Toner

I recently bought a Xerox Phaser 6125N for the school, as a result of good experiences with similar Xerox printers at previous schools. This one, however, had started to concern me as it seemed that the toner cartridges were reporting as empty when they still had a bit left in them. I knew this because the cartridges on these printers are very simple; they don’t incorporate the image transfer components like so many of Xerox’s competitors, and opening them is as simple as sliding a small trapdoor open by hand.

Last week, I did a little experiment. I borrowed a Petri dish from the science prep room, and used a funnel to shake out what was left in an ‘empty’ cartridge into the dish.

Left-over toner from a magenta 6125N cartridge (p/n 106R01332), with 10 pence coin for scale

Now clearly this isn’t a mountain of toner, but it is significant, and more than I was expecting. Next week when I have more time I intend to weigh both a full and ‘empty’ cartridge to find out the weight difference between the two, then weigh this residue to see what percentage is being left over. Care to place any bets?

Testing

If there was one thing I could rely on in my last school, it was that no problem was ever down to the infrastructure cabling.

The school’s network cabling had been done in house for years before I started there, and it was there that Bond taught me the fine art of Cat5e. I don’t remember us ever having an infrastructure cabling problem, except for the time it was chewed through by glis glis.

That meant that when I moved to my current school, I immediately decreed we would not be using contractors again any time soon, since I could take care of it and know I was doing a good job. This in turn led to me becoming intimately acquainted with several loft areas of the school over the summer, and more importantly, the purchase of my first Fluke Linkrunner kit. At nearly £600, it was an expensive purchase, but worth every penny; I view it as an essential for anyone who takes network cabling even half seriously. If you can’t trust the cabling, you can’t trust the network.

Which is why I have subsequently become infuriated by the fact that the contractors who previously installed network cabling at the school clearly did not have one.

In fact, they did not appear to have a testing tool of any kind. It turns out that I should have decreed that any of our previous cabling contractors who ever showed their faces again on site would be repeatedly stabbed in the eyes with an IDC punchdown tool. I’ve already had to re-terminate patch panels in two separate buildings after discovering that they hadn’t been terminated properly, a fault that not only demonstrates utter incompetence, but is also impossible to miss if you use even a basic continuity tester.

I am the Angry Technician. I am a professional, and take my job seriously. That is why when I install cabling, I GODDAMN TEST IT.

Dear Acer

Question: Who in their right mind would ship a server in this day and age that has EDB disabled by default, with no way to turn it on in the BIOS?

Answer: YOU WOULD, YOU DONKEYS.

This server is less than a year old. I should not have to install a BIOS update just so I can get Hyper-V working. Especially when said BIOS update takes far longer than it should and is extremely poorly documented.

Thanks to you I didn’t leave work until 23.15 last Friday. I inherited this server when I started my new job. Rest assured we will not be buying any more from you.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

How to be a Favourite – #7: The Thank-you Email

You probably all know someone who seems to get the things they ask for from IT more quickly than you. Chances are, they are a Favourite.

Until recently, I thought I’d covered the main ways of becoming a Favourite. Then someone demonstrated possibly the easiest method of them all:

7. Send me a glowing and unsolicited thank-you email, copied to the Headmaster

Let’s face it, that probably trumps all six of the previous methods.

RM don’t have a damned clue what they’re talking about

Within minutes of logging onto an RM system for the first time, I became frustrated with the fact that on most workstations, any keyboard shortcut using the Windows key had been disabled, even for administrators. Win+R, Win+E, and Win+L are shortcuts I use all the time, so my frustration mounted quickly.

First I was told that Win+x shortcuts were disabled because they are “a security risk”, on the basis that by using Win+R, someone could run programs that aren’t on the Start Menu. There are three flaws in this argument:

1. If your workstation security is set correctly, it shouldn’t matter what program they can run. Security through obscurity is a fallacy I do not entertain.
2. There are plenty of other ways for someone to start programs that aren’t on the Start Menu.
3. You can disable this command using Group Policy for particular users without affecting administrators, or the other benign shortcuts.

Later I found an RM support document (TEC85637 for those with access) that boldly stated that by leaving Win+L enabled, users would be able to lock the workstation and stop other people from using it, even if they were prevented from locking the workstation elsewhere in the UI (i.e. by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and clicking ‘Lock Workstation’). When I first read this, I’ll confess I’d never tested such a scenario, but it seemed very unlikely.

So I checked.

It’s utterly false.

RM really don’t have a damned clue what they’re talking about.

Dear RM

If your unnecessary replacement login screen for XP doesn’t work with usernames longer than 20 characters:

1. Why does it allow you to type more than 20 characters in, and
2. WHY THE HELL DID YOUR MANAGEMENT CONSOLE ALLOW ME TO CREATE THESE USERNAMES IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Recovering a deleted Microsoft Outlook PST file

• Have you just discovered that one of your users has lost their Outlook data store (PST file)?
• Are you using POP3 instead of IMAP or Exchange, and therefore don’t have a copy on the mail server?
• Was the PST file stored in a location that isn’t backed up for some reason?
• Did it happen to a very senior member of staff, and through no fault of their own?
• Are you starting to think you, as the Network Manager, might be totally boned?

Welcome to my Tuesday afternoon.

Recovering the data

Under normal circumstances, Pirform’s Recuva is my go-to program for quick and easy file recovery. However, this problem proved too much even for the deep scan option to find a trace of the file. This needed a more thorough solution:

1. PhotoRec is a recovery program that completely ignores the file system on the disk, and instead siply scans the underlying data looking for patterns that match known data types. It was originally designed to recover photos, hence the name, but currently works on about 100 different file types, including Outlook’s PST files.
2. Once I’d recovered some data, I quickly found the recovery wasn’t perfect; I couldn’t open the PST fies in Outlook. This was hardly surprising given that part of the data store had been overwritten and Recuva couldn’t even begin to attempt a recovery. I then turned to Outlook’s Inbox Repair tool (Scanpst.exe), which is installed by default with Outlook. After running the recovered files through Scanpst, I was able to open them in Outlook.

Value

Never forget:

Your all-singing, all-dancing backup server, which cost you a four-figure sum to buy and backs up every file server on the site, is worth absolutely diddly squat if your users have their most important files saved on their local C: drive.

Dear Xerox

If you’re too lazy to write some damned code to present a list of valid months for when I could have bought a printer, try not to fire the guy whose job it is to add a new line each month.

It’s now October, and according to your warranty registration page, I apparently couldn’t have possibly bought anything from you since August.

Have fun typing up the registration form I sent you by fax instead.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Low Power

When the lights start flickering in your house at 8pm, and you hear the UPS for your Home Server clicking on and off, you know it’s going to be busy at work the next day.