Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Due to health reasons, i won’t be working or blogging for this and the next week.

Of course you’ll want to read interesting content, so i’d recommend these links:

• 4sysops
• Aaron Bartell's Blog
• Bink.nu
• Exchange Team Blog
• Lenovo Blogs
• midrange.com Blog
• MSBLOG
• MSXFAQ.DE
• Performance Team
• ReSQueL
• SBS Doc Team
• Sharepointer
• The Daily WTF
• The Old New Thing
• Windows Server
• Yusuf's Directory

Office is available as a trial version for download, and as a preinstalled trial called Office Ready PC.

Both a trial versions of office, but there is a very, very important difference:

Office Ready preinstallations accept MLK keys.

The downloadable trial version does not accept them.

If you have a new computer and bought an MLK package, you’re out of luck. Consult a local hardware reseller which has an Office Preinstallation Kit (OPK).

IBM has published a few flash presentations of the new HMC GUI. This finally looks like something decent. Now if only the HMC were included into the base system (with the price of that staying the same, of course), even smaller businesses could use such advanced features like a remote accessible console.

This was a typical case of PEBKAC, but i’ve found to solution to be non-obvious enough to be blog worthy.

A customer received a new HP LaserJet Color P4005n about two months ago. Everything worked as expected, and everyone was happy. But when the customer printed some full size booklets, he noticed that the content wasn’t centered correctly, and roughly 7mm off to the left side.

I arrived at the customers site, and used a testing document – sure enough, the center was 7mm off. I couldn’t explain this to myself, so i started with the usual routine of upgrading drivers and printer firmware, which didn’t fix the issue.

I checked all the printer and page size settings, but in the end i was sure that everything was configured correctly. Then i started the printer’s web interface, and the solution became obvious immediately:

Someone has adjusted the x/y tray adjustments (see screenshot to the right) – probably to adjust for some special labels to be printed.

In hinsight, the solution is obvious, very obvious. But i’ve never encountered the symptopms before, so this stumped me for a few minutes.

Windows Vista has been available for consumers since more than half a year – longer for companies and IT professionals.

Are you using Vista on your Desktop yet? No matter what you think of Windows Vista, you should already be using it right now. If you don’t think you’ll ever migrate to Windows Vista, you should start evaluating your alternatives now – and not when mainstream support for Windows XP ends in a few years.

Windows Vista is the next stop in the Microsoft desktop operating system part. I’ll agree that Vista still has some smaller quirks to be sorted out, but the main problem are 3rd party apps made by lazy idiots based upon technology from before 2000. If you’re working in IT, you should start getting used to Windows Vista now, even if you read and heard bad things.

Vista offers many great improvements – none of them are revolutionary, but they definitely make Windows a better platform. These are not the features advertised on TV, or debated in forums – but instead the deployment process which was just awkward under Windows XP and it’s predecessors, and many management improvements.

This is a topic that i’ve spent fighting for the past year. A solution is still not in sight, but i decided to publish all this stuff anyway – so that it might help someone with the same problem to know that they’re not alone.

The problem starts early. If you want to print with color from i5/OS, you’ll need FS45 capable IPDS printers. Some IPDS ROMs support this, and so does ExcelliPrint. Pay attention that not all IPDS ROMs support FS45.

The next step is to create a color overlay. I’ve written about this in the past, involving a cumbersome way through a TIFF printer and tiff2afp. Those of you familiar with overlays know that there’s IBM’s AFP printer driver, but that doesn’t handle colors correctly. About 3/4 years ago, i’ve opened my first PMR about this problem.

This was PMR 33480, involving a bizarre, month long debate with IBM, which first didn’t acknowledge the problem, and later promised a fix in 2Q07.

A few weeks ago, i’ve opened PMR 61439, which was just a request for the fix promised in 2Q07. One of the best excerpts from that PMR is

What is an .eps file? Googling shows
“encapsulated postscript”? When I try to open it with any PC
application I have, it says it cannot process the file. Do they have a
sample image that can be opened with the basic microsoft software that
is installed on an IBM corporate PC?

I found it quite ridiculous that an IBM printing support person didn’t know what EPS is. But even funnier than this was the end of the PMR, with a simple statement:

Unfortunately, there is no estimated date on
when color support can be improved.

Which means “we won’t fix this”. Again, there is a suitable workaround using tiff2afp, which i’ve documented here. That’s only half of the problem.

The second half of the problem is the creation of color PDFs on your i5/OS instance. PDF is a very important format if you’re sending electronic bills, etc. IBM’s InfoPrint Server product (5722-IP1) handles this. Unfortunately, the performance for the generation of a single page color PDF is abysmal – about 5 minutes on a usual customer system, and about 30 second on one of IBM’s high performance testing systems.

I would consider a PDF generation time of about 10 or maybe 15 seconds on a very low end system acceptable – 5 minutes is way out of dimension. Again, i’ve opened a PMR on this topic. This is PMR 61235. Again, it took over a month of forth and back with IBM until they told me again that this won’t be fixed.

Another funny thing in that PMR is that IBM support tried to contact me on the 1st of August – which is a swiss national holiday. Looks like they lack a concept to know when people aren’t working…

The PRTPDF job is spending most of its time in CPU, this
is due to processing. If the amount of processing (work)
can not be reduced then a faster processor may be
required.

IBM’s way to solve this problem is to through a faster CPU at it. This might be reasonable, but my ThinkPad T60 with CutePDF just needs 5 seconds to generate a multipage, color PDF, and cost 2000 CHF – all the while a System i5 with appropriate i5/OS licenses costs 15′000 CHF minimum – but is not capable of generating color PDFs in less than 10 seconds.

Color printing, easy creation of overlays, and fast generation of color PDFs are essential for a business. Currently, i5/OS does not provide this, and IBM refuses to fix these problems.

If anyone knows a solution to one of the problems stated above, i would be very interested.

In a conclusion to yesterdays post about a broken northbridge cooler in a HP DL140 G2, i got a replacement System Board shipped overnight by HP. Mostly because the customer decided that he didn’t need an On-Site carepak from HP.

So i got stuck with a probably refurbished systemboard, and instruction sheets on how to replace them. I’ve also made better pictures of the missing pin, and the whole replacement procedure. Unfortunately due to the digital camera which seems to be over 9000 years old, and the low light situation, the pictures weren’t that much better.

One thing that irked me though is what the HP rep said to me yesterday. He estimated shipping at “one or two weeks”, which is far too long for replacement parts of a still more or less modern server. On the other hand, the parts arrived today with overnight shipping from around the world. It seems that HP does better than their reps say.

Replacing the systemboard in a DL140 G2 is not as bad as one might think it is. While there are several screws to unscrew, and of course the processor replacement itself, i never had a problem during this procedure. Only one thing i wasn’t sure with – HP’s docs stated that i had to empty my entire syringe worth of thermo conductive paste onto the processor. I did that, and the processor temperature seems to be okay now.

I’ve had interesting problems today with a HP DL140 G2. The machine crashed, and it wasn’t possible to bring it back online using the integrated iLO 100. The iLO 100 had no problems in it’s event logs.

I restarted the machine a few times, and the machine brought the message that a critical error was encountered, and the system thus halted – right after the BIOS welcome screen. I tried to enter the BIOS, but failed a few times. The third one worked, and i looked at the event log in the BIOS. There were several error messages regarding voltage, but they were over a year old. I deleted all error messages, rebooted the machine until it halted again, and then entered the BIOS again. This time, there was an error Message regarding ECC Memory being defective.

I turned the machine off, set it on a table, and opened it. The problem was obvious immediately: The Northbridge cooler no longer was attached to the Northbridge. A tiny little metal nook which held the cooler in place was not found immediately – it was later located in the RAM slots.

I’m sure that i am the first and only person who opened this machine in the last few months. The Northbridge cooler obviously broke off by itself, indicating cheap manufacturing as being the problem.

This machine is a year old by now. Warranty expires tomorrow. Luckily we’ve opened a case today, and hope we can get a fix soon. I’m very interested on how this plays out with HP.

If you’re intending to buy a System i 515, there are a few pitfalls IBM has built into the product to lower it’s price a bit.

The model usually advertised comes with 2 70GB disk drives, without any console, 1 GB of RAM, and a 4mm 36/72 GB tapedrive.

Here are the pitfalls:

• i5/OS is very I/O intensive. Two 70GB disks will give your a very crawling system if your datasets don’t fit into RAM. Make that you have at least 4 disks – and use RAID5 if possible. Mirroring only makes sense if you can afford enough disks (8).
• i5/OS also needs enough RAM because of the first point. I would consider 4 GB to be a fair starting point for a standard configuration. You might get away with less if you’re using legacy applications, but remember that all the new System administration stuff is still in Java.
• Remember to buy a Console. The HMC is the best technical solution, but far too expensive. You can got with OpsCon (requires a PC) or with the Thin Console (a special Neoware appliance).
• The low end model only includes 3 months of software maintenance, and does not include CRU (Customer replaceable unit) service. Make sure that you have SWMA as long as you’re using the machine (it’s a support contract and a license upgrade contract). The CRU service is also important if you do not have on-site IT staff.

If you fix all these things, remember that you’ll probably increase your system price by about 50%-75% – but that’s just the way this game works. It exactly the same in the System x world, or even when you’re buying a car – all upgrades add extra cost.

I’ve been using ImgBurn for the past few months to burn CD’s. It works well. It doesn’t have many features. But it does it’s job, isn’t complicated to use and free as in beer.

(Sorry, nothing interesting happened today).