Where I’m @

20080213

!$@%#!&* Dell GX620s
In the summer of 2006, we bought 23 Dell Optiplex GX620s for one of the student labs/classrooms at the office. Under two years later, ten of them have had their power supplies and motherboards replaced. (Well, technically, nine have. One had to have the procedure done twice.) That's a failure rate of nearly 50%. Not so good. We could only find one public record of this kind of significant failure count, but we have spoken with an acquaintance at another higher ed institution who says some of her people have seen an unusually high failure rate with these. We'll be talking with our sales rep about this. Not a comforting thing.

Labels: dell, frustration, troubleshooting

20080205

How To Get the MAC Address for a Nokia N810
We needed to get a colleague’s shiny new Nokia N810 device on the wireless network, and here at Yale you have to register wireless devices. Interestingly, the manual didn’t seem to have any obvious instrux on how to find the MAC. (Note: We did not RTFM cover-to-cover. That's what searching a PDF is for.) However, the first result on Google for “nokia n810 mac address” contained the steps. We reprint them here for brevity, since the original site contains much more info than necessary to solve this specific problem.

• Click the four-blocks icon at the left
• Choose “Settings”
• Choose “Control Panel”
• Choose “About Product”
• Record the “WLAN MAC Address”

Found at http://www.arachnoid.com/linux/nokia/

Labels: handheld, MAC address, networking, open source, wireless

20071204

ISAPI_Rewrite3 Unattended Upgrade/Install
Our primary webserver at the office needs to rewrite URIs, but runs IIS, which puts mod_rewrite right out. Hence we use ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon. The new version looks to work better with some WordPress rewriting needs, so we upgraded from v2 to v3. Unfortunately, the install for ISAPI_Rewrite restarts IIS, so — though our server is not the highest trafficked in the world — we have to do the install at off-hours. Server logs tell us the time closest resembling down time is 0400, an hour at which we are not at work. After a bunch of playing around, we found a command line that works to install silently the app to a nonstandard path (another of our requirements): ISAPI_rewrite3_0031.msi /quiet /log path\to\logfile.log INSTALLDIR="non\standard\install\directory with spaces"

To clean up the upgrade, we also needed to migrate the old httpd.ini files for the root and the individual sites to an httpd.conf file and .htaccess files, respectively. (We presume that Helicon changed the files for better compatibility with Apache, because otherwise it’s just annoying.) Using the Helicon Manager, it was as simple as clicking “Migrate from v2.0”, selecting the existing file from the production server (you aren’t doing this import after install, are you?), reviewing the imported content, and clicking “Apply”.

Make sure to test this on a nonproduction server, to read the logfile afterward, and to look at your event log afterward.

Labels: 3rd party tools, development, iis, installation, server management, webservers, windows

20071112

WordPress Solution
When installing WordPress for a trial blog at our office, we ran into a common problem, but turned out to have an otherwise unmentioned solution. After getting everything installed, we were thrown the error that "Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress."

This was our first time installing PHP 5 (our other installs were long ago and used PHP 4), so apparently we forgot select MySQL and MySQLi to be added at install.

Ran the PHP installer again on Repair, and still got the error message.

The WordPress Codex has many postings about this, but none that succeeded for us.

We realized after many frustrating minutes that the PHP.ini file is not necessarily read on the fly, the way the MySQL config file is these days. We quickly ran iisreset (because our website is not so high-traffic that it can't be reset in early morning) and all was right with the world.

Labels: development, frustration, open source, PHP, troubleshooting

20070711

Wrestling with Selenium
We’re trying to use Selenium IDE in our brand spankin’ new QA phase of development (what a concept!) and it’s a steep curve. The basics are easy enough, and explained perfectly well at OpenQA, Selenium’s maker, or in one of a number of good tutorials. But it took us a while to complete the perfectly reasonable quest for a command reference. That is, we’re running into problem we find with tools from time to time (most often, but not always, with open-source projects), viz., that the information exists to get you going, but it’s terribly distributed, not from authoritative sources, and even in the aggregate not comprehensive. It also becomes more fragmented the more advanced it gets; noobs can get started, but advanced documentation is only for specific troubleshooting. Not that we have time to take on this task, either.

Update: Changed link destination for the command ref, as we found what may be the always-current one, with more poking around.

Labels: browsers, development, frustration, open source, testing, tools