Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Out and about

This afternoon I'll be going to one of our customers who is experiencing intermittent connectivity problems. Their SMC gateway keeps dropping offline and has to be power cycled. We have several customers experiencing similar problems and we've been unable to replicate this in our lab. So, we're planning to setup a laptop connected to the modem via a serial cable and save the console output to a file. We'll simultaneously run Ethereal to see if maybe the problem is being caused by some kind of weird packets. We'll leave the laptop onsite for a few days to gather a good amount of data.

The SMC 8013 gateway that we use doesn't have a regular 9 pin RS232 port on it. Rather, the serial console is only available if you pop the cover off and connect a custom cable to an array of pins on the mainboard. Obviously, it's not anticipated that this will be a frequently-used feature.

Rather than going into the office then out to the customer, who is in West Chester, I'm just working from home this morning.

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