Failure is the Key to Success

I was looking on the VirginMedia website to find the cost of adding Caller ID to my telephone line and noticed that the prices they were quoting for 10MB broadband were £12.50, half the price I was paying.

So I rang them up and renegotiated my package. I have upgraded my broadband to a 20MB connection, removed the sports channels, added Caller ID and am still £15 a month better off.

I had to enter into a new 12 month contract with VirginMedia, that’s not a problem, I’ve been with them (and NTL before them) for over 10 years. The moral of this story is not to assume that you are on the best deal available, ring up and let them work out the best package for you.

I thought I’d check out my connection. The image above is my 10MB connection just after I got off the phone. It took overnight for the Caller ID to be added and a day and a half for the broadband and TV changes. Below is my new 20MB connection.

Quite a way off of the doubling I was expecting, but maybe Saturday’s a bad day to test.

Tags:broadband,virginmedia

If you’re not an IT person supporting printers using HP Web JetAdmin software, tune out now.

What, you’re still reading. I am surprised!

OK, here is some background. HP Web JetAdmin is software that monitors network attached printers and provides alerts when certain conditions are met. For example, if the toner is low or there is a paper jam, it can alert you, allowing you to be proactive with support. It means that you can purchase toners when alerted rather than holding a large stock or being caught on the hop when all the colour printers are out and no-one has mentioned it until 5 minutes before a critical print job.

Anyway, we had been using this software for some years at work without any problems. You would just get the alert email with a summary of the issue and a link allowing you to open the admin interface in a web browser. Recently, we had some major network changes which resulted in the IP addresses being changed for all our network devices (including computers and printers). After the changes, and rediscovering the new printers (some of their details changed as well), the Web JetAdmin software continued to work as before. Unfortunately, this also included the link to open the admin interface. It was still using the old IP address which was no longer valid.

After ‘googling’ for the solution without luck, I tried several approaches, some of which got me into a bit of a mess with the database. In the end I got the software re-installed, only to find it was still hooked into the old database and the old information.

Continue reading » Changing the IP address of a HP Web JetAdmin installation

Tags:changing ip address,web jetadmin

Over Christmas, the main hard disc on our 5.5 year old Dell mini tower failed, causing us to replace the computer with a new one. We could have replaced the disc, but we had had other components in it fail in the past year, so its time was up. We didn’t really loose any data, as the majority was already stored on our server and backed up regularly. What was more of a problem was the assortment of programs that had been installed and configured over the years. The thought of having to re-install and reconfigure these wasn’t something I was looking forward to, especially if I had to change the operating system to Windows Vista, from Windows XP. Some of the programs would need upgrading to run on Vista and the cost would be prohibitive.

Dell do a range of computers for Small Business, called Vostro which are very well specified and which also offered the option to ‘downgrade’ from Vista to XP for £10. This seemed a very good solution to me. We specified a Vostro 220 mini tower system with a dual output graphics card to match the functionality we already had. This also became the point at which we changed from a pair of 17″ CRT monitors to a pair of 19″ widescreen TFT monitors. The thought was to re-arrange our desk to minimise the items on it. To accomplish this we bought a Belkin OmniView Pro2 KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch which would allow us to run both the new computer and Jo’s laptop sharing one of the screens and the other screen only attached to the new system.

When the system arrived, I was in for a surprise with the dual outputs on the graphics card. I was expecting a pair of DVI (white digital connector on the left) outputs. I should have checked the specifications of the ATI Radeon HD 3650 card that Dell provided more carefully. It had one DVI output (which I promptly had to convert back to VGA to attach to the KVM switch) and a Display Port and HDMI output. I had to get a HDMI to DVI cable to attach the second monitor.
Continue reading » Enabling RAID 1 on a Dell Vostro 220

Tags:intel matrix storage console,raid,raid 1,vostro 220

I signed up with Skype a few months ago to give me another VoIP telephony option. Skype to Skype calls are free, so it seemed worth setting up.

I originally got myself a Bluetooth headset. Initially, I had problems connecting the headset to the Bluetooth on my laptop. I upgraded the Bluetooth stack to the latest Toshiba stack and then was able to successfully connect the headset to my laptop and configure Skype to use it. However, shortly afterwards, the headset locked up completely and I was unable to use it.

Continue reading » Kensington VoIP handset

Tags:kensington Vo200,skype,voip

The Netgear FVS124G router has settings to allow it to pick up the time from NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers.

I initally set this to my local NTP server with a backup on an online one. However, there is no way to manually set the time initially. When you power on the router the date is set to 1st January 2005. The problem with this is that using NTP will only correct a small time difference; 3.5 years is a big large to correct.

I had almost given up on resolving it when I thought to try connecting using telnet to the router.
The user name and password for the telnet session are the default admin credentials (not the ones I had changed for the web interface). Once connected, press Ctrl C, then type Cli (Capital C is important). This gets you to a unix type shell. Then cd config cd sntpc show This will confirm that the time is sychronised and gets around the large time differnece. Then type exit and logout.

The bonus of fixing the time is the firewall logging now works properly.

Tags:netgear fvs124G,ntp netgear

Tim at The Inflatable Soapbox blind sided me this with this post and tag on Tuesday night.

I wasn’t able to reply on Tuesday as I was replacing a failing hard disc and reinstalling Windows XP on a laptop for a colleague at work. I’d forgotten how long it takes from plain XP, through Service Pack 2 and then downloading and installing the remaining 91 security patches. Still, after all that I was able to install Avast as a free Anti-Virus program and Open Office as a free office suite (much better than MS Works that was previously on the system).

On Wednesday at work, I got called to look at a printer with a paper jam. Usually a simple fix, in the worse case maybe a pair of tweezers to remove the last bit of torn paper. The printer was an old, but very serviceable LaserJet 4000, not very heavy use, so plenty of life left in it. Of course, no maintenance on it, its not worth it for a printer that’s getting on for 9-10 years, so if I didn’t fix it, we would replace it…it would be cheaper than getting it fixed. After 10 minutes at the printer location pulling scraps of paper out of it, I took it back to my desk. I ended up unscrewing just about every bit that would come off, before I could finally get the tweezers to the last bits of crinkled paper and pull it out. All in all, I removed a piece of paper about the size of my hand, but it was finally working again. Just time to get it back on the shop-floor and get the toner off my hands before going home.

Continue reading » Tuesday Tech Troubles and Triumphs