RIP Johnny (My Big Brother)

One of my last posts of 2023 – titled ‘3 Funerals and a Crappy Breakfast’ talked about the pitfalls of 2023, the people I lost that year, and just generally how “crappy” the year went (despite its upside). In that post, I looked forward to 2024 being new, different, and “better”. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

I’ll post a “year to date” review of this year in a separate post, but for now, I’m sad to report that my brother John “Johnny” has passed away in July of 2024.

Nearly a week and a half since, I can at least talk again, but I’m still in shock and dealing with the mental fallout of all of this. I’ve been to many funerals in my life, but this was the first one where I’m one of the people greeting the visitors. It wasn’t easy, as they never are. I felt bad for people walking up, who just don’t know what to say, and often, they just admit that, and thats OK. There IS NO right thing to say.

My brother pushed me to be nerdy since I was old enough to know what that was. He often got me awesome Christmas gifts, including things like a CB, stereo speakers, a ham radio, and more, almost all from Radio Shack.

Over the last decade or two, we shared a common interest of going to hamfests, whether we we’re vendoring or just buying. Over the last few years he had a stroke in 2020, which impacted his right side. As such, I only really vendored at one hamfest since then, and his ability to get around at a hamfest involved solid ground and using a cane.

Hopefully I’ll put up a better post in the near future; seems I just haven’t had a chance to update this site like I hoped to, and really life has just been kicking me in the nuts over and over again. I have done some cool nerdy things this year, I have picked up some neat stuff, but I just can’t seem to catch up.

RIP Johnny…I MISS YOU BRO.

Windows Server and Corrupted Files

As always, I try to post up IT fixes that may be a little tougher to find, and only if the fix is proven to actually work, so you’re not scrolling amongst 100s of forum posts. One useful command from back in the day, “sfc /scannow” used to be used to fix corrupted files in Windows installations, although its been a bit of a meme over the past few years (decades?) in that it was almost universally suggested by online Microsoft support, yet rarely ever fixed anything. (Rarely being used liberally here – it DID work…sometimes). Yet, what happens when SFC doesn’t work, and instead spits out an error?

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Fiery Print Server ignores DHCP/DNS Changes with Papercut

Another (Wasted) day…another dollar. Its not unheard of for a typical IT person to rant about dealing with printers. It seems they’re constantly the bane of any admin; not printing, needing special treatment, buggy drivers, buggy settings, etc. I often think I’m immune to a majority of the issues; I’ve been through EVERYTHING, fixed it all, and hey if I can get 1960s teletype machines working, I can get a friggin modern printer working. Well today, I was put back in my place…

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At&t Model 513 Terminal, or Teletype 56D, or…

Talk about an identity crisis! I recently stopped by the swap meet at System Source, a computer museum just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, where I picked up this eighties masterpiece of a terminal. This…style terminal I believe is known by many monikers. This actual unit is labeled an At&t “513” on the front, and “Teletype 56D” on the back. (At&t bought Teletype Corp and often branded some of their final products with At&t nomenclature.) This unit was likely paired to an At&t Definity PBX, and simliar units could also be At&t 4425 as well as many other models (likely only minor firmware tweaks between them).

Posted on it was a sign that basically mentioned it was a “barn find”, and as such, no guarantees on it working, or ever working. As I’m a glutton for punishment, naturally I bought it. (I know the seller and he gave me a good deal on it).

Let’s see what’s inside…

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Sharing Printers – Windows 10 22H2 – Error 0x0000709

Once again, a fun little doozy with rabbit holes leading in all the wrong directions. A typical 5 minute thing turns into a 4 hour hair-pulling exercise! Tried to share 2 printers from a Windows 10 computer to another Windows 10 computer, and the other Windows 10 computer could not access them; they showed up as shared printers, but I got the dreaded 0x000000709 (note number of zeros may be off) error whenever I tried to connect to the printer.

Doing some searching leads you to believe this was due to a security update that was pushed some time ago to mitigate Print Nightmare, or perhaps a new issue having to do with RPC in Windows 11. (Why so many Windows 11 results when I clearly put Windows 10 in the search baffles me too). The real answer? Neither (ish).

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