The experiences of an SMB IT technician
Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category.
If you need to the type and serial number of a Lenovo ThinkPad or ThinkCentre, use these two quick WMI commands:
C:\Windows\system32>wmic /node:"HOST" bios get serialnumber
SerialNumber
L3BXXXXX
C:\Windows\system32>wmic /node:"HOST" baseboard get product
Product
646065G
Replace HOST with the hostname of the machine you want to check on. The ” ” are important, so don’t leave them out.
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.
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.
HP’s LaserJet 4250 is a b/w workgroup printer. As such, it is as unspectacular as it can get for a printer.
We’ve primarely used Lexmark err IBM printers before, like the InfoPrint 1532. The first and most important difference between the IBM and the HP printers is the tray numbering - HP usually counts the multipurpose tray as “Tray 1″, while IBM counts the first real tray as “Tray 1″. This is especially important for users which are not accustomed to this. In fact, i still prefer the naming scheme IBM/Lexmark used here, it just so much more intuitive. One of the reasons for moving away from the IBM printers are the slightly higher cost, but also the exorbitant delivery times (a normal IP1532 can take up to a month, while Also usually has all HP printers on stock and can ship overnight).
In a System i environment, it’s important to note that HP offers their own IPDS modules for these printers, though these didn’t work as expected. We usually ship our HP printers with an ExcelliPrint license, which can be used even after we’ve replaced a printer with a newer model, thus lowering costs for our customers and still having a high quality IPDS interface from our System i. I’ve written aboute ExcelliPrint before, especially what needs to be done when using OCR-B with ExcelliPrint and HP printers without a builtin OCR-B font.
In a Windows environment, the HP LaserJet ships with rather well done Windows drivers, which is quite the norm for HP’s business printers, and no-frills printer drivers are even starting to appear for some DeskJet printers. One of the features i like most about the HP windows driver is that it allows you to predefine some paper settings on the server, name them however you want, and have them automatically published to all clients. This gives you the possibility to save your office workers time and reduce errors when you’re using some standard settings to print certain documents.
IBM Exam 000-074 is part of IBM’s Certified Systems Expert certification program. As with the similar HP0-055, the focus was a bit different than your usual Microsoft exams.
When first looking at the specs for this exams, i found the required passing score to be very low: 59%. HP’s exam had a passing score of 71%. As such, i expected a very difficult the exam, but that wasn’t the case.
This exam focused on three points:
I’ve passed this exam with an okay score, but was guessing at almost all the IBM Director and the System x hardware knowledge. The problem here is that neither IBM Director nor 4 socket machines are being used in the small businesses i work for. The fact that i still passed shows that good guessing can give you lots of points, because the answers are sometimes rather obvious.
There was also a good deal of normal Windows Knowledge required, and several very very basic Networking questions, which could probably be answered by your average gamer kid. If you already hold an MCSE/MCSA on Windows Server 2003, you might be able to pass this exam without having touched an IBM server before.
Even though this may sound bad, i though the exam in it’s whole made a lot of sense. Most questions where detailed, and the answers where short an concise. Again, for several questions you had to know what the limitiations of a given IBM hardware platforms are. I still don’t really like this, because i don’t deal with every piece of System x hardware IBM has to offer (even though i’d like to know, that’s currently not the case).
As expected, there were many performance tuning questions which were usually answerable with general IT knowledge. You’ll just need to know which system performance values indicate what kind of performance bottleneck.
I think i have already said enough.
Layer One still has massive power outages, one after the other. The last one wasn’t even two weeks ago. As unprofessional as it can get.
Update: 13.08.2007, 06:41
Just after writing the above post, at 12.08.2007 around ~2210, die power went down again at ~2215. When i first tried to contact the Layer One 24/7 service, i reached just a voicemail box. About an hour later, i was able to contact a technician which was enroute to the housing center, but didn’t know more than that there was total power failure.
At around 00:00, the problem still wasn’t solved, so i decided to go to bed. According to Nagios logs, the systems came back up at around 02:30, but only half of them, the second power circuit was still down.
After waking today at 06:00, i called Layer One 24/7 service again, and told them that our second power circuit was still down. The situation was soon rectified, so as of 06:41, all our machines are back up. The problem appears to be still the same as the one that cased all the other power failures - a broken UPS that has not been replaced since the first incident, despite promises indicating that this would be the case.
Currently, the servers are connected directly to the power line. Assuming the professionality of the rest of this orginization, a bypass was probably not employed, so switching back to UPS power would require a shutdown of all machines.
Right after i got my new iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger, our chief sales was looking for a new mobile phone (mostly because there was no longer a sync software for the Sony P910 under Windows Vista). As i’m fine with any mobile phone as long as it is running Windows Mobile 6, as these offer superior synchronization to Exchange using Exchange ActiveSync. Even Push-Email is supported since WM5+MSFP using Microsoft’s DirectPush.
In the end, the choice fell on the HTC TOUCH. It runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional (aka “PDA Phone Edition”), this means it uses the PDA UI, not the SmartPhone UI.
The packaging provided by HTC was very nice, in a sleek black box that comes with everything you need. A USB cable with the usual mini-USB connector (no idea on how this thing is really called), stereo headphones, a 1GB Mini-SD card and a USB charger cable.
Again, setting up the device was a breeze, it automatically configured the necessary GPRS settings. After downloading our self-signed certificate and installing it, the Phone already synced against the Exchange server. No need to plug it into any computer. (Many WM5 modems back in the days required a variety of registry hacks in order to import new trusted certificates - it’s very good to see that this has changed).
I’ve also installed version of Windows Mobile Device Center on the laptop, in order to sync files and notes (You can’t sync Outlook notes over the air, i’d like to see the design decision behind this one). WMDC works fine and integrates completely into the OS. While the ActiveSync desktop software under Windows XP was mostly troublefree when used with Exchange ActiveSync, the WMDC software works even better.
Back to the device itself. The HTC Touch is often touted as an iPhone competitor, but it’s not. They play in whole different areas. The iPhone is a consumer device - it does not offer Enterprise Messaging features like a Blackberry Connectivity Software or Exchange Active Sync. The HTC Touch is meant for professionals which need the ability to synchronize with an enterprise messaging system over-the-air, including contacts, calender, etc.
The HTC Touch has a 2.8″ 320×240 screen. The resolution is acceptable, but i would’ve preferred 640×480 pixels at the same screen size. (I really liked the 2″ 240×320 screen on my HTC MTeoR). The device is much, much smaller than it appears on photos. It’s also much thinner - in fact, it’s the first Windows Mobile device that doesn’t look like a Windows Mobile device (which can usually be described as “bulky”. As such, i think the HTC Touch is very important for the Windows Mobile marketplace.
The Touch has an alternative shell called TouchFLO - it’s a homescreen replacement with support for a few gestures, a program launcher, and a music player. The TouchFLO functionality is nice to use, but it is not a full Windows Mobile touchscreen conversion. As such, the functionality is very, very limited. There’s a standard pen located in the phone’s corner, like with every other PDA. You’ll need this to use much of the functionality. You can place calls with just the touchscreen alone, and the touchscreen seems to implemented very well. It even works beyond the edges of integrated 320×240 screen, which makes using your finger to point at things on the side much, much easier.
There’s an included ZIP-Software and Adobe Reader LE is preinstalled, and there is not much “vendor crap” as i’ve seen on operator branded HTC devices. As such, i see little reason not to recommend this device - the build is very nice, the screen and other hardware components also work as they should. They only points that could be criticized are the screen resolution (which is “normal PDA” resolution instead of “hires PDA”), and the missing UMTS support which only plays a role when surfing the Web or connecting to the Web with a laptop. For EAS purposes, EDGE is enough.
In my opinion, the HTC TOUCH is a very cool Windows Mobile 6 device, thats shows a lot of the progress needed in this sector. Together with the Motorola Q9h (Review from a co-worker), i would vote these two to be the two best available Windows Mobile 6 devices on the market. The TOUCH is better if you want a full fledged PDA with a touchscreen, while the Q9h is a true Smartphone with a full keyboard.
Layer One had another power outage this night, at around ~03:00.
Again, i have no idea why, and there is no information from Layer One available yet, but we can rest assured that they will state some nonsense again. As things are right now, i can only recommend against choosing Layer One for your colocation needs. They’re obviously unable to ensure even basic things like power delivery, which is a lot worse at Layer One than it is here, at home, without an UPS, directly on the power grid.
Disclaimer: I currently work for an IBM Business Partner.
I’ve written about the IBM x3650 before, and i’m generally very fond of this machine as it’s build quality and features are impressive.
However i’ve heard from several customers that they want the similar Model from HP, the DL380 G5, with the only reasoning being that the machine is going to be less expensive.
I’ve configured two almost-identical servers, and the price difference is clearly there. Please note that the configuration of the two machines is not the same, mostly due to real world restrictions in the Small Business segment when ordering machines. These restrictions are here in Switzerland - they might not exist in your country, and they might have changed in a few months. So take this with a grain of salt.
The configuration for these machines are thought to serve a Small Business with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2.
Configuration:
Total list price: 9500 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1000 CHF
Total: 10500 CHF
Configuration:
Total list price: 7000 CHF
Warranty Upgrade to 7×24: 1450 CHF
Total: 8450 CHF
Okay, so we have a pretty major price difference between those two machines. The HP machine costs 20% less than the IBM machine. These prices don’t apply when you buy them by the truckload, but they do when you buy one or two.
About the IBM System x3650:
About the HP DL380 G5:
About the IBM System x3650:
About the HP DL380 G5:
Make up your own. I’ve tried to be as truthful as possible, and both machines have advantages and disadvantages. Usually the choice is already made if a customer already works with a given brand. Both vendors have pushed for different feature sets and their machines, and this shows quite clearly. The IBM machine is more expensive, and the additional capacity might not have much worth in your company. It really depends on your needs and your budget. Both machines are cool, though.
