we're spoiled ...
It's easy to get spoiled when you're a software developer these days. Loads of RAM, fast processors, new machines, freshly installed operating systems and modern conveniences like plug and play hardware and wireless networks make it simple these days to futz around with stuff and it all *just works*. It wasn't always that way and if you were around for the bad old days say 8 or so years ago when windows 95 ruled the earth, then you'll know what I mean.
I took a refresher course just this weekend and realized how much better these things are now that in days of old (reminder to you youngins, we used to walk 5 miles to school and it was uphill both ways... and yes, we liked it and didn't complain once)...
My refresher turned out to be a try at rebuilding a windows 95 (ahem) server machine which was being used as a gateway, printer server and VPN client providing service to a bunch of office PCs. This was the most critical piece of equipment and there was no documentation, no anything... and it died. Drivers ? dream on ... config files or notes ... um no. It had three printers, one parallel (thank god) and two serial... Remember baud, parity, flow control ? Not quite as simple as plug-and-play networking, you either know the details or you cannot connect.
So, off we go and first things first... remember Wingate ? this must go. Replaced with a dirt cheap router/gateway which does everthing you need, stuff like DHCP, VPN routing, firewall with no fuss no muss. Removed all the wingate hacks from each client to make it normal and get back to connectivity. Now the printers... no idea what baud rate the old printers needed and no, getting a new printer is not possible as these were specialty printers and no replacements exist. So, we waste this special expensive paper trying to get a simple non garbled ticket to print ... all day my tale of woe lasted.
The fix in the end was we found a written post-it that said 4800 on it... Guessing that this was the baud rate and with some additional experiments it worked and printing was happy again.
I just don't know how small customers with 10 year old computers do it. No patches, so software and no way to fix simple problems due to lack of drivers, updates or anything and the faded history of time means all past configuration know how is gone.
The funny thing, is when we finally checked all the configurations, we noticed the server has a whopping 128M and the clients all on 64M and they worked *fine*... they even boot way faster than my new highend machine running Windows XP...
all I can say after this afternoons mess is we're spoiled...
I took a refresher course just this weekend and realized how much better these things are now that in days of old (reminder to you youngins, we used to walk 5 miles to school and it was uphill both ways... and yes, we liked it and didn't complain once)...
My refresher turned out to be a try at rebuilding a windows 95 (ahem) server machine which was being used as a gateway, printer server and VPN client providing service to a bunch of office PCs. This was the most critical piece of equipment and there was no documentation, no anything... and it died. Drivers ? dream on ... config files or notes ... um no. It had three printers, one parallel (thank god) and two serial... Remember baud, parity, flow control ? Not quite as simple as plug-and-play networking, you either know the details or you cannot connect.
So, off we go and first things first... remember Wingate ? this must go. Replaced with a dirt cheap router/gateway which does everthing you need, stuff like DHCP, VPN routing, firewall with no fuss no muss. Removed all the wingate hacks from each client to make it normal and get back to connectivity. Now the printers... no idea what baud rate the old printers needed and no, getting a new printer is not possible as these were specialty printers and no replacements exist. So, we waste this special expensive paper trying to get a simple non garbled ticket to print ... all day my tale of woe lasted.
The fix in the end was we found a written post-it that said 4800 on it... Guessing that this was the baud rate and with some additional experiments it worked and printing was happy again.
I just don't know how small customers with 10 year old computers do it. No patches, so software and no way to fix simple problems due to lack of drivers, updates or anything and the faded history of time means all past configuration know how is gone.
The funny thing, is when we finally checked all the configurations, we noticed the server has a whopping 128M and the clients all on 64M and they worked *fine*... they even boot way faster than my new highend machine running Windows XP...
all I can say after this afternoons mess is we're spoiled...
posted by John Duimovich at 6:41 PM
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