Sounds cool.... what Card reader are you using..? ...or is that custom written ?
-----Original Message----- From: Derek Fountain [SMTP:fountai@hursley.ibm.com] Sent: Monday, July 24, 2000 1:57 PM To: SuSE English Subject: [SLE] OT, but funny
This is almost completely off topic, but it's pretty funny so I have to share it with you.
Some time ago our coffee bar here at the Hursley IBM site put the price of coffee up to what was considered unreasonable heights. In the face of a minor revolution, the boss of my department arranged for an industrial sized coffee machine to be installed in our little kitchen area, which would provide coffee for the people of this department at cost price. The payment is done by a card reader - we make a coffee then swipe a card through a reader which logs the drink. At some point we go to the boss and settle up with cash. It happens pretty much on trust, and works rather well. The machine which the card reader is attached to is a Linux box attached to the network. The data about coffee purchases goes into a MySQL table which the boss keeps updated as people pay money.
(Bear with me, it gets better.)
We operate here with static IP addresses, except for about a dozen dynamically allocated addresses which visitors can use to connect their laptops etc. to our network. The DHCP server was an NT box in our server room which, you may be astonished to hear, wasn't too reliable. Some time ago the thing keeled over and we've been without DHCP for some while. This morning the boss finally decided that the DHCP needed to be reinstated, and he wanted it immediately and at zero cost, like bosses do.
Guess where the eyes turned?
We now have a Linux machine which serves both coffee and dynamic IP addresses. The machine in our little kitchen now has a "Mission Critical" label on it.
:-)
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