My new whip.
As a technology professional, I typically have most of the equipment I need provided for me by my employeer. My laptop for the last four years has been a trusty ThinkPad T400. Upgraded over time to its final configuration of a 256GB SSD (FDE) and 8GB of ram. The T400 has been my trusty whip through power outages and daily VMware Workstation labs – it carried the brand name well. Lenovo support and quality is still top notch.
With that said, my family has grown to a few Macs and I’ve grown to love and envy my wife’s MacBook Pro that I got her for Christmas. During a weekend trip to Chicago for our 15th anniversary, we stopped at the Apple store to get her MBP a hard case – and I was oogling the laptops there. She had finally had enough and convinced me to order a 15″ MBP, no it wasn’t that difficult. I wish the Apple store had stocked the high resolution screens or I would have walked home with one. I was a little disappointed at the insane charges Apple tacks on for memory, but a quick search on NewEgg resolved that issue.
- i7 2.2Ghz Quad Core
- 15″ 1680-by-1050 Glossy High Resolution Screen
- 750GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
- 16GB (2 x 8GB DDR3) Mushkin RAM
- Zagg invisibleShield skin
I scored a 2nd power brick at BestBuy for $35 (open box) and a DVI adapter.
At work I work mostly in the boot camp partition that I run Windows 7 64bit natively. However, I love using VMware Fusion to run Win 7 from bootcamp when I’m in OS X. It’s a great way to keep all my options on the table. I dare say, even if I couldn’t run OS X on this laptop – the build quality and features like the backlit screen and magsafe power connection – it more than a value for the laptop cost.
Reinstalling HP’s Network Configuration Utility
When you launch the HP Network Configuration Utility from the control panel or the system tray and get this error:
An error occurred due to invalid data in the XML file used by this application. The XML file has been corrupted and should be reinstalled from the installation media.
You have no obvious way to resolve it. The recommendations are to disolve the team or reinstall the NCU. The trick is you need the NCU to disolve the team and the NCU doesn’t appear in the Add Remove Programs!
Attention: Before you go banging through these steps to rip out and replace your network connections, please read the steps first. Enjoy not having to learn from your own mistakes because you will have learned from mine!
I had software installed on my server that was licensed according to the MAC address of the Team – and it stayed the same. Your milage may vary so be sure you don’t nuke the team before you know exactly what your software is going to do if the MAC changes.
- Document your NIC team settings (including IP, Subnet Mask, Gateway, DNS servers, and all of the other customized fields) so you can enter them back in again later.
- Download a recent version of the NCU from HP’s website specific to your server’s operating system and place it on the desktop of your server for easy access.
- Connect to your server from iLO or a console – RDP will be useless after you nuke your network connections.
- Navigate to the properties page of one of the physical NICs on your server (see the screenshot I provided).
- Click on Properties
- Click in the “This connection uses the following items:” area on “HP Network Configuration Utility”
- After you’ve confirmed that you’ve done steps 1 and 2 – Click Uninstall
- Confirm all of the confirmation screens and reboot when it tells you.
- After the reboot, run the NCU installer.
- After a successful install of the NCU – launch it.
- Configure your network with a new team using the information you copied down in step 1!
Enjoy your new fully functional NCU. If you need further assistance, HP Support will be your best resource, check out their new support site: www.hp.com/go/hpsc
Apple Airport Extreme 3% Packet Loss
I’m posting this quick note to bring light to a common thread I’m seeing with Apple’s Airport Extreme base stations. My ThinkPad T400 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Express Adapter III has a consistent 3% packet loss while communicating using 802.11G wireless.
I’ve tested from other devices in my house (iPhone, HP laptop with 802.11a/b/g/n, and a MacBook with 802.11n) and have not seen any packet loss. It goes without saying I have full strength signal with a LoS connection to the base station. I’ve checked and scanned the other wifi users in my neighborhood and modified my channel settings to occupy the least occupied frequencies.
This problem is consistent with this base station and I think it boils down to the specific way WPA (1 & 2) are handled between my wireless card and drivers and the Airport base station’s software.
Others on the Apple forum have described the root cause could be local interference… but I’m not going to give up and run Ethernet to everything.
I have no answer or fix yet, but if you have feedback or suggestions please add to the conversation on Apple’s forums here, or make a comment on this blog post.
-update 9-6-2011
I’ve given up on Apple supporting this issue. I’ve replaced the Airport with a Linksys E4300 access point. Not a problem to be had.
-update 4-5-2012
With the addition of two more MacBooks to my house, I’ve decided to revive the APE and give it a go to at least offer file and printer sharing for our Macs. I installed it in the entertainment center so that the TV, Xbox, and Sat box could also be wired to the Gig E switch and get off my wireless. So far it appears that the Airport is working flawlessly with MacBooks and our wireless TVs that stream Netflix.
A recent firmware update may have helped, but I couldn’t test with the T400 – it’s been retired.
HP Touchpad Fire Sale Burns HP
If were under a technology news rock yesterday you may have missed the news that HP decided it was no longer going to be competing with Apple in the phone or tablet business. The HP tablet prices dropped from $600 and $700 to $100 and $150 Saturday early morning.
A price drop this significant causes some big news. Websites like slickdeals.com picked up on it almost instantly and spread the word far and wide. Leading to a run on web retailers’ websites like bestbuy, officemax, walmart, and others. I even went out to stores on Saturday morning to see the effects and maybe a chance at scoring one, but my luck was poor. Not a poor as the guy working the phones at Staples… That guy was getting nonstop calls and angry walk-ins. I even let a disgruntled customer waiting in the computer isle in on the story and that the kid in the comouter department got sucker punched by HP last night… And on one of the busiest back-to-school shopping days around here… Dickish move, HP. You could have waited a few weeks.
But that’s not the worst of it. HP’s own web store couldn’t handle the traffic. Actually, it utterly crumbled under the load. The entire site was lethargic, more than normal, and even before getting to the actual product page you could tell it was getting hammered. The store was unresponsive and took three minutes to process my intent to purchase. After all that, I ended up with a VB Script error about running out of memory. Very classy.
Let me give you a little side story. HP is betting big in their cloud services, managed services, and high performance data centers. They’re looking to spin off or dump their consumer products like tablets and PCs because they aren’t profitable. They want to sell you servers (good products), network gear (crap), and software (hit or miss) to make it all work. They want you to come to them when you have problems with your network, websites, and business.
And they showed how completely unprepared they were for a simple spike in traffic that equalled, I’m estimating, the traffic any major retailer site gets on black Friday.
So here we are… with everything clearly in perspective. HP is going to take a beating from consumers who have stood by them and defended their consumer products, CTO and CIOs are going to question their professional services and data center designs, and me… well, I just wish Michael Dell would shut the fuck up about it all. His company isn’t doing all that hot in this market either and he’s not doing much to fix it.
It’s a shame really, this is not the company Hewlett and Packard worked their lives to make. The history of the company was one of greatness – a Google of the last generation. If you get a chance to read “The HP Way” give it a read. You’ll see this isn’t HP anymore.
USB Concentrators And The Software That Sells Them
Recently I’ve been targeting some old servers for virtualization. Getting rid of these old, slow, power sucking, rack hogging servers should be in my job description… worded just like that.
Only thing keeping these dinosaurs around is software that the developers have decided was so unique and expensive that they require USB dongles to prevent us from posting their software on the internwebs for all to download and install.
Software like, CNC machining and CAD drafting licensing servers. No only do these license servers require a stupid USB dongle – they also call home to check in. Redundancy? You bet. Do they care? Not that I can determine. License servers are nice and very handy in an educational environment where the software can be installed in many rooms – but only scheduled to be used in one room. The software on the desktops check out a license when launched and won’t run if there are no more left.
So when I want to virtualize a server like this – I can’t because virtual servers don’t have USB ports. No USB port, no USB dongle to authorize the license server. No license server, no desktop software will run.
Luckily there is a fix – USB Concentrators. A USB concentrator is simply a box with USB ports on one side, a network port on the other, and some fancy software in between and on the virtual machine itself. With a bit of software and a pinch of luck, your VM will have a true, i’m touching reality, USB port.
We have a few of these damn USB dongles for various software, so I was able to justify the 14 port Digi AnywhereUSB concentrator. Our EDU price weighed in at about $1,400. Yep, a C-note per port – thank you software DRM. Luckily they now are routable – so one concentrator can support servers in multiple locations. They make smaller ones, but the cost per port is higher and we’d need two of them – which brought us within a few hundred bucks of going for the 14 port.
One of our license servers, GibbsCam, decided it wasn’t going to work with our Digi AnywhereUSB ports. After a few reboots and reinstalls, Windows actually kicked off a “Problem Report and Solutions” report that explained that a service called HASP had gone over the deep end and after checking with Microsoft – a fix was recommended. Insert shocked emoticon here, because that’s a first that this service has actually provided usable information – and insert a second shocked emoticon for software that I wouldn’t consider commonplace is actually tracked by this.
A couple of clicks later, I’m staring at a new web page hosted by esafe.com, specifically this one.
After downloading and installing the HASP update, our USB dongle was recognized and we could continue on with the heavily DRM’ed license server – in a virtual environment.
This is not a knock on GibbsCam support, they actually do rock. To complete our install they had to “adjust or reset” some settings on their end. But they returned their calls quickly and we’re professional about it.
I’m more upset about the layers of DRM used by them to prevent piracy or non-compliance of their software. I’m also upset with the fact that companies that have to deploy hardware to support this crap when a very viable solution is already available that doesn’t require hardware.
The end of the story really is this: If you’re going to be paranoid about someone stealing your software, just have the software phone home -or- require a hardware key. Neither will prevent all piracy, but the problems with requiring hardware is archaic and an assumption that your customers are running hardware to support it.
It’ll take us about 2 years to recoup the cost of the USB concentrator… a waste of money that could have been put towards more software licenses or things that would actually help students like workstations and teachers – if these dongles didn’t exist.
