HP LaserJet 5L is streaking, how to 'clean' up?

Yep Jeff is one smart cookie. Redundancy is your friend. I learned that working on live computer systems for commercial clients that ran 3 shifts of CNC. Take them down for half an hour is a big deal. Screwing something up big time and not having a redundancy plan to return before the upgrade will lose you the client. Happened to me once on an old Novell 3.10 server running a golf course point of sale system. Upgraded the OS to 3.12 and it died in the process. Later figured out after a couple hours that the dos partition was full and that's where the boot files are. Deleted some orphaned files, re-ran the upgrade and all was fine. Didn't lose the client but they spent a lot of time entering sales they wrote down on paper back into the system. I couldn't charge my time ethically so I lost

Well, not exactly. Cover thy ass, backups, and disk images are best. RAID, mirroring, and tape backup are the road to hell. Been there, done them all, and learned some really expensive lessons.

Ugh. Don't remind me. I had a customer running some APT program on Lisa Xenix. They had two Lisa machines so theoretically, I was protected. However, the system as stable as a house of playing cards. Since Lisa Xenix wasn't getting updated, I didn't have that nightmare. Instead, I had hardware failures, corrupted filesystems, and just plain bad luck. So, to cover myself, it was: find . -depth -print | cpio -odB | compress | \ rcmd machine_name "dd of=/dev/rStp0" before attacking. That saved my posterior more times than I care to admit.

I tried every variation of being considerate and nothing worked. Even showing up at 2AM to do maintenance at the local hospital was a problem. So, I went the other direction. I decided that I would set the maintenance schedule and to hell with anyone that dared to interfere. After checking with management, I would send out email and post signs indicating that at 5:00PM, the servers would be down for maintenance. At 5:00PM exactly, I would invoke the sacred incantations: sync; sync; haltsys and wait for the screaming to start. Invariably, someone had files open, or unsaved data. I didn't care. Trust me, it works far better than trying to be considerate.

Ummm.... I think you mean 3.11. There was no 3.10. Next time, check your disksapce with Volinfo and clean up marked for deletion files with the purge command. Going from Novell 3.11 to 3.12 was a not major project but did require having quite a bit of empty disk space. incidentally, I have a (non-paying) customer running 3.12 on a 4GB drive.

Well, if you only did that once, it's probably not a major disaster. In my case, I'm always finding new ways to burn my time. Todays mess is a classic. Virus infected laptop. Customer wants me to save some of the junk in the Documents dumpster. She said it was ok to reformat and start over, so I didn't see any reason to remove the virus. I copy the files to a USB flash drive, and shove the flash drive into my main office machine with the intent of scanning for viruses. I didn't have to scan as autorun.exe conveniently installed the virus on my machine. It took me about two hours to get rid of it (mostly spent scanning). Argh.

Redundancy means cover thy ass. Any way you can. Had my fair share of the Dell PERC2 RAID controller battery failures and complete loss of RAID containers. Dead Fujitsu drives on the second day of service for a Poweredge server. I could go one and one...

Most I remember about Xenix it was an AT&T product I think. Mine is all NT4 server, NT4 Hydra, NT4 Terminal Server with Exchange, Citrix Metaframe, Windows Server 2k, 2003, Novell 3xx, 4.xx. BSD and linux for routers (before the hardware appliances) Cobalt Cube mail servers, managed switches, fiber the whole shebang.

Most of my nets were hybrid Novell/Windows. I sent a message to the Novell clients to inform upon an impending shutdown so people could save their work. Hell I charged by the hour so it didn't matter to me how long I waited for everyone to back out. I could tell who was still in and what files were open from the Novell server. I also had to do backups onto Travan with open files for the corp systems running CNC 24/7. Skipping open files wasn't an option. 21 tapes rotated weekely, one kept off site. I never had an issue with viruses or malware. New virus definitions were automatically deployed from the server running CA.

My bad, 3.11. Yeah I didn't check first. My mistake. I had been thrust into Novell because the Novell guy quit after only two weeks training me. I was learning Terminal Server at the same time. We had one problem Terminal server where this guy didn't put the server into the install mode before installing Exchange server on it. What a f'ing nightmare it was rectifying all the errors. Took Microsoft paid support. After that it never worked right. Memory leaks galore. I eventaully wiped it, Poweredge

LOL...sorry :) I use Win 7 inside Oracle Virtual machine for such things. Have an install of Malwarebytes and Sophos on it. I don't do anything in Windows except to keep it handy for remembering how it works. I do have a netbook with Win 7 on it but hell I hardly use it. Mandriva 2010.2 is my main OS, I love going to pages where they try to upload and run malware like that virus checker crap. :) I feel very safe using linux. My first linux box was a Slackware 3.xx box used without x-windows for a cable modem router in my home. Again before the Linksys appliances were on the market. Had to find experimental drivers for the 3Com 305 10/100 network interfaces so that tells you how long ago that was :)

Well, ok. I'll use your definition. If I have two identical drives, each 90% reliable, how reliable are two of such drives? 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81 = 81% reliable. If I have a RAID array of 4 drives, with the same reliability, it would be: 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 = 66% The data might still be safe or recoverable, but limping along with one drive is not acceptable. Even worse is that identical drives tend to fail identically. The point where I gave up on the RAID idea was when I had 2 out of 4 drives fail within 2 weeks, and there were indications that the other 3 drives (RAID 1+0 with parity 5 drive array) would soon follow. I was lucky was able to replace all the drives before they all failed.

I had previously purchased several identical drives as spares when the RAID array was first installed. The plan was to use them as replacements in order to keep the rotational sync problem to a minimum. The drives just sat on my shelf. When I crammed two of them into the RAID array as replacements, they started showing signs of impending failure. Just what I didn't need was a fundamentally unreliable array of drives.

Argh. The AMI or LSI Logic controllers use a proprietary parity algorithm that is just short of being encrypted. Of course, LSI Logic won't divulge the details and Dell claims it's not a problem. Various companies have reverse engineered the system thus allowing uses to make a backup. You can always tell that there's a problem, if there are companies specializing in recovering RAID data:

Nope. Originally a Microsloth product, which was almost immediately taken over by SCO (Santa Cruz Operations). At one point, it was also sold by IBM. I still have one customer using Xenix 2.3.4 on a 386. Totally reliable for late 1980's character based applications.

You're probably thinking of AT&T Unix SysV and others.

All for one company? Seems like a rather strange mix of server operating systems. Ever consider reducing the number of OS's in order to simplify maintenance?

I mostly charge by the hour, but I also had some service contracts. My problem was that I would usually book several service calls per day. An extra hour at the morning customer, would cut into the time I had allocated for the later customers. I didn't care if it took longer, but only if I could leave at my predicted time. Also, if I left it to the customer to declare that the computer was can't be shut down, it would be more like several hours delay.

I got into Novell when all the local consultants decided the company was a loser after Novell unilaterally tweaked the relationship in their favor. I decided to give it a try, which worked until Novell started insisting on expensive certifications and bizarre financial requirements. I bailed, but managed to keep a few Novell customers. Mid 1990's I think, maybe.

Naw, I don't look good in a toga.

That is a nightmare. I've seen it happen and do everything I can to prevent application proliferation. Every new hire has their own favorite application that just has to be installed immediately. Fortunately, I was dealing mostly with Unix/Xenix boxes, where choices of the major applications were fairly limited. At the time, I would have sold my immoral soul for a VM type system, where I could sequester individual users and their strange applications in their very own private pig pen, and let them wallow in their own bugs.

The one most remembered was a Poweredge controller with RAID 5. The owner shut it down over the winter against advice and without my knowledge. It's a golf course and vacated for 5 month a year. I was unaware of the battery problem in the controller but that didn't matter. Once the configuration is gone in the controller there is no way to restore the lost container. Luckily they did back their data up the week before shutting the server down. I created a new container, installed W2K Server and the point of sale software and SQL server. Some ODBC stuff, their sales and price data restored and they were ready to reenter any changes made after the backup. It was a fairly elaborate system for me. Touch screen terminals and receipt printers for 4 point of sales and two outdoor starter gazebos. A connection to a Windows XP PC running two phone cards for dial in course reservation bookings. So there was quite a bit going on. I re-did the entire system previously running Novell 3.12, TCNS and DOS workstations. Also added a 2 channel 64k ISDN to the network. The fastest they could get at the location.

I knew I read it somewhere in the past: Xenix is a version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive ...

AT&T was the original developer.

No no no no no. Just my experience, and a considerable amount of experimentation.

I had to work around the needs of the network, the current business software, and if that software could be ported over to Windows. I wanted to do away with all the Novell stuff but a lot of people were running their business suites that were not fully ported for Windows yet. I remember one company that tried to switch their Macola suite over to Windows. A rep from the company came with her own server to do the conversion. It failed. Macola makes you sign a release stating they can't be sued for problems with their product. So we gave up on the switch. I got fed up with the CEO and CFO of the company wanting me to try to figure out all these damn ODBC connections so they could fax stuff directly from the CAD department and a long list of other near impossible database crap of similar nature. Some companies charged a couple hundred bucks for each ODBC driver. And they wouldn't send you a sample to see if it would work without paying the full price. I got tired of all the torture, free support, gray hairs and turned that client over to a friend who had some resources I didn't in writing database stuff.

Whatever works. We didn't have contracts. Hell most of these clients didn't even have a budget for IT. So I usually designated the most computer savvy person with the highest worker ranking to do scheduled stuff an proper server reboots when needed.

I never got past 4.xx. A couple non-profit organizations were running it on Compaq Prosignia and Proliant. Had one commercial running two Proliant cluster servers. Once I saw where version 5 was going I bailed.

The receptionist at one printing firm used to bow to me when I walked through the front door. Windows 2K, NT4 servers in the back for the Appletalk storage in CAD to printing. They made custom banners up to 12 feet wide IIRC.

I really got to hate these CFO/CEO that had some computer savvy and wanted stuff to integrate this and that way. I was happy to dream at night about the way it was with one Novell server and diskless workstations booting off the server images. Once windows 98, W2K and XP it was utter chaos.