The work-week has just gotten progressively busier with each day. As usual, the typical build-up of tasks before the oncoming three-day holiday weekend. I was surprised by how busier it has gotten, but at the same time I did not think it would be this bad. Better to be busy than bored, though.
Now, for my work-related rant. Yesterday, I had to deal with getting QuickBooks Pro 2006 to work in multi-user mode. The process is really not that difficult, you just install the application to the server and install it to your client machines. Once that is done, you merely put your data file on the server and point your users to it. The process is pretty simple, but apparently that was not to be for me. I was here later than I expected last night working on it, and I worked on it for 2 hours this morning as well.
The problem was I would get an error from QuickBooks when I would attempt to open the company file. It complained about Windows permissions and spit back some cryptic error code to give to Technical Support (-6108,-105). Since I am the proverbial man when it comes to file permissions, I knew that was not the problem in this case. Moreover, the same file opened just as expected when it was stored on the local drive. I hurled some choice “colorful metaphors” at the server and QuickBooks. It finally took a call to Intuit Technical Support to correct the issue.
The solution was completely unexpected, and I must admit it is a rather moronic solution. Here at the office, our users machines process a login script that maps drives to specific shares on our Windows server. Essentially, the login script maps drive letters on a workstation to folders that exist on a hard drive on the server that are shared out to the masses. This is standard practice for most places operating in a client-server environment. Apparently, I was moving and placing the data on a mapped network drive on the server. QuickBooks does not like this, and instead it wants the see the file placed on the local location that corresponds to the location that is mapped for our users. Once I did that, the file opened fine on both the server and on the client machines.
My rant here is why is there a difference between the mapped drive and the local path on the server that corresponds to the mapped location? It is the same damn location. I essentially had to trick the server into thinking it was hosting a local file in order for my network clients to open it properly. WTF?!?!?!?! To me, this is just some type of brain-dead logic on the part of the application that does not see that there is really little difference. As I said this morning when I finally resolved the problem: Fucking QuickBooks!
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