The workday wasn’t too terrible, and in fact I accomplished a number of nifty things. A not-so-nifty chore I wasn’t looking forward to, though, was setting up our Office Manager on a new network arrangement that includes an HP print server (since she now has to share her printer with her new cubemate). Traditionally the job of making HP JetDirect servers talk to Netware fileservers has been the stuff of ulcers.

I didn’t have much choice this time, though, so I went ahead and ran the installer off of the CD-ROM, figuring that in the worst case scenario I’d at least be able to find out what IP address the print server had taken, even if no other part of the install worked as advertised.

Not only did it work — the first time — but it did so with almost no required input from Yours Truly. I’m not kidding. The only thing I changed was the print queue name (to something slightly less cryptic, given the way XP names network printers… argh). The test page printed. Installing the new print queue on the end-user computer was also flawlessly smooth.

So, uh, who let the flying pigs out? ‘Cause this is freaky, man.