The Hell with HP

Last summer I had it with HP support. My first dealings with them proved to be successful back in 2006, but something terrible has happened since. My brother who lives in Oregon needed help with getting his HP PC up and running after it had been infested with “Internets”. I felt bad that I instructed him to to re-partition his box without checking with him first if he had his OEM cd’s. Okay… secretly I wanted to get him to use those LiveCD’s I sent him the year prior; just kidding, but that was what was left for him at that time.

So I ordered him his OEM CDs next day on a Friday in 2006. Naturally he doesn’t get them until Monday. All must have been well since; I don’t recall to be honest. He says he was able to get the box back to where it was without using the CD’s. A year later he has the same problem but the CD’s fail on the last CD. I suspect it is damaged, but he cannot continue. I call HP and ask for a new set to replace the defective CD’s.

An afternoon in Hell is what I spent on the phone trying to get to the right department. After countless pass-offs and a couple dropped calls, I finally get a native English speaking gal thinking I’m gonna get this one real soon now. But no she can’t find my original order of which I had the emails for still. Evidently they decided to just dump all previous orders from an older database without cross-referencing to the new.

Printing Now Fixed

As usual with most tech support I deal with they tend to have you rehash much of what you already have done; assuming you are technically savvy yourself. It infuriates me further to have to jump though their hoops to get any cooperation. The first reply this morning from IT is to “power down the printer and retry the same documents and report what the error logs say”. Well the only thing that proved was that this issue did not produce those error logs. Those errors were probably legit.

So on my own I attempt to print to file and use DOS to copy the file to the device. Here I get “The system cannot write to the specified device.” This sounds like a write permissions problem. Just before I even got the email off to report this to them, I got a message back stating they changed the spool settings and reboot our server.

You see, even in Windows I try my best to avoid rebooting servers. Perhaps they didn’t know you can restart individual services in Windows. Ah well, guess we’re good to go for another couple weeks before needing to reboot.

Windows Domain Printing Problem?

I’ve been able to print to our Lanier multifunction printer all morning. This afternoon, my coworker starts having trouble printing to any printer on the network. He can print Word documents fine but nothing graphical. I tested and can’t print graphics either now. I keep getting a balloon pop-up saying it failed consistently until it is removed from the spool.

Well with my history in dealing with IT issues in our corporate world IT team hasn’t been pleasant recently. So I decided not to dig too deep and called, left a message with them. I mentioned the error logs on the printer show different errors stating the stapler failed or the hole punch failed. Since this is a problem on at least three Windows boxes and two network printers I suspected the Windows server as the culprit. In my VMWare Player running Linux, I can print directly just fine.

So IT calls back and I luck out this time as he thinks it is probably the server too. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the confidence to dig into this issue and decides to pass the buck to another IT guy for tomorrow. Uh reboot?!

Another MS Monday

I began feeling doomed from the start this morning. Our packing slip printer is a Lexmark 2381 for the AS400. The guy who normally troubleshoots this was out sick this morning and the AS400 expert is in Seattle this week. It was screwed up with all the lights flashing. So I turn it off and reset it. No good. I was printing wide and low. So I figured out how to set the top of form and tear off levels but not the width. So I call the guy at his home and he tells me to lock it on the 10 pitch. I guess I should have just tried all the pitch levels because he was wrong… it was 12. Needless to say he come in looking pissed as ever. Now that I have figured how to set the form levels I watched him wrestle with this again since we changed the pitch to 12, I feel that I have a better grasp on how to do this than he. Better… it’s my job to.

The MS Monday didn’t stop there. No FAXing could go through to Canada nor India today. Not one! I changed the old phone cord and got rid of some old crappy do-hickeys for line protection and splitters. Didn’t help. Tried on a different FAX; no good.

Talked with Linksys about the Win98SE box not connecting prior to logging in. I was thinking it might be the SSID beacon being turned off, but that wasn’t it. They want me to test without WEP next. Not exactly where I want to go since that is why I got rid of the Orinoco AP.

WAP Final Blow?

In a second attempt to establish a secure connection to our original Orinoco wireless network yesterday afternoon, I made some advancements but one fatal blow had to be thwarted. The fact this AP1000 is rather ancient from 2001 era, its technology was pretty proprietary. Only other Orinoco clients would be able to connect if I enabled WEP security. I don’t know everything about HEX key security, but Orinoco seems to think one can just convert a passphrase by hand with their key code chart provided in the help documents!?! Okay so provided I used this, all is fine with other Orinoco cards but no way to fake this with a Liksys card which IMO uses true HEX security. Using the same passphrase and automatically generating the 26 character HEX does not even come close to what Orinoco would have you use. Even if I manually enter the Orinoco version… no go. So what do ya do? Replace it with a WAP11 running for $70 now! So I had a shop guy hoist me up in a cage to access the old chrome dust infested AP and replaced it with the WAP11. Even the Orinoco clients can connect to this with WEP enabled! Just need to enter the 26 character HEX manually is all. Unfortunately the furthest user continues to have 48% power. So my next plan is to find a booster which is what we already have on the other wireless network at both ends.

First thing this morning I thought it was going to be a printer hell day. First the wife of my boss calls with problems printing on their all-in-one HP printer. Seems that it just needed a reboot. I’m wondering if she thinks logging out is the same as a reboot. So now I think I may have found a better solution… but not as effective if ignored. I changed the Windows updates to download but prompt for installation rather than install automatically. I’m guessing that it installs and requires a reboot that in was not prompting for when nobody was logged in. So I guess as long as they don’t simply ignore the requests now. Time will tell. Secondly the boss calls just as I hang up with his wife with printer problems. It was printing only the header of the emails and stopping without ejecting the remainder of the page. Who knows! I do a power cycle there and run a print test.

While out running errands today when I picked up that AP, I also picked up a card reader for the boss. He wanted me to pick up the card reader from his home office while out at that end of town. So anyway it was nice to have it work without using the CD to install it. I just needed to run through showing him how to send photos as attachments through email.

Got my receipt for an upcoming Security Conference! This will surly be fun. I will get to see some of my old instructors from my CAD days out there at the college. I was grateful to know that the boss is all for extending my knowledge in security issues. I had no resistance what so ever in selling this to him in getting his approval. This conference will primarily be a Microsoft solution style but… several of us from the Linux community have banded together to come to this. To date we are not a part of their speaker/seminars, but who knows, they may have some sort of open forum discussion to attend. I ordered a couple shirts to wear during this too. Nothing offensive. Just a Tux patch on one and a work shirt with a “31337″ patch. Surly to loose enough there I’m sure! Rocky had the first Security Conference a few years ago I helped out with and we had quite the turnout. Wanted to have Kevin Mitnick come but he was a bit out of their budget. However they did get Marty Roesch, the father of Snort and Kevin Fenzie a well known security consultant from Colorado based Tummy.com. Not to mention several local computer guys in the area.

The rough beginning

Yesterday I had attempted to start my blog but after writing it all afternoon, I had to open a second tab in Mozilla to do some admin stuff to get this going. In the process of doing that I had closed the tab and tried continuing my writing on the original tab. Well I suddenly lost the data probably due to the closing of all cache related to this site when closing the previous tab.

I don’t plan to re-write it. All it was about is past and future projects I have. As it is anyway, it’s my nature to go into too much detail as it is when talking about something. But then again it’s my nature to not give enough detail at times too. Never a happy medium.

So this blog is about my daily doings in the computer world. It may include what I have been doing with Windows boxes too. But for the most part my daily work is structured around Linux.

Today started off at the bosses house at 8am. His son called last night with major computer problems. No mouse and huge fonts and icons. Come to find out that something hosed his registry so I needed to take it into the office. It had ME on it and I put 98SE on it this afternoon. Almost had to ax the whole windows directory as it took several tries to install and it kept pulling in data from the corrupt OS.

I plan to install a Linux VPN server (FreeS/WAN) at the bosses house so while I was there I took a peak at their cable modem setup. The new home (mansion) has a hidden network control panel so I couldn’t see everything. I got the info I needed anyway by finding the Linksys DSL/Cable router. Next is to call them up to make plans to incorporate it.

Got a used HP lj5 from another Linux user in Colorado today. We got it for $250 and it has 109580 pages, so I hope that is considered low mileage. It was a nightmare to get it shipped because UPS thought we were going to print the labels her and mail it to them to affix then call UPS back up to pick the box up. What we wanted was for them to supply the label, have the driver affix the label and have the driver bring it to us and have them bill our account for this. It’s called a “one time pick up”. I thought the USPS was bad!

The boss had another guy pull some old equipment down from the loft about a week ago and placed them on pallets in the shop getting them ready for the dumpster. I had gone through testing the PC monitors for good/bad. Also want to get rid of all the IBM terminals from our old setup. Ironically I got a call from Computer Management International asking for used equipment to buy or sell. Had to call them back up today to light a fire under them so I could get rid of these! Everyone thinks this is my mess I drug out into the shop as the bullets fly.