Back on top!
After a week of being sick and falling behind at my other job I’m finally all caught up and then some! During my downtime I was able to get much accomplished on this website which is finally almost finished! Today started a little slow as I’m still recouping from the vicious cold that’s been going around but much to my suprise I ran out of priority work at 4:30 PM. Hurray!
Upon getting to work, one of my more pressing matters included reprogramming phone extensions and handset configurations on our Nortel phone system to make way for the wholesale division who’ve just returned from the winter season layoffs. They needed to be able to forward their desk phones to their cell phones so they can recieve calls while working in the commercial yard. Also it was reported that some phones in the retail building were not picking up their proper call groups. After wasting a good 20 minutes I found out that the actual problem was that the function buttons on the phone were not programmed properly. Phone crysis solved!
Next was the ODBC issue with Labelview… During the winter season I plucked the 2 remaining Windows 98 boxes from production because I was too lazy to configure a Nod32 Configuration file for them and quite frankly sick of seeing them on my network. Unfortunately one of these two 98 boxes had a legacy printer application connected to a legacy printer. Well you can see where this is going…
The replacement machine is not much newer but runs Windows 2000 which at least conforms to my Domain Security Policy and gets Automatic Updates from my WSUS server. Anyway… After deploying this machine I had no had time to setup and configure the Labelview application, so sure enough last friday I was asked to get it running for them, and then got sick over the weekend. After returning yesterday I got the application installed but could not get the labels to open and kept getting an ODBC error. I saw that the latest MDAC was installed but did not see any ODBC in the Control panel. After tearing thru the Registry i noticed odbccp.cpl was set to hidden (Security Policy ?) so I ran the control and noticed no drivers were installed – Meh! So i downloaded and installed the drivers from Microsoft and was still getting issues. After further examining the application I was able to gather the credentials needed for it to properly login to the database and violla the labels started working again. No documentation on this program from any former IT Admin and nothing but panic from the one employee who holds the disk. WHAT A PAIN IN THE ARSE!
Finally got that relic of an application figured out… now to document it… oh, that’s what this is ? 
What else… Oh yea, the “Musical printers” (Had to swap out 5 printers!)
… So the other pressing call I got this week was in regards to a printer (printerA) in the home services department that was “smearing the toner”. Today I was able to take a look at it and confirm in fact it was printing very “sloppily”. So I put in a call to our printer service company only to find out this particular printer is not under contract. (Just my luck) So as a quick fix I took the printer (printerB) from the president’s office and ran it down to replace the broken one (it’s his company… i’m sure he’ll understand!). Guess what, once I get there, their printer was printing fine! So what do I do? The minute I walk away its gonna start printing crappy again but they are printing 100 pages a minute to it so its not a great time to take it down anyway… I guess i’ll leave the president’s printer down here for now (its pretty heavy anyway). Also snagged an oldschool HP JetDirect (external) card that happened to be sitting down there, powered on, but not connected to anything.
Both of these printers are higher end HP LaserJets. Now let’s talk about the other 3 printers
printerC: IBM InfoPrint series
This printer we got a great deal on and has NIC built in so I figured would make a great replacement for the accounting printer (printerE) which had no NIC and was attached to a PC that is never used except left on to print to via network sharing. Unfortunately when printing to it from certian legacy applications you’d have to manually set the PCL type to Raster from GL/2. …Yeah, i dont know what that means either but hey it made the printer happy but didn’t make the accounting team very happy. Needless to say I promised them I’d find a solution…
printerD : HP LaserJet 2100 (spare HR printer)
During a chat with the HR manager she mentioned that I could take the printer in her office if I could provide a replacement, and since she doesnt print from this particular legacy app I figured she could use the IBM printer (printerC).
printerE : HP LaserJet 2100 (original accounting printer)
Inevitably I swapped
printerA : printerB
printerC : printerE
printerD : printerA
printerE : printerD
Other than that there was the common “I forgot my password”… “can you reset my password” … “im not on the right email groups” … “my mouse was doing something funky” … etc…
