'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Today's Windows 7 incompatibility is that Microsoft Office Document Imaging 2003 can no longer see my scanner (an HP psc 1215 all-in-one box). Apparently, and I kid you not, the reason is because msvcp71.dll is missing from C:\Windows\SysWOW64. No, I don't know why this is the case or why MODI doesn't just crash when faced with a missing DLL.

Actually getting hold of this file is quite hard. It's the C++ (not C) runtime library from Visual C++ 2003 and was never released as a separate download because developers were supposed to install a local copy with their program. The internets suggest that you can get it by installing the full .NET 1.1 SDK, but if (like me) you've still got a Windows XP install kicking around then there's a much easier solution - copy the file from the XP's \WINDOWS\system32 folder and MODI will magically once again be able to scan stuff.

Today's discovery is that Linux gets rather offended when the SAN containing / vanishes.

Interestingly, one of the Linux variants involved was much less offended, and "worked" as long as you didn't try to actually touch the disc. Running stuff like "cat" and "ls" even continued to work, presumably because I'd already run them recently and so they were cached. The other linux variant, however, was far more offended and limited me to just bash. Specifically, those portions of bash that were currently loaded into memory. And while the first remounted everything read-only when the SAN came back, the second refused to believe the reappearance of the SAN and wouldn't even let me log in at a real console. For added fun, Ctrl+Alt+Del had no effect because, rather than sending a command to the kernel as in Windows, under Linux merely causes /bin/shutdown to be run.

To be fair I've no idea how Windows would hold up in a similar situation, although I did once uninstall the IDE controller drivers for the C: drive, and while that drive did vanish from the system nothing spectacular happened as a result. Even Internet Explorer continued to work, although stylesheets stopped being applied, and I could even do a controlled shutdown without anything being able to write to C:. Possibly enough of the driver remained to let the kernel speak to the disk, even if it wouldn't admit so.