Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Off to Deal with My Wacky Mother One more before I leave the office.  I need to go pick my mother up in lovely Waynesboro, VA this evening.  Tomorrow is her rescheduled court date, and I am responsible for getting her there.  That said, I will be shipping her back to Waynesboro tomorrow afternoon.  On one level, I am annoyed that I am doing this.  Nonetheless, I still feel on the hook for this--since I bailed her out for this arrest.  So, I am making sure she makes this court date.  Nonetheless, my mother's inability to stay in touch with me has annoyed me to no end.  If she cannot make an effort, than neither will I.   Harsh words, but I think that in the end this is for the best.  4:47:34 PM    comment []  trackback []

Stupid People Need to Pay the Price I spent most of my morning today--what should have been an easy day--messing with a network printer.  One of the NetWare 6.5 servers we support uses Novell Directory Printing Services (NDPS) to service some printers.  It is the new way to connect printers to NetWare servers, allowing for the support of IPP printing as well.  Well, all seemed well for this one printer, but no matter how many times one cleared the queue it would inevitable fill back up.  I decided to look into the matter.  I noticed that the server was running an old version of the printer gateway, so I decided to upgrade that to the latest version that is supported by Novell. The older one was the HP IP/IPX Gateway, which is no longer supported by our friends at HP.  Since there were but a handful of printers, this migration went pretty smooth.  After the migration, I noticed that the printer complained of LPR Communications Failure.  What does that mean?  Well, the new gateway talks LPR.  If it cannot connect to the printer, then there is something odd going on.  Nonetheless, the server can ping the printer and get a response.  I decided to retry it with the old gateway, and I would get the same behavior as before.  Test print jobs sent to it would wait in the queue.  I deleted it again, and I retried it using the new gateway, wondering if there was another problem I was not seeing.  The LPR Communications Failure again appeared.  I thought this was odd, since the printer had this enabled by default--heck, all it had configured was an IP address.  I decided to poke at this using my SuSE Linux laptop.  I go to configure the printer, and it returns an error.  It says that it can ping the printer, but there is no LPD queue.  Again, this is odd, as the printer has the defaults all set.  I decide to step away and consult one of my UNIX colleagues.  We open up a shell to another UNIX host, and we run hpstat to the IP address of the printer.  The output shows that the printer has an Access Control List only allowing certain subnets to access the printer via IP.  Since the subnet the server is on is not in the list, the printer would never connect to the gateway.  After I discovered this, I spoke to my boss.  He reminded me that the printer was coming from a group that used to be supported by one college on campus, and is now being supported by another.  The other printer that was configured for this group had the same problem--access control lists.  Needless to say, I was a little upset.  The on-site admin conveniently forgot ro check this, and this was following the problem that was encountered with the last printer.  He obviously conveniently forgot this issue when it came to adding this printer as well.  Add to this the continuing morass of the group on campus with the dead Exchange Server, and I had an already growing list of people on my proverbial $h!t list.  4:37:33 PM    comment []  trackback []