I am an idiot.

My brother has been waiting years for me to make that admission.

This afternoon, not half an hour ago, I was logged into a customer's router. They couldn't get from the US to their router in the UK. I was wondering why the UK router wasn't advertising the host route for its Loopback via BGP.

If that doesn't mean anything to you, never fear. I'll not be long with this.

I had added a configuration command, so the router had to be advertising the address, and yet it wasn't.

Now, here's where the idiocy comes in.

"0.0.0.0" and "255.255.255.255" — do those numbers look even slightly close to being the same? You don't exactly have to be a computer geek to spot the difference, and yet I had used one instead of the other when configuring the router. Fortunately, after only five minutes of head-scratching, my error was easily spotted and corrected. But still... duh.

I'm just glad I didn't take down the customer's network when I made that particular goof. Maybe, just to maximise my idiocy, I can log in after hours and shut down their trans-Atlantic frame-relay connection.

Or better yet, in the middle of the business day.

Posted by Russ at 05:40 PM, August 17, 2006 in Geekery