More than a Network

On Thursday, I went into Tim's office to try to make some changes to their computer network. A lot of her employees were off, so it gave me the chance to work without disrupting them.
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a network guy. In fact, I really don't like working on networks beyond my own simple one at my house. There are problems that I knew I would encounter that someone with experience would be able to handle easily. A lot of times I learn by trial and error. Unfortunately for me, I am a lot cheaper (free) than experienced and skilled individuals.

The network was a bit of a mess. It was put together ad hoc, and didn't include a lot of the PCs in the company. They had a combination DSL modem and wireless router that was "outdated" to put it kindly. The way it was configured only allowed up to ten specific computers on the network. So I needed to replace the DSL modem, the wireless router, setup the wireless print servers, and set up the printers for each PC.

This isn't the first time I've went to work on this. The Linksys file server which I had installed earlier has malfunctioned, and we had to take it back to the shop for repair. I've run into a lot of other issues, but this time, I was confident that I could at least get the networking and printer servers setup.

I arrived at the office at about 8:00 a.m., and ended up leaving at about 11:30 p.m. After fifteen plus hours of nearly non-stop work (aside from brief meals and a quick trip home), I had accomplished most of what I had set out to do. But like so often is the case in life, just telling you the final result without sharing all the "treasured" moments is a bit of a let down.
Some of the challenges that I encountered:

- Left the print server disk at home, requiring me to go home and get it, wasting time.
- The power cord for the new DSL modem did not have enough ampage. Everything was working well for a few hours when I lost Internet access. After about thirty minutes, I found a new power source and was able to reconnect. Actually, I'm not sure if the power problem caused the outage or it was a problem with the provider that was resolved while I was getting a new power cord.

- One of the print servers was hooked up to an older HP printer. For those of you not familiar, a print server is a device that you hook to a printer that allows you to access the printer from a network. So instead connecting the printer to an individual PC, you connect it to the print server. After setting up the print server, I had to install the software on each PC. Well, the print server required me to set up the printer on each PC first. The HP software wouldn't let me set up the software because the printer wasn't attached. So in some cases, I had to actually carry over the printer to individual PCs, set them up, and then connect it back to the print server.

- A few times the lights on a hub connecting to the new router would start flashing wildly and then the router would lock up. This was made even more lovely by the fact that the Ethernet cable was in a huge tangled mess in their server room.

- On some PCs, the HP installation application displayed in Thai. On a few PCs, I couldn't get it to revert to English, which was a bit of a problem since I don't read Thai.
- There is no firewall or anti-virus software standards at the company (yet). So I would spend quite a bit of time trying to get a particular PC to connect only to find out that the firewall was preventing it from connecting.

- There were keyboards that didn't work as expected. Tim helped me toggle from typing Thai to English, but there were some where pressing keys gave unexpected characters. On one, for instance, clicking "0" gave "*", while clicking "M" gave another result.
- There was a grounding issue on one PC that shocked me when I touched the back of it. That was truly wonderful.

- I thought that I was having an issue with a printer when I discovered that the USB cord that appeared to be connected to a certain PC was instead connected to an extension USB cable.

- An employee had brought his son there who was making annoying and disturbing sounds while playing a computer game.

- I was extra careful around some PCs. The last time I was there I was working on an individual's PC and started to type in "google" in the address bar. The auto complete gave me options for a variety of Thai style male on male entertainment.

That reminded me of a lesson that a computer administrator shared with me back in my days at Computer Science Corporation. The admin was responsible for all the lap tops in the office. He was in the habit of viewing personal files on the laptops when they were turned in. One day that changed when one of our male colleague left pictures on his laptop of himself engaged in very explicit same sex behavior. The admin told me that the pictures were very graphic, so much so that he stopped his file peeping forever. Well, at least for those returned by guys.

In any case, there was a lot of cursing and frustrating moments, but I think things went pretty well. Once I get the file server back, I have to go back and set that up. Then Tim will start using the customer tracking program I wrote for them. Fun stuff.