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

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