A happy Friday to y'all. Bowled a 199 scratch last night, with an average of 128. Really happy about that. But that one stinking pin. Argh!
Anyway. We have this absolutely Jurassic-era phone system, an NEC Electra Professional Level II. Yeah, sounds fancy, but its probably nearly as old as me. Anyway. This thing has a voicemail card that is essentially its own little entity. ElectraMail. (any NEC techs out there get a kick out of Amy Ronk?) Anyway. The hard disk is taking a dump. I sourced a Transcend 8gb PATA SLC SSD to replace it. The thing runs DOS 6.22. Ought to be simple. Well, the system doesn't boot with that drive installed. I am starting to recall the old days, before LBA, where the BIOS had a fixed table of drive types. Considering this dinosaur of a voicemail card only had a 1.2gb drive in it, I am guessing it is not sensing the new drive size; i.e., its somehow locked to some fixed parameter. Here's the kicker. This bastard of a card communicates solely over a db9 serial console. It appears to be 9600/8/n/1. There's a ton of noise though. This handy serial terminal program called Realterm (a sourceforge project) is indicating UART framing errors all across the board. This is a regular Radio Hack serial cable with a null model adapter. I can sorta see the text of the Phoenix Bios and "640k RAM OK" messages through all the noise, so I'm pretty sure the baud rate is correct. Does this sound like the VM card has just pretty much bit the dust? It has been a good 4 years since I installed this thing, perhaps the serial interface on the card went tits-up? Phillip Partipilo Parametric Solutions Inc. Jupiter, Florida (561) 747-6107 THIS ELECTRONIC MESSAGE AND ANY ATTACHMENTS ARE CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY PROPERTY OF THE SENDER. THE INFORMATION IS INTENDED FOR USE BY THE ADDRESSEE ONLY. ANY OTHER INTERCEPTION, COPYING, ACCESSING, OR DISCLOSURE OF THIS MESSAGE IS PROHIBITED. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS MESSAGE IN ERROR, PLEASE IMMEDIATELY NOTIFY THE SENDER AND DELETE THIS MAIL AND ALL ATTACHMENTS. DO NOT FORWARD THIS MESSAGE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE SENDER. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
