Just came back from Las Vegas, where I installed my 3rd pool service billing / routing product. I planned for it to take a whole day, even though I didn't think it would take that long. Turns out it took that long and then some -- I missed my return flight and had to come back two hours later. Things always seem to talk longer than I thought. Especially computer things.
Here are some things I learned:
They had DSL through Sprint, but it was only connected to one computer on their office LAN. The LAN was just an old hub, with static IP's assigned on each of the 3 computers. They had a brand-new LinkSys wireless router in an unopened box. Cool! Just hook up the router so all nodes on the LAN can get my software via ClickOnce. Right? Well, right -- after banging my head against the wall for an hour and a half. The install “wizard” for the LinkSys router tries to set things up for internet access based on how the internet was accessed before the LinkSys router was there. LinkSys failed to notice that the computer was using 192.168.1.1 to talk to the Sprint 645 DSL modem. LinkSys uses that for it's own admin address. So LinkSys and Sprint were bumping into each other. I didn't know the cause of the problem at first -- all I could see was that internet access worked fine on the stand-alone computer but not through the router. Sprint / Earthlink support didn't have a clue about how to help. That's Ok I guess -- Sprint shouldn't have to be supporting 3rd party routers. My only complaint with Sprint was their danged touch-tone support. You know, the one where the friendly recorded voice says “Press 1 if you are an idiot, press 2 if you are also an idiot, and shh--we won't tell you this but if you press 0 enough times you just may get to talk to a real person if you are willing to hold for 5 minutes, have your line dropped, then go through the whole process again and hold for 11 minutes”. While on hold the voice comes on every once in a while and says stuff like “Did you know that if you plug in your unit it just may work?”, and “Did you know that we have a top rating from J.D. Powers and Associates for our excellent customer support? (and did you know that that plus 50 cents will buy you a can of soda?)”. Anyway, the fix is simple: Change the router's admin IP address to 192.168.2.1. Thanks Google.
.Net's ClickOnce is great but getting the prerequisite stuff installed (.Net 2.0 runtime and MDAC 2.8) can be a pain in the butt. Those are supposed to download and install automatically. The MDAC kept giving a non-descript error. This happened on all three computers. I ended up downloading the .Net 2.0 run time and the MDAC off of the Microsoft.com site and running them separately. Then ClickOnce decided the prerequisites were already there and could proceed. In the process of all this I got to learn all about how Microsoft is now making you get past their “check for genuine Windows” test before you can download something. By genuine they really mean a legitimate copy of Windows. One of the computers there did not pass the test. It was really legitimate from a certain point of view. Long story. Anyways I had to download from one of the other computers.
As soon as the other computers on the LAN noticed that they had internet access, they begain busily downloading Windows updates. That's nice -- I think the updates are worthwhile. Except that they hogged a lot of bandwidth while I was trying to get my own stuff downloaded and installed. Yes I want some cheese with that whine.
I had to mess around with getting one of the computers to access the SQL Server (MSDE) database. Turns out it was a couple of over-eager firewalls. It took some head-scratching and time-wasting to figure out what was going on and then convince Norton that it was okay to use port 443 and turn the Microsoft firewall service off. It seems that in the effort to curb internet attacks everyone is doing their own thing. This computer had three firewalls in place including the one in the LinkSys router. That's a bit much.
I shot my own foot and missed a step in the conversion process. The result was I converted their August data (that was already on my computer) instead of their data from today. It took a while to figure out why stuff was out of balance and missing. Doh!
In the end things turned out well. Que spent a lot of time showing their bookkeeper how to use the system. They should be fine. Maybe this stuff I learned will help with the next few installs.