{"id":532,"date":"2009-06-10T19:32:11","date_gmt":"2009-06-10T09:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=532"},"modified":"2009-06-10T19:32:11","modified_gmt":"2009-06-10T09:32:11","slug":"aside-failures-in-interface-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/06\/10\/aside-failures-in-interface-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Aside – Failures in Interface Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I was rather happy to have my “new” Solaris\/Sparc lab machine. It’s a Sun Blade 1500 \u2013 obviously it’s not a Sun server, but I don’t need<\/em> a full Sun server for lab testing.<\/p>\n

Frustratingly, the person who sold it to me had setup a firmware password, but couldn’t recall what that was, and had neglected to mention that. With a wiped hard-drive, it was somewhat … challenging to fix. Thankfully, I had a hard-drive left over from a Sun Blade 100 that managed to boot the 1500 into single user mode – which enabled me to clear the firmware password.<\/p>\n

That wasn’t the failure in interface design.<\/p>\n

The failure came when it was time to install Solaris 10 on the machine. Having burnt the DVD, I hooked up monitor, keyboard, network, etc., and started the install process. Since I don’t run DHCP, I started the process by running through my DNS server, finding an unused IP address, and thinking up a hostname that obeyed RFC-1178.<\/p>\n

Picking the hostname (luyten \u2013 the name of a nearby star, and therefore apropos for a Sun host), I started the graphical installer, went through the network configuration and got a strange error about the DNS server being invalid. However, the DNS server was perfectly fine. I thought at the time, “OK, maybe IPv6 isn’t happy on the lab network”, so I restarted the install process and made sure to leave that option off.<\/p>\n

It was then when I got the same error, that I noticed the following in the console display window:<\/p>\n

Unable to run cmd:\/usr\/sbin\/sysidput<\/pre>\n
Doing a bit of Googling, it didn’t seem that the solutions around were specific to my issue, but I decided that I’d follow one of the suggestions, which was to install in text mode.<\/p>\n
Imagine my surprise then when in text mode<\/em>, the Solaris installer told me it couldn’t use the IP address I’d entered because that was already in use on the network.<\/p>\n
Now, I know the issue was my fault \u2013 I assumed that because an IP address was unallocated in DNS it wouldn’t<\/em> be active, and didn’t think to check, but<\/em>, I’ll go so far as to say that this is an example of stupid interface design, with one very key issue:<\/p>\n