Gremlins
Today was going along okay, looking like I’d get done what had already been delayed a couple days. Then, most of the way through reinstalling that delayed workstation, it couldn’t see any printers or print servers. It also couldn’t see an unrelated old server on which I tried to map drive letter U, which goes to an individual, semi-private share for each user. Hmmm…
Rebooting the print servers and powering off and on the HP 8100, the main printer they use, solved that. The main printer is mainly accessed directly via TCP/IP, and it seemed to forget its address or something crazy like that.
Then I checked out the old server and it had no power. Oops. Power supply blew. This is an old Pentium 200 box that used to host the accounting software until the upgrade a few years ago. They wanted to keep it going for the couple times a year they might need to run the old software and look at legacy data. The secondary drive had enough space to let it keep hosting the U drive shares.
Just last night I remarked to myself that it was time to migrate those. When I upgraded the KVM switches in the server room, there were enough slots for 8 servers, so I left that, the 9th, and the odd one out, not hooked to a monitor. It already had a separate keyboard because it took standard rather than PS/2. Figured it was near time to retire it completely, and in the meantime I’d hook a monitor to it if and as needed.
I should know when I have that particular sense about something that I should really pay attention. At the very least I could on the spot have decided to copy the whole kaboodle over to the server where it will move. But nooooo.
And so today the drive on that old server that hosted the U drive shares died, along with the power supply. I hate it when I ignore the spidey sense and get slammed for it.
At the end of the day today I got diverted into completely recreating the fifty U drive shares on a different server and restoring the most recent good backup. I managed one shortcut though. I use login scripts to make sure people are mapped to the right network drives. Never included the U drive in that, because it’s different for each person. This time I used the %UserName% variable so I don’t have to go to every workstation. Trouble is, that doesn’t work on Windows 9x, and there are still a few of those. I can deal with that tomorrow, when I’m not ready to drop.
And the machine I have been attempting to setup most of the week can be deployed! Just a few minor details left, and files to copy from the machine it replaces. Yay.
No Saturday off for me this week. At least I should be clear for Sunday though.
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