When the Ring-a-Ding team showed up to do the install, they were mildly distressed to discover that we were a Linux house. They were accustomed to installing in a Windows environment, but we were totally opposed to adding a Windows server. We had gone to a lot of trouble to get the buggers out of there in the first place, and we didn't want one sneaking back in. On the other hand, Ring-a-Ding had never set up a DHCP phone server on a Linux box before. So to make life simpler, we agreed that they would install the phones using static IP addresses. Then, at the last moment, they decided that setting up over 200 phones statically would take too long. Somehow they convinced my boss to have me reconfigure our Linux DHCP server. This turned out to be a nightmare.

Configuring the server to boot the phones required some very obscure options. Every time I asked Ring-a-Ding for help, I got the same response from Charlie, the team leader: "I'm a phone guy," he would say, "not a data guy."

Luckily, I found a similar product that ran on Linux and used a DHCP server. Due to the simplicity of text file-based configuration on Linux, we were able to copy the necessary options to get the phones up and running, but the fun was just beginning.

My company has two locations, and one of the most appealing features of this new phone system was that it was supposed to allow staffers at both sites to dial each others' extensions directly. Except this feature never worked.

"Well," said Charlie, "I'm not a data guy, but maybe you don't have the right ports open."