rootninja

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver.

>f100 config ntp set host:10.1.1.244 dir:
HOST config IP 10.1.1.244 CONFIGURED SUCCESSFULLY!
SOURCE FILE ntp.conf BYTES READ: 555
DEST FILE /etc/ntp.conf BYTES WRITTEN: 555!
SOURCE FILE ntp.keys BYTES READ: 39
DEST FILE /etc/ntp.keys BYTES WRITTEN: 39!
CONFIGURATION FILES TRANSFERRED SUCCESSFULLY!
OK
RESETTING THE UNIT
PLEASE WAIT…

This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.

The command to copy the existing configuration files from the GPS unit to the ftp server is “get”. That one’s completely backwards as the command should be “put”. These problems are in no way road blockers, but with today’s prices and storage sizes of flash memory, is it really that hard to implement a decent OS? This isn’t a tiny unit that runs on batteries, it’s a rack mount enterprise piece of equipment.