What A Day

I ended the day by heading to the new client to inventory computers so it would be clear what they had before proceeding.  Seems it’s going to end up being a combination of me, the person developing their B to B web site in-house, and the programmer who wrote and maintains their order entry application all involved in bringing them into the future.

Anyway, this involved going around to each machine, getting the OS, user, machine name, CPU, and other info.  After first detouring through figuring out how to create an export template in the timeclock software to be compatible with ADP payroll processing.  All went well and it took about the duration I had expected.  There were fun details like my learning that many of the machines had BIOS passwords set, and learning they do in fact all log onto Novell as the network controller.  The Novell machine was intended to be gone months ago and supposedly was there only because it still contained relevant data not ported off it yet.  Most of the machines were built by a previous computer guy they now despise, and it showed.

We saved the NT server for last.  I had to reboot that to find out everything I needed to know.  Not a problem; they periodically have to reboot it anyway.

Not this time.

It kept getting to the blue screen that displays the amount of memory and chugs for a minute before moving on, then rebooting itself.

VGA mode was no good.  The additional instances of regular and VGA mode on the boot screen were artifacts in the boot.ini that had no connection with reality.

I ended up going into SCSI utilities and having it check the two drives.  Nope.  Disconnected from the network in case, as they thought, Novell was interfering.  Nope.

We ended up leaving, with the server off, and in the morning they will try again.  If it’s not sane then, they will try to get the evil computer guy who built the machine and knows it and, apparently, didn’t leave them with the NT disk that goes with it.  Thus I couldn’t try recovery with that.  I didn’t dare to use Last Known Good to take it back to original configuration.

What an awful end to the day!  And in the middle of it, another new client called to report when his office would be ready and stuff would be moving in there, and to ask progress on the document management software he will beta for us if I can wrestle it into creating an installable distribution.  Even though the beta is free, I would like to have it ready on time when he needs it.

I don’t remember ever leaving someone with things that completely down.  In the morning they will be in “send people home because they can’t do anything” mode until the server is back.  All I did was reboot it an have it by sheer coincidence fail at that time.  When I came home and looked up the problem, I found one possibility involves doing a new install of NT to a new folder, using that to change settings in the original install, then going back to the original when fixed.  Ugh.

I hope tomorrow is better.  Today I heard from or dealt with most of my clients, and got called by a guy I help free as a favor who naturally is the most demanding “client” of all.  Which is why I developed a habit of ignoring him for the most part.  It must have been one of those crazy days for computers.

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