Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Mon 10th Apr, 2006

To run ISP: require one TCP/IP Networking License.

I've been trying to repay my IRC debt by hanging around on #samba on irc.freenode.net and trying to help people with simple problems. It feels a bit like the blind leading the blind, or the bland leading the blonde, but I've helped one or two people so far and that's been good.

Then I started chatting with a Jordanian who is using an ISP called Horizon Satellite Services (horizon-satellite.com, range 82.205.128.0/19). It seems that the people running this ISP haven't ever been to a basic TCP/IP course, because they're allocating all their internal subscribers addresses in the 90.1.x.y range. Yes, that's right, not 10.x.y.z - 90.1 is a range owned by Wanadoo in France.

The depressing thing is that the guy I was chatting to was using Ubuntu. He's trying to share files using Samba so that other people on the ISP can read them. He has no idea if there's a firewall in Ubuntu, or how to get at any of the graphical tools to configure Samba, or even why 90.1.x.y addresses on his local network were a canonically Bad Thing. At that point I lost all interest and pointed him in the direction of Eric Raymond's How to ask questions the smart way, since he seemed to think that I had enough time to hold his hand through every single step. He finally decided it was probably easier to set up an FTP server.

Coincidentally, yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who's just come back from living in Oman for two years. Her opinion of the problem with the Middle East was that the entire Middle Eastern, and Asian, philosophy of learning is to learn by rote and copy exactly. Never try to think through a problem yourself, never question or ask if something seems illogical. Everything is justified in terms of what went before - what historical precedent can be warped into suiting the new situation. Maybe I'm harsh in categorising this guy as symptomatic of that whole problem - Trellis knows that there are enough morons who expect to be spoon fed through every challenge in Australia, let alone anywhere else in the world. But the more people expect to just not know, to show no interest but to demand results, the worse the world will get...

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