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>FILTER POSTS BY LENGTH WELCOME TO TFTS! MODERATION INFO COPYRIGHT POLICY SPAM FILTER ALERT SISTER SUBREDDITS TALE SUBREDDITS THE BEST OF TFTS TFTS ESSENTIAL LINKS. I work in K-12 IT for a school district in the midwest US with about 4,000 students. Our high school was rebuilt in a phased project that lasted from 2006-2009. Our tale today comes to us courtesy of the bells/intercom system in this building, which, for cost-cutting reasons, was transferred over from the original building instead of being purchased new with the reconstruction (a decision outside of my control). Cast: $me - District's IT manager. Department of 3 (Me, Assistant IT Mgr, and a tech) responsible for the entire district (2,000 proper computers, 2,500 Chromebooks, 500 iPads, assorted printers, network, WiFi, projectors, etc).

$Principal - High School principal $FOC - Freakin' Old Contractor - runs a local AudioVisual/Integration business. Nice guy, his company has somehow come to be in the position of providing support for our intercom system. Has also done a few Audio/Visual projects in the building. Aging gentleman, seems to be having Parkinsons-like symptoms, usually ends up spending most of his time on-site telling me how things have changed in the 30+ years he's been in the business and telling me how we need to just replace the bell/intercom system (which his company just happens to sell, but still - he's right, it needs to be put out to pasture). I suspect he's got another year or two before he decides to hand his business over to someone else. Our $Principal had a hands-on relationship with the bell system in his building (which, incidentally, is where my office and datacenter are located, despite my responsibility being for the entire district).

He would come in and set the schedules, tweak settings, and basically sort of made it his own thing. We've had problems with the system since the day it was installed in the old building a couple of years before the reconstruction, and things didn't magically fix themselves when it was transferred to the new building.

Thankfully, this was one of the few areas where I really wasn't expected to provide any support or have any involvement, so the fact that the system sucked wasn't my problem, and I was totally okay with that. The $principal had a laptop that was supposed to be dedicated to the building's security cameras, but which also happened to have the software on it to connect to the bell system to let $principal do his tweaking. This laptop royally sucked at life - the security camera vendors provided it without consulting with me about its specs or anything, and it was a crummy consumer-grade el-cheapo laptop that was underpowered for its job from the day it was taken out of the box. It was originally running Windows 7 (Home edition! I mean, really.) and halfway through last school year I decided to see if it could handle Windows 10 as a last-ditch effort to make it better. I maxed out its RAM, and surprisingly enough, it was actually a more responsive box with Windows 10 than it had been with Windows 7. Spss 19 Keygen Download. I did a wipe-and-install, but before I wiped the disk, I saw the software needed for the bell system, and made an honest attempt to copy it over.

I didn't have any experience with it, though, and so I had no particularly good way of determining if my transfer had worked. I figured, if it didn't work, I would be told, and we'd re-install from wherever it had come from in the first place - no biggie. Even though W10 was better than W7 on this box, it was still an awful end-user experience, so this year, about 7 years after it originally came on-site, I decided to put it out of its misery. I got a nice new laptop prepped for the principal. Fast forward a few months, and $principal wants $FOC to make another attempt at fixing some latent issues hanging around in the bell system.

This is apparently the first time he's tried to connect to the system since before I wiped his original laptop from Windows 7 up to Windows 10, and certainly the first time with his new security camera laptop. This is where our tale begins. $Principal: $Me, I've asked $FOC to work on the bells, but my new security camera laptop doesn't have the software. $Me: 'Sure, let's see what's up.' Hmm.apparently forgot to re-transfer the already-transferred-once software over. Fortunately, I happen to have the original laptop sitting in a pile of waiting-to-be-recycled hardware, so let's pull it out.

Launches software Darn.basically immediate crash whining about missing DLL files. Googling the names of the missing DLL files reveals that the original software was written in Visual Basic 4, and compiled as a 16-bit project. Further research reveals that its original system requirements talk about how you can install it on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows 98. Running in that new-fangled Windows NT 4 is 'Not supported.' Our intercom/bell system was manufactured by a large company, and their PA/bell division had apparently been bought and sold a few times over, and the system is old enough that no one wants to acknowledge its existence or support it. There's very little mention of the system on the internet, and the software needed to manage it simply isn't available.

There isn't a supported, sanctioned copy out there anywhere. The original bell system vendor (a small local company who was heavily involved in the high school's reconstruction) apparently installed the software on $principal's security camera laptop years ago, and they've fallen off the face of the planet in the intervening years, so we can't contact them to get a copy. I had assumed our department installed it, and as such, assumed we'd have its installer in our repository, but that ended up not being the case. This could potentially be very bad.

Even though I don't support the bell system, the fact that we no longer have a functioning copy of its management software is my fault, so I'm determined to fix it. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and start scouring the 'Net. There's a forum where other sysadmins have lamented the software's disappearance, and one responder has offered to send copies out to people, but those responses are over a year old in some cases. Still, I give it a shot and put in a 'Me, too' response. I figure, on the off-chance that I get a response, I'll treat the copy I get from that person as a last-resort (after all, installing software you get from random-person-on-the-internet isn't exactly a Best Practice).

Airport Firefighter Simulator Download Crack Idm. Other than that, I come up empty-handed. I find a handful of the old, 16-bit DLL files this software complains about missing, but I'm still not able to get the software back to a fully-functioning condition. I get desperate and search my email to see if I happened to have been included on any correspondence with the original vendor years ago about this software, and lo-and-behold, find an email from $principal with an attachment containing an installer for the software!

Except.the email is from 2009. We transitioned from a locally-hosted, Dovecot-based mail system to Google Apps for Education about 4 years ago. While the email that $principal sent me made the leap from the old system to the new, the attachment did not - it's a 0-byte file. You know those scenes in the movies where the hero jumps a chasm and gets about 90% of the way across the gap and then falls?

That face he makes just before gravity takes hold was the same one I made when the attachment failed to download. Fortunately, I'm a digital pack-rat, and we did a Physical-to-Virtual migration of our old mail server after we decommissioned it. I fire up the old mail server VM, and check to make sure all the files it expected to be there were present. I wouldn't be able to connect using a standard mail client, since none of the DNS names were valid anymore, the VM wouldn't be getting the IPs it expected to get, and we had changed directory servers, so the mail server had no idea who anyone was anymore, but that was okay. I have enough Dovecot experience to know that it stores client mail files as plaintext. The email is there somewhere, I just have to find it. I look through my current mailboxes to find one whose name was likely to be unique to my mail hierarchy, and which would have existed back in 2009.

Run a quick find command to figure out the path to my mail store on the original mail server. Then grep the mailbox to find the original copy of the email that $principal sent me. Copy-paste the Base-64 text containing the attachment to a new file, and decode that into my prize: A 3.8 MB.zip file. Bring that over to the original laptop, and.it fails to install. It installed a lot of the missing.DLL files before it died. I'm able to combine those.DLL files with the ones I found on the internet and am able to get the software to launch and not complain about missing any files. I had honestly expected to have to set up a VM running XP or Win 7 to get the software to work (being 16-bit VB4 code, after all), but surprisingly enough, it works fine on the original laptop.

I'm sure that's because I stuck with 32-bit Windows 10 on it. I have no doubt at all that this software will never run on $principal's new 64-bit laptop, but oh well.

$FOC was able to get his work done, and after hearing my tale, said that I had saved the district a LOT of money by getting this software back into operation, since new intercom systems run into 5-figures pretty easily. I smile, and keep to myself that I had already basically told $principal that he needs to be talking to our CFO about replacing the intercom system with something that we can actually support with modern tools. I'm sure $FOC will be getting a call from him soon to discuss possibilities. Merry Christmas, old man.

Oh, and about half an hour after I get the software working, I get a reply from the forum with a link to a 3.8 MB.zip file.