the foobar zone

So, today's job was to upgrade a pair of D-Link switches in the office.  They're relatively recent jobs: a DGS-1216T and a DGS-1224T.  Both managed and gigabit ethernet capable, with various bells and whistles.

The boxes had been irritating me for some while because the VLAN configuration web interface had clearly been designed by some stupid web developer who only used IE6.  As a result, you could only create new VLANs if you used IE6, or if you turned off CSS completely. Nice one, guys - I just love your testing procedures!

First things first: you create a backup of the configuration and then do the upgrade itself.  Reboot the switch and splat, the network falls over.

It became apparent pretty quickly that the upgrade had nuked the configuration on the switches.  Great.

So, you pull out your configuration backup and attempt to upload that to the switch.  Of course, because this is a cheap and nasty switch and because the system uses binary format configuration rather than a text-format configuration, and because the configuration format had changed between version 4.10.02 and 4.20.12 (let's be clear here: this is a minor revision upgrade), it wouldn't accept the old configuration.

Fucking idiots. I mean, this is precisely the reason that you just don't use binary configuration formats for this sort of thing.  It's because they break when you make trivial changes.  So, Mr D-Link, if you're going to use some heap of shit binary configuration format, could you please either:

1. use a structured format like ASN.1 or something, or
2. make sure that older formats can be read on newer devices

 Goddamn asshats.