Category Archives: Hardware

Sep 01

USB Device Sharing: Solution for Old Printer Driver

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I had a situation where we have a perfectly fine Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that is a few years old now but still a quality printer but we had been using it with 3 iMacs in a lab area. The Epson printer driver has some nicer features than the Gutenprint one that ships with the Apple drivers and we wanted to have the printer driver be set to that.

Via direct USB, the printer driver worked fine. The Epson driver was developed for PPC I believe and since it is such an old printer, it probably is the last version we will see. Rosetta also needs to be installed to handle it, but that is pretty-much automatic. So direct USB is fine and if you do printer sharing on the iMac that has a direct USB connection, you could get the machine that was piggy-backing on the sharing iMac to work with AppleTalk. But, when we upgraded to 10.6.x we lost AppleTalk on those iMacs and we lost the Epson driver nice stuff on two of the three computers. Sharing via Bonjour or IP did not work for the Epson driver, so we had to figure another solution out or re-purpose the printer.

So, enter the IOGEAR GUB431 4-Port USB Automatic Printer Switch

IOGEAR GUB431

It can be used without software, but the software is a critical piece because it can be set to do automatic switching. After setup, we got the old R2400 going and the three iMacs into the switch. Each iMac sees the native USB so the driver is happy and shows all the options the users like and the USB switch is smart enough to handle switching between the computers when a print job is dished to it. The default software setup is to have the computer printing grab hold and own the printer for 3 minutes then let go, but I changed the settings so it would automatically let go when needed by other iMacs. It seems to be working well and we will keep testing it with users to see if it can handle what we need. I like the solution and well worth a try to keep a perfectly good piece of hardware going even if the vendor might have some driver issues across the network. We could have tried a print server on ethernet, but I was hesitant to try it since printer sharing wasn’t even working. To clarify, one could print via Bonjour printer sharing, but NOT with the extra driver features Epson bakes-in to the USB type of connection which is a major deal for us.

The device has Mac and Windows software and seems very solid. So far, so good.

For more info checkout

http://www.iogear.com/product/GUB431/

Jun 03

Synology DS410 Review and Experience

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Here are just a few initial notes on setup of our Synology DS410.

Packaging
Out of the box
Installing the drives

Drives in and chassis off
Running LEDs
Building the RAID-5


 

Drives: Installing easy, one drive lower than fans, notice it runs a littel hotter too. To install the lowest of the 4 trays, you need to remove the back fans, but no biggie. The sleds are nice and simple. The kit comes with little baggies of screws so that is great. Also, the drive sleds slide right in and the SATA connector is aligned perfectly so you can just nudge the drives into place without any stress on the drive or sled. I went with some Western Digital 2TB Green drives. I have never had great luck with WD, but the power consumption on these newer drives seemed like a good call and the price point was great.

Operation: It is just amazingly quiet! Geez, you put in 4 2TB drives and you expect the thing to be noisy, but it is super quiet. This is a huge benefit for me as I hate the electronics sounds around the house, so this is great even though it will be the garage. I have a Nextstar simple RAID-1 with a couple of SATA drives and it is super loud in comparison.

Building the RAID: RAID-5 took forever due to size of the logical volume. I could have gone with the fast/rapid option, but anyone who has ever been burned by a bad RAID setup because they did the quick format only to have to do a full low-level format later knows why I went this route right off the bat.

Little Things: There are many things to appreciate throughout their setup process I wanted to note. After setting up a ton of different network devices, we all know changing network address is a pain because the device can get confused during the process and if the configuration is web-based, it can get messy when you lose contact with the old address.  I was waiting for that to happen when I went from DHCP to fixed IP through the web GUI, but to my surprise it redirected to the new IP address (nice!). I am so used to HP, Cisco, Linksys and other that don’t care to take this into account and force the admin to enter the new URL / IP address but when it is done right, it is so nice to see. Nice GUI touches throughout. They use AJAXy stuff, but not overdoing it. Linux support in documentation. Date and time already correct due to network time.

Initial Setup: The box came with CD with a Mac, Windows or Linux installer. I am really happy that Synology has Linux ‘baked-in’ to everything they do with their products and I really want to support that.  My DS410 came with DS v 2.2, so had to upgrade to latest 2.3. I downloaded the updated firmware (v2.3) and in the expansion process, Archive utility expanded a little too much so it didn’t keep the .pat file in-place for the GUI to recognize that the update was a legit firmware update. But, in going to their support site and FAQ, they had an article for that and I had change archive utility to not expand more.

Support Site: As mentioned above, their support website rocked. The FAQ area was great and exactly what I needed. They have this down.

Testing: after initial setup, I went to move the DS410 and the power cable was loose causing the DS410 to lose power. Plugged it back in and all was well! Copied some files across the network and the drives and throughput felt great. I also turned-on the various applications and have been testing with a great success on the internal network, from work and from remote on my iPhone using the Synology iPhone Apps. Being able to consolidate music and stream anywhere will be awesome the more I consolidate it on the Diskstation.

Very happy camper right now…

May 15

Digital Signage In Schools

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When I took up the task of trying to find a nice system for displacing paper-based bulletin boards in my high school’s foyer, I looked at a lot of solutions out there. I also asked around to see what others schools were doing. The types of setups people were using ranged from an old PC or Mac running Powerpoint on a display to provide scheduling and events for students and faculty to doing crazy VGA over ethernet to expensive displays. The top of the line solution was much to expensive and you still only had video and the fun of dealing with the craziness of cabling.

But, then I found MediaTile. Their systems are geared towards advertising and using their portal, the tile can communicate across the internet to get the data feeds you want for it. We got the 42″ model and set it up on our wireless. We have been running it now for over a year and did have some hardware issues, but MediaTile support went above and beyond to correct them and we are talking about power supplies, so what can you do?

We are looking at getting a few more around campus now that are internal trials seem to be positive. We also recently had a member of the Faculty at Lick-Wilmerding start to do some Adobe Flex/Flash development for a better, more interactive way to show our rotating block schedule which can really be difficult for everyone to understand and be aware of daily. The MediaTile system is currently and Windows-based system running their Adobe Flash-based MediaTile Player. We have it taking RSS feeds from our Whipple Hill Podium website News so we can keep our information unified and not have to post the all the same information in multiple places even though it is great to optimize screen images for the MediaTile for students and Faculty in a different way than we would for our website.

All in all, the lack of cables and overall slickness and network-connectivity the MediaTile digital signage system gives us is great and has become critical to our day-to-day operations. When we change the schedule or need to alert students to events, this is a great tool. The update time to the tile is not immediate, but that is due to the way the system checks-in for updates back to the home-base @ the mediatile.net portal. But, the time between the send and live on the screen is minutes so it is more than adequate for what we need.

More recent pics of our signage

Lick-Wilmerding High School Digital Signage Pic1

Lick-Wilmerding High School Digital Signage Pic 2

Apr 05

Epson Brightlink 450Wi First Impressions

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Got a demo today on the Brightlink 450wi projector. Here are some thoughts/observations.

Observations:

  • Love the simplicity. Really like the super-short throw aspect of the device so we can mount this on the wall and get people out of its way.
  • Software is simple. Basic floating palette for Windows or Mac OS so it can be used across all apps.
  • Pull-down white screens will actually get in the way, really you have to project to a hard surface or wall
  • USB and VGA connectors coming off the projector to the computer.
  • Calibration initially with pen was easy.
  • Single pen
    • changing colors/width via the sw floating palette
    • uses IR to communicate back to the projector
    • has a right-click button on the pen/stylus
    • a little space in the point to the shaft of the pen is nice because it gives feedback on pressure against the wall
  • wide screen throw is nice.
  • virtual screen stuff is nice to create multiple whiteboards on the fly.
  • No pairing/registration system needed for wireless pen to projector
  • wireless video to it – not really interested but probably still not there yet.
  • Really a good fit for what I think we need

Notes/Concerns:

  • I wanted to touch the whiteboard with my fingers (a la Smartboard). Not going to work. If you have teachers using their hands with other interactive boards, this would be tough to get used to.
  • Can use a couple of pens with one projector, but not at the same time. No multi-touch. Also, would be nice to have colors/thicknesses tied to the pen, but no biggie
  • Because of the demo location of the projector below me and front desk projection rather than the standard front above projection, I was able to block line of sight of the pen to the projector a few times. Not going to happen when it is properly installed, but interesting.
  • Fewer pieces of hardware makes more sense to me.
    • Less stuff to lose
    • Less stuff to break
    • Less stuff to install
  • Seemed like a nice transition to interactive boards for teachers who want to play and see if it makes sense with their content.
  • Really a pen-based system. The pen is the mouse/color, etc.
  • You also see the stuff you are annotating back on the computer screen which is nice.
  • Has basic built-in speaker, but can do audio out, so you can tie it in with existing amplified speakers.
  • floating tool palette remains visible in powerpoint and browsing the wbe and other applications, but doing the fullscreen flash test (i.e. youtube full screen) you lose the palette which I expected but would be nice in flash video fullscreen to be able to annotate (I know our teachers do it with dry-erase.)

Seems like a good call for our situation where you have space challenges and you have rooms that have multiple subject and teachers that may be interactive board users and/or ones who want to test and see if they could use one.

Feb 16

Fixing the flashing red alert light on an Altus 1600 SS

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Top view of the Altus 1600 server with top panel removed

Don’t know how many of them are still out there, but my school had a couple of Penguin Computing Altus 1600 SS 1U servers when I arrived. One was offline and the other was being used as a sendmail/dovecot email system. They might have come shipped with Fedora back in the day. I setup the offline line one with RAID1 and put CentOS 5.4 on it. It is doing some DNS and Apache serving for us.

It was still barely on the support contract at the time with Penguin Computing so I was able to get some semi-recent BIOS and controller updates  (July 2008). Since that time, have really been on my own. The server is older and I can’t blame them for not doing anything further with it. It has been running great actually and there has only been one annoyance. The flashing red warning light on the front of the chassis. The light has been blinking for at least a year.

After multiple resets and looks into the IPMI logs in BIOS, there were always intrusion detection errors. I would clear them and not open the chassis, but still get the errors in the BIOS. I guessed the red flashing had to be related to that and if I could disable the intrusion detection sensor, my annoying red light would cease. When I was moving the server room rack locations, I decided to solve this once and for all.

Sliding the top cover back and off, you will see an intrusion switch/sensor towards the rear near the power supply. Here are a couple of shots of it. I did this ‘hot’ (i.e. while the server was running) but don’t do that.

Side view of intrusion detection switch/sensor on the Altus 1600

Another side view of intrusion sensor on the Altus 1600

You can wiggle the body of that senor free and disconnect the wires that lead to the jumpers on the motherboard. This will nix the sensor feeding a bad result to the BIOS. If you have the server on when you do this (not recommended!) you will see the front bezel red warning light stop.

The pulled intrusion detection sensor from the Altus 1600

With the faulty sensor yanked, and the warning light dark, it was time to move on to better things.

Flashing red light no more!