Where I’m @

20060725

Jane, Stop That Crazy Noise!
One of the drives in a Dell PowerEdge 2850 we oversee failed this morning. We were alerted to this fact by a phone call from our employee who got to the office earlier than we did and heard a loud steady beeping coming from the data room. When we got in, we located the source and began troubleshooting. An hour later, we were handling it all just fine, but the beeping continued. Soon enough, we began to feel like a prisoner of SMERSH undergoing torture, what with the loud constant beeping. Fortunately, we found in the course of troubleshooting that we could, in the Dell OpenManage Array Manager, right-click on the first PERC and choose “Quiet Alarm”. Ahhhh.

posted by Tk at 10:20 • • sealed in amber

20060714

Obtuse Mac Errors
(Not that Windows errors aren’t, but this concerns our friends from Cupertino.) We were trying to connect to a Windows Server 2003 fileshare from a Tiger Mac and were returned without fail error code -50, with no further information. OK, we were told, “an error occurred”, which we count as redundant, seeing as how the lack of connection and error code tells us quite well that an error occurred. With a little searching, we found Apple documentation for this, which was in itself a little obtuse. Nowhere in the text does it say that the share may not exist, which turned out to be the case for us. More to the point, if Apple knows that the problem is likely with the way the fileshare is set up on the Windows machine, why does it not put that info in the error message?

posted by Tk at 11:32 • • sealed in amber