I knew I was gonna spend SOME time on-site today but not an entire day. I ended up abusing sudo so windows users could easily switch between the GPRS connection and the LAN connection by shelling to the firewall with a specific account.
A printer problem took at least a year of my life. Apparently, some older thermal printers have both serial and parallel interfaces and selecting the interface is done by sliding a dip switch (which is hidden quite good). This setting is undocumented and the helpdesk guy had me run through the default scenario, had me install some new drivers and even had me describe how the centronics cable looked like (since he assumed I had no clue what a centronics cable looked like). His conclusion (after 15 minutes) was : That printer is set to serial and it shouldn't. I think the mainbord is broken. Can you run a diagnostics? After running through all the diagnostics results with him, I noticed that the dip switch setting was defined as RS232C. He apparently had no idea there was even a dip switch on there. The last 5 minutes of the conversation was basically a monologue of me running through the setting and giving feedback on the results.
I hope my lost year is now for ever mentioned in his knowledge base under Why a printer won't print
