Adventures in Geek

I haven’t had an issue in the past 10 days that would lend itself to a ‘This is a problem – this is how I solved it’ type of post but I thought I would list the different issues I’ve worked:

1.  Set up a Xerox Print/Scan/Fax station for fun and profit!  Sometimes the calls run to a pattern.  I had a week where three different companies had network switch issues and it drove me crazy wondering why they all had Netgear switches and they all died right at the same time.  I got over it and this last week I had three different ‘setup a network printer’ calls for three different companies.

Setting up a Windows network printer is simple enough – it gets more involved when they’re using those Toshiba or Xerox scan/fax/print/copy workstations.  Setting them up as a network printer is fine, patching one of the LAN drops as an analog port [see #2] is also simple enough.  The scan function is more involved because it wants to scan to a network folder location OR do scan-to-email, meaning that it needs a live SMTP server.

In the second instance, they had an SBS server with an open SMTP port on the internal network, no problem to set up scan-to-mail beyond creating an Exchange account.  The first one has hosted Exchange; how do you get port 25 opened on both sides to allow scan-to-mail to take place?  I was thinking of setting up an SMTP relay internal to the LAN but it would still require a trusted connection to the Hosted Exchange service (hours of phone support).  In the end, we went the other route: set up an FTP server inside that stored all scanned docs to a folder that we also shared through Windows Networking.

A couple of notes on that process:  Toshiba has Xerox beat in that they allow for simple Windows File Sharing on scan-to-mail.  The Xerox 7655 I worked with didn’t have this although they had FTP and this was simple enough to create.  But why wouldn’t Xerox cover this with the customer when they purchased the copy center?  “By the way, to use Scan-to-file, you’ll need an FTP server set up."  I keep seeing a recurring trend among vendors to not close the loop for setting things or telling the customer what is involved to successfully set up their product.  I guess this is why I get paid the big bucks but really, shouldn’t it be part of the service?  A to Z?  Alpha and Omega?  Help me out here, guys.

3.  Standards are a thing of beauty – I don’t know why I didn’t think of it ahead of time, but fortunately someone did.  Our usual cabling and telco vendor Talisman Networks has embraced the concept that CAT6 and RJ45 jacks are good for both LAN and telco.  Because of this, we were able to quickly and easily transform a LAN port to an analog telco line – 35 seconds or less.  How does it work?  Simple:

As you can see, an RJ45 connector has 8 wires wired in 1 of 2 configurations [straight-through or crossover].  It’s simply an extension of the smaller RJ11 connector (a simple telephone plug) which uses 2-6 wires.  So if you have an RJ45 port wired to 2-6 telco wires, all you do is run a CAT6 patch cable from that port to another RJ45 port on your patch panel and presto – your LAN port now dials out.  You don’t have to install separate RJ11 jacks in your little LAN biscuit that’s installed at each desk.

Sweet, no?