On 1/5/2012 8:46 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

The Daring Dufas wrote:

On 1/5/2012 8:33 AM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

The Daring Dufas wrote:

I pulled a Catalyst 2950 off the shelf that was salvaged from a job and
checked it out. I'll probably use it as a loaner on a job we just bid on
for moving a company into a temporary office trailer while mold
abatement is going on in the building. I'm going to pull one Cat5 from
the server room and move 7 work stations, 3 network printers and 7
phones. For the phones I have to pull a 25 pair Cat1 because the phones
are the freaking old Merlin system sets. They tell us they're supposed
to be getting a new IP Phone system soon. The mold abatement work will
take a couple of months and then we'll have to move them back. The 2950
is a 24 port managed switch but we only need 10 ports or a few more if
someone wants to plug in a laptop or two but I don't have to go buy one.


I've pulled a lot of 25 pair for 1A2 key systems, and for studio
phones at TV studios. The AFTRS station at Ft. Greely had severe
problems with the AM radio station getting into the phones so I added to
new Demark points in the building. One for the offices, and the other
in engineering. Then I pulled out over a mile of station wire. They
were very quiet after that. The Orlando station (Ch. 55) had a really
bad habit of using station wire to set up the phones for their
telethons, and they never used the same layout twice so there was lots
of dead wire in the lighting grid. I cleaned up the 1A2 at WLBE, and
added more phones, then repaired all but one of the existing phones.
The last Merlin system I saw had caught fire at Microdyne's Ocala plant
in 1999. They had already signed a contract for a new phone system and
they were waiting for it to be installed when it went up in flames one
Saturday morning. A lot of smoke and water damage in the executive suite
and Engineering department. You could still catch faint smoke odors a
year later.


The old Merlin is not 1A2, it's the funky electronic Merlin horror show
that Ma Bell saddled customers with. It uses 4 pair and an RJ45 plug on
the cord. I sort of liked the old 1A2 systems, they were hard to break
and you could hit a burglar over the head with the phone then call the
cops with the bloody set to come pick up the corpse. The electronic
Merlin can quit working if you hang up too hard.



I know the difference in the two systems. I was just pointing out
that the Merlins couldn't even die gracefully. The biggest failures in
1A2 were the line selector switches and the DTMF keypads. (Most of what
I worked with were S.C.)

The next group of failure were power supply fuses, and wiring. I had
one TV studio building hit by a direct lightning strike that blew away
some of the reinforced concrete where the lines ran from the STL tower
to the control room. Some of the Electrical system exploded, but all I
needed for the 1A2 was a full new set of fuses. I still have a couple
new 400E cards and some used power supplies. The only bad line cards I
ever saw were in the Army. One guy in the Telephone section would
collect the couple cards that failed, every couple months so I could
cannibalize them for the relays.


One of my cousins was an EE who worked for Northern Electric,
building and testing their early ESS. He would follow a new ESS
exchange through final test, then follow it to the jobsite to make sure
it was installed properly, and got a sign off from the local Telco. He
did that for years, until he ended up being hired by a Telco near
Atlanta.


The guys really don't understand computers that well so I can really
mess with their minds like when I drop a live Linux CD into the optical
drive and leave it running. ^_^


I use a live Lucid Puppy CD to test hardware. It works when a lot of
other releases refuse to boot and tell me that they don't support the
hardware. I've recently picked up several XP systems that lost
networking all at the same time, but the Lucid Puppy boots them and they
can go online. I haven't felt well enough to drag them to my bench to
diagnose them, yet.


I've been using Puppy rather than Knoppix for some time now to test a
system before I dig into it and I haven't really had a problem with it
working on anything PC based. Good Doggie! ^_^

TDD