Total Badass
I was reminded of this the other night. I called a friend and co-worker at my previous employer. I asked him how things were at the shop and he indicated that they were going fine, with the exception that the fax server needed to be replaced. That made me smile because I was tasked with building a fax server approximately 8 years ago with no budget whatsoever. I re-used a retired desktop computer (rather than a server), with Windows 98, with a paltry amount of RAM and hard drive space, and a Pentium II Processor. I stripped other retired computers of their dial up modems to use for faxing and filled all of the motherboard slots with them.
I purchased and installed ActiveFax, which I had heard about from a fellow M2M Admin, because it was so much cheaper than M2M’s officially supported product. At one time that “server” was e-mailing and faxing notifications of invoices, sales orders, and other documents to customers automatically. I integrated it into ordering software I wrote and Customer Service could automatically fax questions to customers as well. It handled incoming faxes as well and acted as a secondary fax machine for two departments, directing those faxes to various network printers. ActiveFax never went down. It rarely needed to be upgraded. There were no maintenance fees as lifetime maintenance and upgrades were included. It just simply worked.
Building this server was actually one of the best decisions I made during my time there. This was one of my best MacGyver moments.
I’m tagging three Microsoft MVP’s that I follow on a regular basis Brent Ozar, Tim Mitchell, and Aaron Bertrand to challenge them to share their MacGyver Moments.
I also challenge my readers, both of you, to share yours. So, what are your MacGyver Moments?
Probably more of a Doogie Howser but I have a ten year old box hosting my Blackberry server, Winternals centralized defrag service and our logging software. This gem likes to intermittently down the OS for no obvious rhyme or reason. David if I get out the duct tape may I apply for MacGyver points?
[...] was tagged by David Stein, a.k.a. Made2Mentor [ blog | twitter ], to talk about "MacGyver Moments" in my career – times when I've turned nothing into something. One clearly comes to mind, [...]
[...] MacGyver Moment Meme David Stein (Blog – @Made2Mentor) started a neat new meme: My McGuyver Moment. He talked about a time where he cobbled together a workable solution out of a coat hanger, two [...]
[...] MacGyver Moment David Stein started this current blog meme. He passed the buck on to Brent Ozar, who shared a horrifying tale of his time in the trenches as a [...]
[...] of honor, glory, and red bull, you must rise to meet this challenge, and write a themed blog post. David Stein started this and it continued to Brent Ozar who has called out my name in the darkness, to answer the call to [...]
[...] last time. I’ve also seen several other good MacGyver Moments from Aaron Bertrand (blog), David Stein also known as Made2Mentor ( blog | twitter ), and Denny Cherry also known as MrDenny (blog). [...]
[...] the last time. I've also seen several other good MacGyver Moments from Aaron Bertrand (blog), David Stein also known as Made2Mentor ( blog | twitter ), and Denny Cherry also known as MrDenny (blog). [...]