In my Mobile World

I just purchased a new XBox360 game called “DarkStar One: Broken Alliance”, and I have to say: I really like what I see.    The graphics are amazing. 

I’ll be writing-up a Product Review after I have had some additional time to play it further…

Picked-up my new Touch Pro 2 from my local AT&T store today.   Boy is this one sweet phone.  Only thing that would be (possibly) better is the HD2, but lacking a keyboard is a major deal killer for me.   Getting ready to update the ROM to NRG’s latest and greatest…

Yayess!  

The used HP Proliant DL380 G4 is now mine!   The “Buy Now” bid was officially accepted today on eBay.  Now I just have to wait until my wonderful wife can pick up the item the next time she’s in the Bay Area…

I am making arrangements to obtain an HP ProLiant DL380 G4 64-bit Rack Server.   This is a professional-grade server, but it’s about two generations old, so it can be had at a totally reasonable price.   Here are some of the specs:

Processors:

• (2) 64-bit Intel® Xeon™ processors at 3.4 GHz.
• 800MHz Front Side Bus and 2MB of L2 cache.
• Intel E7520 Chipset.

Memory:

• (6) 2 GB PC2-3200R 400MHz DDR2 Ready Slots with online spare capabilities.
• 6x 2048MB (12288MB total) HP PC2-3200 DDR2 RAM.
• Support for dual-rank 400MHz DDR2 memory.

Storage Controller:

• SCSI model includes the integrated Smart Array 6i Ultra320 Array Controller with optional 128MB of Battery Backed Write Cache (BBWC standard).

Internal Drive Support:

• HP Smart Array 6i Ultra320 SCSI Controller with Internal hot plug capacity 1.8TB standard (6 x 300GB HDD).
• (6) hot-plug U320 SCSI drive bays, of which (1) 1.6″ bay that supports a hot-plug DAT tape backup drive.
• (6) 72.4GB HP 10K Wide Ultra320 SCSI Hard Drives.
• (1) 1x IDE CD-ROM.
• Optional PCI-X Hot-plug cage or Optional PCI Express Non-hot plug Cage.
• Optional dual channel drive backplane (2/4 split) for U320 SCSI models.

Network Controller:

• Embedded NC7782 PCI-X Gigabit Server Adapter.
• Embedded “Integrated Lights Out” (iLO) port for Remote Admin.

Expansion Slots:

• 3 Total Available Slots : (2) non-hot plug 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X slots and (1) non-hot plug 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X slot.

USB 2.0 Ports:

• 3 Total: (1) front, (2) rear accessible ports.

Redundancy:

• (8) Hot Plug Fans with optional full redundancy.
• (2) Hot Plug Power Supply with optional redundancy.

Management:

• HP Power Regulator for ProLiant, delivering server level, policy based power management with industry leading energy efficiency and savings on system power and cooling costs.
• Integrated Lights-Out industry leading remote management with new support for two-factor authentication, schema-free Microsoft Active Directory integration, Power Regulator p-state reporting, USB key virtual media and VLAN on the shared network port.
• Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) Standard Management on system board.
• Support for new iLO Shared Network Port enables access to the iLO management processor through one of the embedded system NICs.
• Automatic Server Recovery (ASR), ROM Based Setup Utility (RBSU), HP System Insight Manager, Status LEDs including system health and UID and SmartStart.

Form Factor:

• Rack (2U), (3.5-inch).

Pretty sweet, huh?

I”m going to be installing Microsoft’s Small Business Server OS on top of it, and see how well that works out.   I’m hoping that this new (to me) server will take good care of me and my business for years to come!

My IBM Server’s Power Supply died unexpectedly on Saturday or Sunday.   I honestly didn’t even notice it until Jana pointed out that she couldn’t access the server on Sunday.

A quick check of the system proved the Power Supply had gone bad.   Pulled it out and tried a spare and it worked fine.  Just one problem.   The spare wouldn’t fit inside long-term (the original server Power Supply is odd-sized, and the spare is standard-sized).   So Monday after work, I was attempting to salvage parts from another system to add to the server, another component blew-up right in front of me, and took the IBM server with it entirely.

Not wanting to attempt to isolate further if the whole motherboard was bad, or just the processor, or memory, I decided to try another system entirely.  Luckily I had recently obtained an older Celeron Server, which I had stored in Mothball, so I hauled it out Monday and started to add components to it as well. 

Luckily, the mothballed system board still had the CPU and memory, so it was just a matter of adding the original server’s hard drive.  Unfortunately, the Power Supply on that machine was defunct as well.  It gave out with a bang in the dining room on Monday night, right in front of me and Jana (she was NOT happy with that).  That ended Monday’s attempt to troubleshoot further.

Fortunately, the spare power supply that I had would fit into that case, so I was able to get it up and running later Tuesday.

Unfortunately (sense a pattern here?), it was an older motherboard and I didn’t have all the drivers, so I stayed up until about 1:00am this morning trying to get the right drivers loaded.

But, happily, everything is up and working.  Yeow, what an adventure!

HP finally came through in the end, and it looks like the left-hinge issue is completely resolved!

My sincerest thanks to Murray at the Case Manager group for watching-over the whole process.  

Boy, was that close!   I will really need the laptop when I attend CES 2009 in a few weeks!

I boxed up the laptop last night (Sunday), and Jana was able to get it down to one of the FedEx locations nearby for shipment back to HP. 

Hopefully they’ll get it later tomorrow and we can get a decent start on the 5-7 day repair cycle that HP needs.

Update: Per the FedEx tracking number, they have received the shipment in less than 15 hours.  Pretty quick!

Well, I didn’t get any further response from Bill Robbins from Porter Novelli in the last day and a half.  So I decided to followup on this.  Granted, it’s already 5:45pm, so I don’t really expect a response tonight…

By the same token, I can’t really afford to wait on this, as I hope to cover CES 2009 January 8th thru the 11th, and that’ll be hard to do without a laptop.   I figure if I wait too long, then my package will have to compete with all of the Christmas mail traffic.    Sigh…

Thank you Cringely!    Hopefully more folks suffering from this particular problem with their DV9000 laptop will hear about it and take-up HP’s offer for a free repair!

Kudos to Robert X. Cringely: http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/12/hewlett_packard.html

UPDATE: Just got word from Robert X Cringely that an HP Representative is interested in “helping to resolve my problem”.   Most excellent!

Got a e-mail from Robert X Cringely asking how things went.  I had to admit that I’m a little afraid of sending my laptop in without having first backed-up the system via Ghost or something similar.

I told him as much, so I guess he’s going to do an article on it later today.  Let’s see what happens…