Up and At Em

I had two voice mails when I woke this morning. No, it wasn't that late.

One, the township had their router problem solved. I had diagnosed that their Nortel Passport 2430 T1 router was dead and had ordered them a Nortel 1001. The 1001 directly supersedes the 2430, and is about half the price of a Cisco 1841. That was, until the county IT guy dropped in and replaced the unit. Seems the county owned it all along. Who knew?

Second, I got a call of another storm-related problem. Last week's storm fragged a client's server. They replaced the power supply, but did not get any joy. On arrival, I noted that the PC would begin to POST, but shut down after about 2-3 seconds without any BIOS beeps. Kinda like a thermal breaker defending against a short. So I took it back to the shop, where it did start the POST, and gave a lot of BIOS beeps. Like, all of them. The pattern was fast and hard to pin down (it was like this ST:NG episode wherein Picard tries to convince an alien race that he is sentient by knocking a sequence of prime numbers. Sorry - geek interlude). So I started card swapping and found that the IDE RAID card was the one that died. Even tried a different slot, and no difference. They were happy to get it back, and back to work.

Except... they were already online without the server. I walked in with it on my shoulder, and I see they're already working. They have a network in name only - its all done through the router. The 'server' is basically a storage shed. An old, decrepit storage shed. They asked me what it would take to upgrade the whole system. I said only about 6 grand.

Yeah - the current set up works right now, lets not fix it so fast.

So tomorrow, I'll pick up one of their personal laptops to optimize and secure.

Thats fine, they really don't have the resources right now to start replacing their whole infrastructure. They even have a Win98 desktop in the system. What are ya gonna do? The mindset I want to project to my clients is one of cooperation - You tell me what you want to do and what you can spend. We'll work with what we have. Few companies right now can afford to just upgrade everything.