” he explained.
Although the script functioned correctly, the telco’s network remained unstable, causing Tim’s pager to buzz two or three times nightly.
After two weeks of disrupted sleep, Tim’s manager suggested he hand the pager over to a colleague.
However, the colleague frequently misplaced the pager at work, failed to power it on, or deliberately kept it out of reach.
Consequently, Tim reluctantly reclaimed the pager and endured several more weeks of nightly interruptions.
