Need Sun RJ-45 console cable

[Guy B. Purcell]

Replying off-list to avoid starting a religious war there...

I thought a bit about this, and beg to differ.  Apple put a label over 
every port on the Mac.  If this user had bothered to pay attention, 
s/he may not have made such a mistake.  Just because it's possible to 
plug a cable for one "hardware service" into the port for a different 
function doesn't mean that the designer of either piece of equipment 
failed--especially if they bothered to label their ports.  Were that 
the case, then the makers of every switch in common use today are at 
fault for bad design because I can plug an RJ11 phone cord into their 
equipment's RJ45 switch ports.

In this case, the user is clearly at fault--perhaps not for plugging in 
the printer, which could be construed as an understandable mistake, but 
definitely for not unplugging it after seeing that the hardware 
addition caused a problem.  Personally, I don't mind my users 
experimenting a little (that's how they learn stuff, and I consider 
learning to be A Good Thing in general); they'd just better be prepared 
to undo whatever they do, in case it breaks something.

-Guy


On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 10:22 AM, Chuck Yerkes wrote:

> No, is this a user error or a failing of the computer makers?
> I offer the latter.  At least that odd HD connector on Mac
> laptops isn't used elsewhere.
>
> Quoting Greg Kulosa (greg at kulosa.org):
>>> Some Macs had DB-25's for SCSI.  And I've seen them used by
>>> multiple vendors for parallel ports.S
>>
>> Ah, yes, I remember the tech support visit so well.....
>>
>> The user had taken the PC printer, and plugged it into the back of the
>> Macintosh, and wanted to know why the Mac would not boot!
>>
>> The parallel port cable confused the SCSI bus sufficiently that the 
>> Mac
>> couldn't see it's own boot drive.  Lucky it didn't fry anything.