A certain amount of computerish success

Between the shop cat and sweeping in lots of nooks and corners where lots of fluff, cobwebs, and dirt had collected, I spent the whole day at the Land of Faerie alternately sneezing my head off and mopping my dripping nose.  (That wasn’t the productive part of the day.  That was the annoying part of the day.)

The productive part of the day was that after installing the new CD-RW drive, loading up several drivers and finding answers to some networking problems via Google, I now have both the shop’s computers (the point-of-sale system running Win 98 and the office system running Win 2K) talking to one another, sharing drives, and even printing documents from both systems.  I was told they hadn’t been able to print to the laser printer from the front in more than a year.  I still need to figure out why the POS can’t talk to the bar code and label printer, because it has the right drivers installed and ought to be able to print.  More mysteries.

The one thing that’s still scaring the pee-wadding out of me is that both computers are running without any coherent system for making backups.  The one inventory backup to CD that the owner showed me is months old, and I’m even more nervous now than I was last week after I discovered that the hard drives in both systems are Maxtor 6L020J1 DiamondMax Plus D740X models.  While it’s not notorious for failure, as is the 6E040L0 DiamondMax Plus 8 (I’ve seen failure rates in that model above 40% during the first three months of life in the systems where the Empire used the 6E040, and we used a lot of them for a while), the words “Maxtor” and “hard drive” in the same breath have me (and a lot of the IT people I talk to every day) feeling very gunshy—and the more so because the POS system is reporting some kind of cluster problem which nobody else has, before now, let CHKDSK run all the way through to see what’s going on.  Instead, they’ve ABENDed the CHKDSK every time they rebooted the system.  Granted, a full CHKDSK run on that drive takes four or five hours, but when the computer tells me that it’s running a temperature, so to speak, it worries me to give it two aspirin and say “call me if it gets worse.”  Fortunately, I was able to start CHKDSK running at the end of the day today so it can complete overnight and perhaps I can see just what’s going on.

In the meantime, I need to pull together some figures to see how much a Travan 20 IDE tape backup system might cost.  (Answer:  a Seagate STT220000 costs something like $200 plus tapes, depending on which Web vendor you buy it from.)  I’d like to work up a system that would let us get into doing a multi-generation backup, which would be much safer when it came to fire or flood.  Not that a flood’s quite so likely any more, since we moved away from Shoal Creek after losing more than half the inventory in the 2001 floods, but “there’s alllllways SOM-thin’,” Roseanna.  And if I can figure out some way that “SOM-thin’” can become less likely, I like that.

And tomorrow I also need to remember to carry in some wrenches, pliers, penetrating oil, and other Implements of Destruction.  Today Rowan mentioned the toilet wasn’t working properly and asked me if I could fix it.  A quick look showed me the refill valve is completely shot and needs replacing, so I ran over to Breed & Co. at lunchtime and picked up an inexpensive replacement valve.  Toilet valves are one of the few no-brain plumbing problems I know of, so as long as I use lots of penetrating oil and don’t snap a connector getting all in a rush, I’ll be fine.

Andy Griffith printed a counterfeit parking lot for the Sultan of Swat.  Fnord.