Comments on: TCLP 2008-06-11 Monologue: Unintended Uses (Comment Line 240-949-2638) http://thecommandline.net/2008/06/11/unintended_uses/ Podcast and blog exploring digital citizenry as a creator and a consumer. Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:43:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: cmdln http://thecommandline.net/2008/06/11/unintended_uses/comment-page-1/#comment-433 cmdln Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:37:55 +0000 http://thecommandline.net/?p=1016#comment-433 That's a great anecdote, really fits well with what I was trying to get across. Thanks for sharing it. That’s a great anecdote, really fits well with what I was trying to get across. Thanks for sharing it.

]]> By: Paul Fischer http://thecommandline.net/2008/06/11/unintended_uses/comment-page-1/#comment-430 Paul Fischer Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:21:03 +0000 http://thecommandline.net/?p=1016#comment-430 I do network architecture not coding. But I had some time on my hands while working in a previous job for a major ISP. So I decided to test some SNMP based network accounting features. I mocked up a basic accounting system in Bourne Shell script that polled the interfaces of the routers every 5 minutes and added the numbers together. It was so efficient that it took 26 hours to boil down 24 hours of information. However, our old accounting system was based on web logs only, not other types of transfer, and my system showed much more traffic the customers were using but not paying for. This was a demo, just to see if it would work. There were still major research issues that needed to be done to make sure it was reporting valid numbers, tracked interface failures properly, associated interfaces properly with customers, etc. The day I showed it to my boss, he had the programming consultant rewrite the core of it in C and hand it over to the accounting department. No further input on my part was accepted. And as it happens, I left the company shortly after that, so I don't know if they ever did anything else with it other than put it in production for accounting. That's right. The network guy wrote the customer accounting program in about 30 minutes and it basically went straight into production. I wonder what unintended consequences arose after my departure. I do network architecture not coding. But I had some time on my hands while working in a previous job for a major ISP. So I decided to test some SNMP based network accounting features. I mocked up a basic accounting system in Bourne Shell script that polled the interfaces of the routers every 5 minutes and added the numbers together. It was so efficient that it took 26 hours to boil down 24 hours of information.

However, our old accounting system was based on web logs only, not other types of transfer, and my system showed much more traffic the customers were using but not paying for. This was a demo, just to see if it would work. There were still major research issues that needed to be done to make sure it was reporting valid numbers, tracked interface failures properly, associated interfaces properly with customers, etc.

The day I showed it to my boss, he had the programming consultant rewrite the core of it in C and hand it over to the accounting department. No further input on my part was accepted. And as it happens, I left the company shortly after that, so I don’t know if they ever did anything else with it other than put it in production for accounting.

That’s right. The network guy wrote the customer accounting program in about 30 minutes and it basically went straight into production. I wonder what unintended consequences arose after my departure.

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