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This week, reader “Earl” tells us that just this year he responded to “a Craigslist ad for a Novell NetWare Admin to figure out why .nlm files would not be loaded and fix the issue.”
[...] The return call came “almost instantly” and Earl “gave them my expensive price and advised them that I was not the first choice for a NetWare admin, but I had extensive system troubleshooting experience.”
Those caveats didn't matter: the person who placed the ad said he's run it for months and months and never had a reply from anyone in the USA. Earl was just 90 minutes away by train and got the gig.
When Earl visited the site, he was told that an electrical storm had taken out the NetWare server and Windows 95/98 clients. Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB IDE hard drive. Earl reckons it was built in 1997 or 1998, so was a bit taken aback when told this was “the new server”.
[...] Next came a request to boot up the Compaqs, which had power supply and fan failures. A request to swap the disks from the dead Compaqs was not something Earl could do, as they had tossed out the necessary SCSI cables a few years back.
Earl was asked to do all of these things so the company could run its bespoke accounting program, which was written for it in 1993.
The developer, it turned out, had died in 2001. But the source code was in the company safe … on about 2000 pages of dot matrix printer paper. And there were backups of the old data … on 20 years worth of floppy disks and a pair of CD-ROMs.
[...] Earl told the company that they'd need a working server, running NetWare, before he could even begin to contemplate the task of typing in the source code so he could see if the backups could be restored. Then he'd have to hope that a Pascal compiler could cross-compile for NetWare to have even a chance of setting things to rights.
To the company's credit, it tried hard to meet his requests. Two weeks later Earl says he returned to the company, where a working PowerEdge 1300 with a PCI network awaited.
[...] But he didn't have his own monitor.
[...] He somehow got to work. DOS 6.22 and all the device drivers “installed like a charm”. NetWare 4.1 installed. It was seen by both Windows 95 and 98 on the frail network. Now it came time to restore the application.
But it turned out that the stack of disks contained only data, not the application. Even the 10MB disk from the “old” server was uselessly corrupted.
Earl tried to explain this problem, but the client was having none of it and showed him the door.
Earl tells The Register the client owes him about US$5,000.00 for his time and is showing no signs of paying up. At least he didn't have to re-type all that source code: perhaps there weren't enough keyboards in the office!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @07:53PM
Last two jobs were a Win 7 box somebody had legally or illegally upgraded to Win 7 Ultimate from Home Basic I think it was. Long story short it now defaulted to Aero, resulting in them thinking it had a virus. Switch Aero off, OMG it was so fast! Turned out it had an HD3000 IGP in it. Not very fast, as you can imagine. Additionally it was claimed to have reverted a week or two later, but I wasn't given a chance to verify if the issue was Aero again, or a virus that got missed while scanning (It was a particularly slow system, and since Aero appeared to fix the usability issues, I only finished a partial scan with the promise to run a full one if the usability issues returned, since they were in a hurry to get it back.)
The other bigger hassle was a favor for someone: It was a computer system for some sort of medical equipment that was running Linux. Turned out it used an array of IDE disks for the data storage, but a SCSI U320 for the OS. Having not futzed with SCSI since the early '00s I didn't have any of the required cables, and this idiot, despite being in the used computer resale market didn't have cables for it, nor supposedly IDE drives (he ended up finding one later.) It needed a password reset that required glitching the bios, installing a copy of linux on the donor drive, then repasswording the original SCSI drive (thanks to glitching the bios, which allowed using a non-default boot config, which it was secured against if a particular jumper wasn't shorted or open while the system was booting up. Literally, it would revert to defaults!) System got finished but the guy in question gipped me on the agreed upon amount of cash, and only paid the original amount, despite misrepresenting the job to me. The friend in question made good on his own payment, but I would never work with that other guy again (pretty sure he gipped my friend on his half of the sale too.)
Moral of my story? Two out of the last three jobs involved working with repairing software on legally questionable systems. It seems like about 3/4s of the independent tech jobs left entail that, and being smart enough to observe that makes it hard to feel comfortable doing side jobs like this given the potential legal burden you have from knowingly working on them. And how often does word of mouth references get you new work anymore, anyways? Maybe this experience is unique to me, however.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @08:20PM
Restoring a BIOS to defaults by changing a jumper is a feature that has existed almost since we've had BIOSes. What kind of tech support guy are you to not know that?