{"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 &#8211; Failures in Interface Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I was rather happy to have my &#8220;new&#8221; Solaris\/Sparc lab machine. It&#8217;s a Sun Blade 1500 \u2013 obviously it&#8217;s not a Sun server, but I don&#8217;t <em>need<\/em> a full Sun server for lab testing.<\/p>\n<p>Frustratingly, the person who sold it to me had setup a firmware password, but couldn&#8217;t recall what that was, and had neglected to mention that. With a wiped hard-drive, it was somewhat &#8230; 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 &#8211; which enabled me to clear the firmware password.<\/p>\n<p>That wasn&#8217;t the failure in interface design.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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<p>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, &#8220;OK, maybe IPv6 isn&#8217;t happy on the lab network&#8221;, so I restarted the install process and made sure to leave that option off.<\/p>\n<p>It was then when I got the same error, that I noticed the following in the console display window:<\/p>\n<pre>Unable to run cmd:\/usr\/sbin\/sysidput<\/pre>\n<p>Doing a bit of Googling, it didn&#8217;t seem that the solutions around were specific to my issue, but I decided that I&#8217;d follow one of the suggestions, which was to install in text mode.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine my surprise then <em>when in text mode<\/em>, the Solaris installer told me it couldn&#8217;t use the IP address I&#8217;d entered because that was already in use on the network.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I know the issue was my fault \u2013 I assumed that because an IP address was unallocated in DNS it <em>wouldn&#8217;t<\/em> be active, and didn&#8217;t think to check, <em>but<\/em>, I&#8217;ll go so far as to say that this is an example of stupid interface design, with one very key issue:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On something as low level as operating system installation, any OS installer should tell you that the IP address you&#8217;ve picked is already in use.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Honestly, &#8220;Unable to run cmd:\/usr\/sbin\/sysidput&#8221; is <strong>not<\/strong> a sufficient explanation of &#8220;duplicate IP address&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I was rather happy to have my &#8220;new&#8221; Solaris\/Sparc lab machine. It&#8217;s a Sun Blade 1500 \u2013 obviously it&#8217;s&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[910],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aside","tag-solaris-10"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-8A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}