RANT MODE ENGAGED.

This one's gonna be a long one. I've been itching to get it off my chest for a while.

One of my largest clients is a company that builds floor and roof trusses. I've been friends with several of the guys down there for years, before I even officially started handling their computer needs. When they were looking for someone to do their computer service and sales last year, they put in a good word for me with the higher ups and my company took over.

They use a special set of software that handles all of their truss engineering, layouts and job information files. The company that writes this software also makes another utility for scheduling, shipping, invoicing - basically everything on the accounting/sales side of things. My client decided to start using this accounting package at the beginning of this year. Before they did, though, they decided to bring in a new server, as the drives were getting pretty full on their P2-200 server, and they felt it was time to upgrade.

On January 2nd, I installed a Dual P3-900 Dell Power Edge 2400 Server, with 512MBs of RAM and 4 disk RAID-5 array with a total capacity of 80GB. Running Win 2K advanced server. Win2k adv. serv., by the way, was a recommendation of the software company. Their previous server was running Win NT 4.0.

So anyway, about a week after I installed this server and got everything set up with (ugh) active directory, the software company came and installed this new accounting software. I should point out here that the software uses the same FoxPro (double ugh) database as the engineering and layout programs. Everything was hunky dory for a few more days...until people started using the new software.

Every couple of hours...CRASH. The database would totally freeze, locking the entire company (30+ users) out of ALL the programs this company provided - engineering, layout and accounting. Everything else being handled by this new server was running fine, just that particular database. After asking the software company for help, they insisted that this problem was totally new to them, they had never seen it, so therefore, I must not have something set up right on the server.

Okay, that's fine, I haven't set up many active directories before, so that's not totally unfeasable. I check everything over. Find no such settings that should be causing this problem. Spend approximately 2 weeks bugging this company and seeing if they have any suggestions as to what I should be looking for. One of their techs lets it slip that they see this problem about 1/3 of the times they install this accounting software. (Huh? I thought you've never seen it.) He suggests that I look at increasing the network bandwith.

So I replace their 3 24 port 3Com 10/100 hubs (30+users on workstations, with just as many machines scattered throughout the plant to control saws and whatnot) with 3 24 port 3Com smart switches. The problem still isn't solved. Back to tech support I go. Another couple of weeks, and one of their brain childs mention that their database has been having problems on Win 2K server set ups. (What? You RECOMMENDED Win 2K for god's sake). So I get to spend a Saturday backing up all the data on the server, trashing it, installing NT 4.0, restoring the data, and rebuilding all the user databases. Yay!.

Everyone comes in the following Monday, fully expecting the problem (which had been bugging them for a month now) to finally be fixed. Nope. Everyone was locked out within an hour. Just for the heck of it, I check network optimization settings on the server. It's all good.

The next day, we got an e-mail from this company with a self-extracting EXE attached, and it simply said to install it on the server for database maintenence. Never actually said what it did, or why it was released. The file was dated a week before we got the e-mail.

I installed the patch, and lo and behold, they ran for 2 solid weeks with no crashes! Apparently, this patch fixed whatever bug there was in the database, and the company was too ignorant to admit that it was their problem the whole time.

Well, the software company sent one of their reps down to apply another set of patches (they didn't want my grubby little hands touching their precious software) and guess what? They crashed 5 times within 3 hours today! HAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!

So anyway, I've wasted about the last 2 months of my life screwing with this "bug", which was no fault of my own, and I've been outright LIED TO by this lame-*** company, who apparently has nick-named me "the big dumb redneck."

And of course, their response for today's little folly was that it must've been something that I changed...despite the fact that I haven't even been there since early last week...and when I was there, I was dropping off a few toners and replacing a power supply in a workstation. I wasn't even within 100 square feet of the server!

Just wait till those primates see my BOOMSTICK. They'll see who the "big dumb redneck" is. Heh heh heh.

RANT MODE DISABLED.

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Dead, I am the one
Exterminating son
Slippin' through the trees
Stranglin' the breeze.