Drafting Division

One of my business customers called today with a printer issue. It simply was not working. The printer was located in the drafting department. These guys are some of the highest paid in the company because their work generates bids on work that enterprise customers of the company will hopefully accept.

I try to keep network configurations as simple as possible. KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid – applies most of the time. If you don’t run as simple as you can there is always something else to break and the more complex it is the harder it is to fix it.  Downtime equals bad PR!

When I was first introduced to the drafting department the company was moving onto Panda Managed Office Protection. The drafting guru is very particular. He is a super type A individual which is important if your a drafter.  He was running AVAST and SPYBOT Search and Destroy and MCAFFEE and .. and .. and .. and … at  a time I was working on the corporate antivirus solution. His computer was not accessible to me and I was trying to get access. I had seen how his security software was set up and was gently trying to explain that if one solution from panda were installed, removing all others, his performance and security would be greatly improved. The product runs mostly in the cloud and can be managed from anywhere. It is very efficient and powerful.  It was a tense moment when he rejected the idea for me. I respected his choice and view and moved on.

Previously the drafting person had only his own needs to worry about. This Guru’s workload had increased a great deal. He needed to take on some help. The company called inquiring on how to set up a secure network just for the drafting department. The company as a whole is running off of a Cisco RV016 multi wan vpn router with multi-homing and a good firewall that allows you to set up very specific traffic rules. It is a really cool and very affordable piece of equipment that I could have used to provide the solution they wanted. It has the ability to separate the drafting department from the rest of the company and even put them on a separate sub-net.  But it was also very important that I give the guru something physical to place his trust in because virtual network security measures cant be seen or quantified. Its a pretty big deal for someone like that to be able to see the protection. It is a a peace of mind thing. He wanted to make sure no one from the company could access his computer except for members of his department. I took a wireless router the office manager had in a closet and placed it in the drafting office. The uplink on wireless router grabs a dynamic IP on the existing corporate network.  I configured its lan interface to provide a unique private network subnet that is far different from the norm.

The drafting office is surrounded by equipment. There are plotters and printers all over the place. Some of them have network interfaces and some do not. Since the Guru had always used USB connections to the printers I just shared all of them from his computer and mapped them for the other user.  This has worked well for quite some time.  It is a very simple solution.  But today the Xerox Phaser Solid Media Printer was not working.

I spoke with them over the phone and had them check that it was not operating in offline mode. It had been. However, changing the device to an online status had no effect.  They quickly set up an appointment. I went out and discovered that the USB interface was partially blown on the printer. It did not allow the connecting computer to properly detect the model. I plugged the Phaser into the network and mapped directly to it from both computers. Problem solved.

It was good to be able to go out and see the drafting team. I was very happy to be able to help them and I look forward to the next time.

Midnight Tech