Hartford contracts with an ASP (Application Service Provider) for its parking ticket management system. The ASP is based in New York. They dropped a DSL line in, with a little VPN box (a Nortel Contivity 1010 — nice box) and I propagate some static routes pointing traffic to the VPN box that is destined to their servers. Thusly, we access their system via an encrypted VPN tunnel over the Internet.

For a three or four months now there has been one last item hanging out from the initial install. The printer at Police that's supposed to work with the system won't take print jobs coming from the ASP's server in New York. I've checked my routers and the config on the Police firewall, the vendor has checked their VPN box and their routers, Police has checked the printer and the workstation that sits next to it — all to no avail.

Finally, after all of this going around and around I said That's it! We're all going to meet at HPD and fix this damn thing once and for all! How's Tuesday at nine?

So, at nine, and in congress duly assembled, the Police IT manager, the engineer from the vendor, one of my network engineers and I put our heads together over this printer. We looked at routing tables, and traceroutes, firewall settings, and printer settings. We did pings and test prints. Everything — and I do mean everything — looked fine.

Finally, I looked at Greg (the vendor engineer) and said you mind if I turn this thing off and back on again?. He said "no" and hit the power button for me. We turned it back on, and I said try it now. whirrr  <print> <print> <print>

All you can really do at a moment like that is laugh.