It was a saying that my parents would use whenever I stumbled upon the solution to a problem without actually understanding it. The saying comes from a fable about a donkey that encounters a flute abandoned in a field, and then blows into it creating the most beautiful sound that either donkey or the flute had ever experienced. In English, I suppose that the expression would be dumb luck.
I remember my graduate Computer Science professor, Mani Chandy, who once said to our small class of Operations Research students that mathematics was an intuitive pursuit – something that the mind grasped often without understanding it. The understanding came later after the intuitive insight had occurred. “I don’t care whether you can explain why your answer is correct; I care that you can come up with the correct answer,” he might have said. This is totally opposite to what most of learned in our grade school math classes where the emphasis was on showing your work. I think of Mani now and then; he was an inspiration.
I have spent the last couple of weeks tinkering with my new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and various settings within the device itself and the other devices on the network that are supposed to communicate with it – my desktop, our phones, and my laptop. I think I have tried more network settings than I have ever explored in past years – some of them two or three times. I’ve rebooted all the computers and devices multiple times. I’ve tweaked every VPN setting, and the AVG enhanced Firewall settings on both computers. I have gotten the Desktop and iPhone to play nicely with the NAS, but the laptop has stymied me. Merde!
Tonight, after screwing up my desktop connection to the NAS, I wound up looking at the NAS’s settings. The NAS is a little computer that manages two large hard-drives. Much of its computing power is devoted to network communications. It turns out that I had not set the IPv6 protocol, and that was keeping the other devices from being able to see the NAS. It was as if the NAS was not on the network. Why the desktop could see it with the older IPv4 protocol is a mystery to me, but like the donkey who played the flute, I stumbled onto the solution.
I can now devote my spare time to doing yard work instead of tinkering with enigmatic networking settings. Eureka!