After spending a few hours trying to convince LPRng that HP LaserJet 5N printers aren’t the spawn of Satan and that Netware print queues are a Good Thing, several things came to light:

1) Intel print servers support LPD-style printing, thereby obviating the need for the Netware queue when printing from any Linux-like environment.

2) HP LaserJet 5N printers are, in fact, the spawn of Satan. At least if you’re going to use print filters through an LPD to get PostScript material into PCL format, they are. I have no idea how it worked before, except possibly a pact between RedHat and the aforementioned Satan.

3) HP JetDirect print servers like, say, those inside of our trio of HP 8×00 printers support LPD-style printing even better than the Intel print servers do. Not only that, but the 8×00 series printers do PostScript natively.

4) I no longer need to run an LPD interface between the Enco network and Netware, since Beast (the gateway box between Enco-land and the office network) can now print directly to the nearby HP 8000.

Frighteningly enough, the old scheme looked a bit like this:

Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> Lancelot’s LPD (because try as I might, I couldn’t get Beast to talk to the Netware queue itself) –> Netware print queue –> Intel print server (because the 5N’s print server sucks elephant ass) –> HP 5N printer.

New scheme:

Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> HP 8000 printer.

I’m a frelling genius. At least, until the next time I’m a frelling idiot…

(Oh, by the way. This is entry #500. Commence fanfare.)

This morning, shortly after 9:00, Duckpond (the server that hosts this site, among others) decided to start sending assloads of spam. I spent a frantic hour looking over logs, checking for security breaches and the like, and generally panicking like a headless chicken. Or duck, if you prefer.

And then I found the culprit. (I’d have found it sooner if I’d read the headers on the spam messages more closely to begin with, of course.) For some reason I can’t even remember anymore, I had a PHP “formmail” script laying around on the server. Someone found it and abused the living shit out of it, mostly to spam AOL addresses. How nice.

I’m going to go turn in my Geek Membership Card now, as I have clearly forfeited any credibility I might once have had.

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Stupid. Ladies and gentlemen, I am the April Fool.