I think the worst setup experience that I can remember (there's probably something worse lurking around in my brain that's been blanked out, I'll wager) was related to setting up a prog we'd "developed".
(I say "developed", because the prog was fairly simple in that it moved a bunch of bytes around, resequenced some stuff, and shot it out the T1/E1 end.)
This was a while ago. It dealt with ISA-based Dialogic 4-channel voice boards, and ISA based Dialogic T1/E1 boards.
If you've never worked with the old Dialogic stuff, well, the configuration files they required were kinda fussy, and the boards wanted an external process to push the program into firmware before the board actually came alive.
Not too weird, except the configuration files were *very* hardware and locale specific, down to such oddities as to what the expected noise level of the line, in dB/m was, and so on.
They can't really be rolled out, someone has to fuss with them on site.
This tale has to do with Puerto Rico, and I don't speak a lick of Puerto-Rican.
Now, the sensible thing to do would have been to send me, or someone else, over, to do the magic twiddling, aided by various dohickies to determine the line quality. Really more of an issue on the T1 part of it.
But that was a no-go because of policy.
So, we spent *years* winding our non-Puerto-Rican speaking way through non-English speaking users on the telephone, getting them to try editing various config files, trying to figure out (remotely) just in what custodian's closet the secret DSU was in, trying to understand exactly how the phone system works, yada..yada...
Needless to say, we never got it wired up.
It also led me to the conclusion that if the Puerto Ricans want to form there own country, great, more power to them. It's gotta suck living in this half-shadow U.S. Territory/Possession status.
patscc
A serious computerist will change the hardware to match the OS, or change the OS to match the hardware.
