minor dactyl surgery

today was a lousy day. six hours on-site trying to get wireless networking going...and a printer...and that's it! Nothing complicated or hairy, but i managed to get side-tracked every time i turned around. how did it start? oh yeah, getting this old windows 2000 dell on the network. no problem, the system has a usb nic and a pci wireless card installed (wireless b, not g, like everything else in the house). so i try to get the nic going and it's refusing. while waiting for a reboot, i decide to pull the pci nic out and move it to another system, a windows 98, that we didn't have an adapter for, then i head back to the original system and proceed to dig myself into insanity trying to get this thing in there. every time i think i have it, error 31 pops up in the device manager. what the fuck is error 31? i look it up in the knowledgebase and find out that it means a parent device isn't working... okay, it's on a add-on usb card, that might be it, so i move it to the on-board (1.0) usb connectors, to no avail. so then, i decide to swap the usb nic i have with a different one i the office and get the latest drivers at the same time... try the nic after the switch. nope, try again. so then i open the dell back up and put the original nic back in and download drivers for the pci nic on another system...

but wait, do i have a cd with open space that isn't scratched to shit or otherwise unable to be opened due to poly-session-unreadable-osis? as luck would have it yes. and the drivers are all happy and the networking is done... big sigh of relief...

enter the customer, stage right:
"how's it going"

"oh fine, thanks. i got things going by swapping nics around"

"that should work"

oh wait, let's back up, i forgot that during this time i was working on his print server as well. yeah, it has a usb and parallel connection and the parallel connection didn't want to see the ibm 7039 laser attached to it. Probably afraid of losing a finger to the behemoth dinosaur. i astutely point out, "oh silly mr. customer, you need an ieee-1394 cable for this thing to work." and slap him firmly on his beefy posterior. he is unamused, but during the following minutes and subsequent reboots (see above for proper linear order...this comes around during the cd search), i decided to call the shop, since i was only five or six miles away, and ask for someone to run me out an ieee-1394 cable, which they do. and i connect it and the printer is still not recognized by the print server although (as I found out later) it did actually light up the parallel LED on the print server. can you hear the excitement in my words?

so back to the customer and our conversation...

"you get the print working on all of them then?"

"uh, no. the cable didn't seem to do the trick, but i've got some ideas."

"okay..."

so he went away to make money, since he's a stay-at-home-self-made-type, and i proceed to reconfigure the printer's settings in an attempt to get things to print. i changed the language to pcl and thought i was clever. i changed the parallel port mode to standard and thought i was even cleverer... hell, i remembered that you could set a standard tcp/ip port up and select lpr, instead of raw, and configure it to print to whatever port by lpr number... and i actually printer to the printer, but just got garbage characters...hrm, bad driver perhaps?

enter customer:

"how's it going?"

"well, the printer is kind of sucking."

"oh, well, just make sure that the hp 5550 is working. if you can't ge the other one going, i understand."

but i'm an mcse.

"no, i can get them going. i've got a few ideas."

after trying the driver on the windows 2000 system and the windows xp system over the wireless, i decided to try the printer locally on the xp system and proceeded to get shit characters. i reset the factory defaults and tried again... now i'm out of paper and have to send it through a second time. no dice. so i try it on the windows 2000 system, which the customer had taken it off of,to put it on the print server. it should print just fine, right?

wrong. still printing crap.

this is with the built-in drivers and the downloaded drivers for 2000/xp, from lexmark, not ibm, since ibm washed their hands of this damnable fossil.

i put the printer on the 98 system and try to print... no luck, doesn't even try. *sigh* oh wait, there's an epson print driver installed on here and it's got an epson printer port. aha! so i change the driver & it becomes lpt3 and i know that it won't print, but do i try? you bet i do. you bet i fail. so i'm in the process of uninstalling the software from the system... did i mention it's a pentium 200 with 64mb ram? no, i didn't... so the reboots are five minute ordeals. and i sit and wait and think about how many hours i've been here at this point (something like 4)

enter customer:

"how's it going?"

listen wiseass..."going not-so-good; printer won't print from anything. maybe it sucks." i forgot to mention that the sheets i had sent through it before twice i had now started sending through for the third time, and, oh yeah, now it's jamming every other sheet *sigh, how stupid can i get?* "but i'm just trying it on this 98 system to confirm... well, fuck me runnin' it printed fine."

"no shit?"

"yeah, no shit."

"well as long as it can print to something..."

"i should be able to set it up to print between them through sharing." now, i know this is wrong now, and i know that i should've realized that 9x would not be able to provide the xp systems with a driver and it would all suck anyhow, but i was frazzled, cut me some slack. so i start setting up file sharing on the 9x system and of course it doesn't work. the sytem can see out but nothing sees in. and i can't share. and yes, file and print sharing is enabled. so, i dig out the networking keys from the registry and remove dial-up networking and try to reboot and the systme locks up and i reboot and the registry didn't take so i have to do it all again and reboot and okay now i can see things (take a breath, take a breath).

"how's it going"

"you're sneaky, i didn't see your entrance written anywhere. the 98 system is able to share, but (working as we speak) network printing (realization hits) won't make a bit of difference for the xp and 2000 system, since the driver sucks, but hey, let's try it (to no avail) again."

"can it print to the 5550 as well?"

"oh yeah, sure thing." realizing that i hadn't set it up yet. "just as soon as i do it, it will."

"well, everything is pretty good then."

"yes. except for your wireless encryption settings."

now, i'm not sure what rock that thought crawled out from under, but i curse that thought to hell and fire and damnation.

of course, you can predict the rest - a couple of hours showing him how easy wpa was to set up on the xp system and how the 98 system couldn't use wpa and neither could either of the other two, so let's move to wep and fucking passkey fiveortencharactersneverworksihateihateihateihateihateiahatethat shit!!!

so i put it back the way it was. and retested printing and it's slow on one system and then its not.

customer says, "well it least it wasn't anything easy. i would've felt bad if it had been too easy on you."

"here's my card. i'm usually a lot better at my job."

yeah, that's the day. it sucked. it also continued, but i'm too tired to even consider writing about it...