Interoperate This!
So there's a lot of hoopla this week from Sun about Interoperability. I'm listening to a webcast by Bill Vass (some bigwhig at Sun) about how interoperable Sun is with Microsoft.

While I am listening to this, I wander over to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 homepage and down under Top Stories is this:

Interoperability Webcasts
Join us for a month-long series of webcasts and discussions about cross-platform interoperability. You will find introductory to expert level content across topics in development, architecture, deployment and management, and business value. Register Now.

Go on, click on the Interoperability Webcasts link. I dare ya...

(for the record, at 10:30pm Wednesday night, you got redirected to Microsofts broken link page:

We’re sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry. It is possible you typed the address incorrectly, or the page may no longer exist. You may wish to try another entry or choose from the links below, which we hope will help you find what you’re looking for.

-jason
- posted by Jason @ 10:23 PM 1 comments links to this post   

 
Issues with a W2100z
So on Monday the two new W2100z servers arrived. Since these are Microsoft WHQL certified, i figured that actually installing Windows on this server was a no brainer.

Wrong.

This server comes with a 52x combo drive, and that's it for removable media. One of the neat things about the W2100z is that is has dual onboard SCSI bus. The only hard drive that ships with the server is a SCSI drive, and there is no OS preloaded on the server. (No OS preloaded is not really a problem because I have never actually used the preloaded solaris instance before.)

I got all the goodies out of the boxes, wired it all up (ordered with the spiffy 19inch LCD panel - before you get all excited this is for trade shows) but was disappointed to see it promptly do nothing (more on that later)...

On this "wiring it up" - I plugged power cable into the power supply and the computer just started POSTing. There is no power button on the back side of the system - only one small recessed hard to press button on the front, and for some reason it seemed that mashing that button did nothing.

Later on in the night I stumbed on a BIOS setting called something like "power fail resume action", where you could choose how the system should act when power is restored. There are three choices:

Resume Last State [default]
Leave Off
Power On

Believing this to be the root of my power switch problems, I changed this setting from resume Last State to Leave Off. Well, the system won't power back on now.

All For now.
-jason
- posted by Jason @ 7:09 PM 0 comments links to this post   

 
Sun W2100z Science Fair Project
So another one of my science fair projects that I am working on, which is part of a larger scheme I am cooking, is to trick out a Sun W2100z with Windows 2003 Standard. Lemme tell you about this machine:

Dual Opteron 246 processors (2 x AMD 2.0Ghz chips)
2 GB RAM PC3200 (4x512MB)
Dual SCSI busses (startin' out with 1x73GB SCSI drive)
Dual SATA busses
Dual IDE busses (startin' out with 1x52x CD/DVD combo drive)

I actually have two of these, one I already broke - more on that later. Just wanted to get something out on this project. More to come.
-jason
- posted by Jason @ 7:56 PM 0 comments links to this post   

 
Photosmart 2610
Our old HP DeskJet 760c wasn't printing yellow any more. I tried two different print cartridges and still no luck. I did all the priming and cleaning, and still nothing. So what a perfect excuse for something new.

I was at Best Buy thursday as was intriged with the HP Photosmart 2610, mostly because of the ethernet interface on this unit. This is an AIO (All In One) device that combines Printing with Scaning, Copying, and Faxing.

So there's not a lot of faxing that goes on around here, but every now and then there is an occasional need that the wife has for faxing. It was a little tricky getting the faxing part to work through Vonage (Vonage claim it "just works", but you have to go it at the slowest speed, disable error checking, and use the super duper bandwidth mode), but I got that working.

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get the other computers setup to print to this printer. In fact, only 2 orf the 3 windows boxes is working. The one that is not workign is having problems of unknown orgin - I think I'll have to rebuild that.

I have not tried to get any Solaris to print to it yet - not sure how that is going to work. Stay tuned.

So far so good - I am finally scanning pictures for a highschool friend that has been after me for months to finish this project.

-jason

- posted by Jason @ 2:55 PM 0 comments links to this post   

 
Gmail Enabled!
I finally shamed a friend into hooking me up with a gmail account. It's referral only apparently, an exclusive club you know, not just anyone is invited.

Truthfully this friend had previously invited me months ago but the spam filter at my company Denied Me.

-jason

- posted by Jason @ 10:02 PM 0 comments links to this post