Should HP support S.M.A.R.T. for consumer systems?

While wanting to get more bang for the buck, I handsomely configured online a HP Pavilion Elite HPE-410t for $908.99.

 

An HP sales rep suggested a "Smart Buy" system called a HP Pro 3130 MT for $859.00.  Without getting into the specs of each system, let's just say the HPE-410t had better/faster everything. 

 

The trick is the HP rep said the Elite is a consumer-grade product which doesn't support S.M.A.R.T. technology.
"NO SMART HDD TECHNOLOGY", he says and supplied a powerpoint slideshow to compare Commercial vs. Consumer.  I haven't been able to find a url for this .ppt online. Not a surprise.

 

While reading the list of Commercial benefits (ie. Legacy OS Support XP Pro, 5 yr warranties available, longer life cycles, TAA compliant, SMART HDD Technology, etc.), everything seemed reasonable that the Consumer grade product would not necessarily need those added values - everything except for one important thing: Data Integrity!

 

To me, by not supporting S.M.A.R.T. for consumers, HP is admitting that the ubiquitous S.M.A.R.T. technology of today is not important to enable for non-commercial users.  Is data integrity not important for Granny and Pappy?  HummPpf!!

 

I don't know if HP is deliberately disabling (crippling) their BIOS to not support S.M.A.R.T.  Perhaps they are only supporting a subset of the features and market the systems as completely unsupported.  Or HP could be installing pre-crippled OEM hard drives (I really hope Western Digital isn't playing this game). 

 

I am disheartened with HP as I thought they were getting smart.  Shame.  This is 2010, not 2000.  Support S.M.A.R.T. already!

 

 

I'm very sorry Avira!

I uninstalled an old version of the Avira antivirus and a webpage pops up a with a "why-are-you-leaving" feedback form.

Should I feel guilty for uninstalling something so beautiful as Avira? Is this a subliminal message that my very own beautiful wife will suffer a virus attack while laying in her bed? Or is this simply stock photo overkill?

SAS 5/iR FAIL!

The Dell E2K-UCS-51 (B), simply known as UCS-51, is an inexpensive RAID 0,1 card for SAS drives. It'd worked dutifully for a couple years until our mission critical CentOS 5.3 box froze with:

sd 0:1:0:0 rejecting I/O to offline device

I thought to myself that a hard drive I/O error would have said sda, not just sd. Surely the controller didn't go bad - I've never had a raid controller die on me. Upon reboot the kernel quickly blurted out:

mptbase: ioc0: ERROR - Diagnostic reset FAILED! (ffffffffh)

mptbase: ioc0: ERROR - didn't initialize properly (-1)

Since this is our mission critical server my heart fell to the floor. Next boot, did CTRL-C to go into the card's raid configuration and received this:

I/O card parity interrupt at 41A7:A382

So now the card's own bios is crashing. Great, did it corrupt my raid-1 array?! Frantically I purchased another card off ebay and drove there and back as quick as possibly. The new card worked. All I had to do is reactivate the array which resync 'd the secondary harddrive automatically. CentOS boots fine.

Although I have backups, I did a lot of praying over the weekend because putting a backup box into production is a bit harder than just swapping out a card. The Lord Jesus brought me through it.

-eric wood

Dead AB Micrologix 1000

When an operator replaced a blown 2/10th amp fuse with a 20 amp one, eventually some device is going to have a bad day - in my case it was an Allen Bradley Micrologix 1000 PLC.  After repeated failed attempts to find a replacement PLC from the now defunct OEM and knowing absolutely nothing about PLCs, a local engineering firm quoted $8000 to enter in about 100 rungs of ladder logic into a new PLC.  I'm desperate but I'm not willing to be taken advantage of.  Regretfully, they declined my counter offer of $1500.  So, I purchased the same PLC off ebay for $99 and was determined to take a stab at programming it using AB's free version of RSLogix called RSLogix Micro Starter Lite (v8.10).  Even with the ladder logic printed in the back of the machine manual I realized this was over my head.  So I took a stab at swapping the power supplies (which is the bottom board).  Yeah, it worked.  Why didn't we think of that in the first place?  The top board (where the firmware and logic is) was obviously spared from the (lightning?) damage.  I went ahead and purchased a serial cable and downloaded the ladder logic from the PLC into an .rss file for safe keeping.  So why $8000? Does having a EE degree gives you a license to rip people off?  Turns out that even $1500 may be too cheap to do what I done for $99 even when the code is already provided in printed form.  One PLC guy recently told me he got out of the automation field and into the IT field because of liability insurance costs of $50,000 was prohibitive.  Because PLCs typically start/stop/run heavy equipment, insurance companies claim high risk exposure of personal injury.  So he's sticking to the IT industry where $500 liability costs are palatable.  

 

Dimension E510 runs a Pentium D 945

My Dell Dimension E510 with the 945P chipset has been very reliable.  So I decided to swap out to a faster LGA775 Presler processor on the mobo.  After some researching, I found out from others that the faster 950,960,etc Pentium D's didn't work so I choose the SL9QB Pentium D 945 (3.4Ghz/4M/800/65nm).   According to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php (as of today), the processor ranks #445.  Not impressive - I know.  However, coming from a #511 ranked SL88T Pentium D 820 (2.8Ghz/2M/800/90nm),  it definitely feels snappier thanks to its double L2 cache size.  Nonetheless, this $80 upgrade will probably postpone a newer expensive PC upgrade for a couple years.  Deal.

 

Where is net view for linux? How about nmbscan.

Had a customer incident where Network Neighborhood came up empty for the
whole network. Everyone could see no one! Marco! Polo! I ssh'd into their RHEL box and
tried to find out how to scan the network for NMB netbios shares. The
nmbclient command was installed but I wasn't sure how to use it. Fortunately
I found a wrapper program for nmbclient called nmbscan:
http://nmbscan.gbarbier.org/

# nmbscan -a

This showed me a master brower called "ROBIN" out there and not much else.
I told the sysadmin to shut down ROBIN. Re-running nmbscan then showed us a
ton of machines and people's network neighborhood browsing came to life.
Perhaps a virus was able to self-elect ROBIN as browse master and then
poisoned the nmb name cache - dunno.