Admissions to various courses in Engineering, Medicine and Pharmacy in Maharashtra State are proceeding in full swing. My college is one of the centers, where you can fill in your option forms, and submit them online. (You can also submit them online from any machine, but then you still would need to come to my college (or any other such center) for verification of your marksheets and stuff. I do not quite understand why the whole process cannot be digitized from the time you fill in details for your SSC board exam, and the same carried over in some universal database… But, government IT systems will be just that, *sigh*. Anyway, I digress!)
Anyway, the story starts on the fine day of today, when I was quite happily enjoying the introductory lecture on Switchgear and Protection when VJ mam barged in with a note in her hand, calling out my name. Turns out, my HoD had called upon my services as the tech guy around, since the poor admission process people were facing a rather strange problem…
Let me highlight the configuration. The admission process takes place in our FE labs (which BTW, they recently renovated, with all shiny Zenith 2.8 GHz P4s (with front panel audio jacks and USB to boot!)), all machines have XPSP2, except some lone 98s… All of them are connected to each other, using a switch, and two HP 1170s are connected to two of these machines, designated as print servers, and all others (around 50 altogether) were to be used to actually fill the forms and generate the print requests.
Now, here’s the trick part, at random, some machines would refuse to connect to the printer. So much so, that they could not even see the printer (on the network, that is)! So, the troubleshooting was to locate the cause of this rather weird phenomenon, and try and find a solution…
I called upon a friend of mine, Amey, a CCNA to help me with the network. Though the network hardly seemed at any fault, since the internet and access to other machines seemed to be working quite fine! But what gives?
After checking the property pages of the printers and windows xp for a dozen times, we realized that the behaviour was truly baffling… No reason in sight. Then it struck me!
I had read about this somewhere, possibly on the eMule forum… XP has a limit to how many concurrent connections that can be made… For XP Pro the limit is 10! No wonder, the other machines would not obtain access! And Bingo! My analysis was proved right… Checked it up on the Microsoft website. It says, this “feature” was introduced to increase the propagation times for worms and viruses… Good gesture, but dear M$, offer me an option to increase the limit. This is stupid!
Spend some more time troubleshooting, trying to get hold of a patch. Found one, for a slightly different problem, but I think it would work too… Installed it on the “print server”, but it wanted a reboot… Now all this was happening on a LIVE machine, when the process was in progress, so the reboot was out the question! So I do not know what was the status in the evening, will check it out tomorrow! Hopefully, problem solved…
Wow, am so happy, I could help! And happier, since I could troubleshoot something just out of the box! Boy, am I capable or what? 
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/. awarded me moderator points! YaaY! Finally! Me going to be an uber geek!!!
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Will be appearing for my first TopCoder SRM (Single Round Match, Level 2) tomorrow. Wish me luck! Will post results! (Though am pretty sure they won’t be exceptional, cause first it uses Linux and GCC, and second, it’s a race against time!) So long, till the next post!