Well, hi there. Its been a while, since I came across a linux user in this town, that I didn’t know, but yesterday, during a short visit in the shop, my coworker was like “Whoo… thank god you’re here, I was looking for you for hours!” and I already suspected, that he had a “special job” for me. He’s currently installing DSL for a very complicated customer in a very easy environment. This customer owns a SuSE Linux 9.3 box, wants to do PPPoE with his Fritz BOX Fon and use it as a gateway for the Linux Box. The Fritz Box does DHCP and the PPPoE Line is up… what did my coworker do? He tried to establish a PPPoE connection via Kinternet… *sigh* and was like “Whaa!! Linux is soo complicated!” (No guy, you are). His words in original (translated): “I assinged a static IP to the box, but it didn’t use DHCP! The PPPoE Gateway didn’t respond…”.. and I already knew, that all was totally messed up. Today, i’m going to visit that customer and enable DHCP on his ethernet interface… that should be enough.
If you use Linux for a while and are, now, an experienced user, take this advice: NEVER… NEVER tell anyone, that you know something about Linux, until its a person you would hug delightfuly at once (which should be enough to reduce the circle of persons matching these criteria to a few). It will get you into a lot of trouble. Linux is for people, who are able to analyze and solve THOSE easy “problems” like using a gateway to connect to the internet by themselves. Its NOT for the common customer… and.. if you don’t want to waste the larger ammount of your lifetime in solving other peoples dumb problems, just give up on being the “Linux Missionaire”…
The Starseeker
. Gleich ruft mich der Chef an und verraet mir wann er mich in der Firma abholt. Dann muessen die vielen Hundert Meter auf die uebrigen Patchpanels aufgelegt werden. Ich verabschiede mich fuer heute.