IT BS thread

i hate not having control of all things in the environment.

SEP is quarntining a file and i have to rely on some idiots from HP to try to get an exception put in. We are on attempt #3 now.

 

OK, this is a new one for me.

Now, I got an 'emergency' call this morning and went on the raod to fix it. 11 year old, 40-pin IDE hard drive (all 80GB of it) that was a single drive with no redundancy has been housing 43GB of 100% mission critical data...for 8 years.

Idiots.

Anyhow, the drive started shitting the bed on Friday. They've been calling around frantically for someone that can work on hardware "older than ...that drive" and give a reasonable chance at an outcome of success.

Now, on a Saturday, I ain't cheap, and the CEO cringed when I quoted what I would charge per hour to come rescue his shit and, off the top of my head, personally bet him $20 bucks that, barring a hard disk physical failure of some kind, I'd have his data not only saved but available to his network by dinnertime.

(Of course, I only did this cause there's a Packer game at 8, and no way am I missing kickoff.)

So, I get on site, and...

...

...

I have not the words. You guys will understand. Here's a screenshot I took with my phone before I took their 'mission critical server' offline and rescued the data. I wish I were joking.



Not only did I pocket ... well, lets just say it was three digits in cash, but I was *home* before lunch.

Side note: Apparently I'm the only tech in south Florida with the data AND power adapters to mount a 40-pin IDE molex-powered HDD to a modern USB port on a laptop in his truck at all times. At least that they could find in two hours on the phone.

 

Windows 98

 

I know, right? I haven't seen one of them 'live' in the wild in about 4 years!

 

I did a p2v of a windows nt 4.0 server a little over a year ago. Working on that old shit sucks.

 

It can, but I'll tell you this much:

Before I brought it down but after the pic was snapped, I spent about four minutes just flying through the UI and the command line, just to see how much I could remember of that OS.

...


Scary how much is still in those memory banks!

 

Hey, people still program in COBOL...

 

Its all still there. Just archived off in the far nether regions of you brain.

 

We have one out in the warehouse, I can't remember if it's for some conveyor belt machine or if it's controlling the cigarette stamper. In either case, we can't upgrade it because the driver support isn't written for anything beyond that version, even though the rest of the equipment is current.

 

Do you have any backup hardware for that? You could find the driver doesn't work with newer hardware.

Or you could get someone to write a new driver or work with the vendor to get the source code (assuming they are still around).

I don't envy having to support that

 

Since I'm dev I don't really get to worry about it. I know if it's supporting the cig machines, you don't touch a damn thing because it's all felony this and misdemeanor that for tampering.

 

Okay guys so I need some help if you can.

At work we have a HP PCL 6 printer. My Boss needs to scan some documents that have to be 8.5x11 but the scanner doesn't give you the option to resize an image so I have to do it the hard way by going into paint and resizing it. That's fine with me because I can do it fairly quickly however my boss is not so computer savy. Is there any easier way to do it that he could figure out?

Thanks

 

You may need to go into the scanner itself to set those options. On the HPs at our office, you can't change scan size in the PC-client end of things, but going into the web interface and changing the defaults of the scanner itself you can.

Check into hitting up the scanner settings for the DEVICE, not just the user end or client-specific settings.

 

Okay so I tried "fit to page" for the copy settings (no settings for just the scanner on the device) and I still get the document I want and like 2/3 of a page of white space.

He used to be able to use the scan and fax wizard from windows xp but they upgraded his computer to windows 7 so it not longer has the wizard. I'm fine doing it myself but when I'm not there in the summer I'm not sure he'd figure it out.

 

Check the margins on the page. Set them to zero or maybe 1/8" or so. Then try "fit" again.

It could be the blank space is the result of trying to maintain the aspect ratio within the page margin.

 

I've also seen them 'default' on scans to booklet mode, where it tries to put two pages per sheet so they can be folded into a booklet format, which leaves you half a page of white space on single pages.

 

Margins were at zero and it wasn't maintaining the aspect ratio it was just scanning it exactly how it was already

Nope turned that off..

The only thing I figured out how to do is to simply copy the document at 135% and then scan that again but that is a huge waste of paper.. Oh well I guess it really only needs to be done once a month so I guess that will just have to do for now.

 

Hrm.

Well, if its only one user once a month, you can leave it I guess.

I'd nuke the drivers, scrub registry, etc and then do a reinstall from a clean state, but that's me. HPs drivers and software are by far the worst of the worst.

 

I would but he's trying to buy a new printer anyways.. if its anything like his new computer it will take a year for corporate to get it right and send it

 

What resolution are you scanning at? Can you increase it?