« March 2010 | Main | June 2010 »
May 18, 2010
MBS Hosted Solution Considered by the WOU Bookstore
The bookstore invited me to attend a meeting last week that was very interesting. This was a regular business meeting, however one topic was of primary interest to me. MBS has a "hosted solution" which means essentially that they will host a customer's account on their local servers rather than having the customer maintain their own server. The WOU Bookstore maintains the one and only IBM server on campus, and it is required to be an MBS customer. Maintaining the Bookstore's server has been my responsibility since I began working here.
The question is whether or not the Bookstore should go with the hosted solution. The Bookstore would need to maintain the IBM based Point of Sale equipment in either case. The Point of Sale equipment is a smaller computer that manages the daily sales, collects sales transactions from the cash registers, and processes credit card authorizations - it is similar to an individual workstation.
There are advantages and disadvantages, of course. The advantages are that the hosted solution is somewhat cheaper than maintaining our own server. The price tag on IBM equipment is very high, maintenance costs are high, plus the Bookstore pays a portion of my salary. Using the hosted system would eliminate the expense associated with maintaining a local server. Also, the hosted solution includes seven new, touch screen cash registers. The Bookstore really needs at least two to four new registers - seven is a bit of overkill for our needs. Finally, the hosted solution requires using a web-based credit card authentication service. What we would do is add on the web-based solution, and also maintain the phone/modem service we presently use. This provides a very nice double-layered solution in case one or the other service would go down. It appears that overall the cost to the bookstore would be less, but the final numbers aren't available yet. Plus, there is a certain amount of apples to oranges comparison that is required, the numbers don't tell the whole story.
There are two main disadvantages to the MBS hosted solution. First, loss of control over the server. The Bookstore's data is held by MBS, and server availability is now totally dependent upon MBS. In my view, this is a pretty serious limitation.
The second disadvantage is that the hosted application is a subset of the MBS application that we presently use. Some of the pieces of the MBS application used by the Bookstore are simply not available in the hosted application. I am not familiar with the exact functions that would be lost at this point, but obviously this requires some careful consideration. Essentially, what is being provided would be a kind of MBS-Lite, not the full-blown application that the Bookstore presently uses.
One final item is that there is the whisper of a rumor that MBS "might" be ready to offer a Windows based solution. In that case, it would be silly to go with the MBS hosted solution. We could provide the Bookstore with a Windows based server much more cost effectively.
Posted by rossm at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
The Boat Anchor Gets a New Hard Disk Plus, New Printers
Some interesting things have been going on at the WOU Bookstore. First, we got two new printers - a small DeskJet type printer that prints out reports from the Point of Sale (POS) machine located in the Bookstore; and a new bar code printer (that looks almost identical to the old one except it now has an "Avery" name on it). The POS printer was pretty much just plug and play - no setup required. The bar code printer, however, was much more difficult. It simply would not print out any labels. Pressing the test print key combination resulted in about 10 labels running through and an error message. We were ready to just ship the thing back. However, MBS hardware support suggested I call the Avery tech support, and it's a good thing I did. A very helpful and knowledgeable support tech told me there were two settings that were wrong on the printer, and told me how to correct them. I made the changes he suggested, and, after another call the MBS support, actually got the new printer to function. Yay.
While all the printer action was going on, I noticed an odd error in the qsys messages - something like "a device parity protected unit not fully functional" or some such similarly helpful message. Well, it's a good thing I followed up on it - that message means a hard disk in the RAID array has failed - not sure why they didn't just say that...Anyway, a call to IBM, pass their verification test, talk to a support representative, and the next day an IBM tech with a new drive was here. He installed the new drive and it has since been rebuilt. That was done last Thursday and Friday. Now, I am checking the error logs a lot! I am paranoid that another disk will fail pretty soon....
Posted by rossm at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2010
My New Electric Bike
You know from reading my past posts that I am a big electric bike enthusiast. That enthusiasm has spread like flood water over a levee and I am working on building my own electric bike. It is pretty much put together and right now I'm sorting out some problems with my lithium battery pack. But I wanted to show you a picture of the new ebike.
If I ever get the electronics problems figured out, it will be a nice ride!
Posted by rossm at 2:41 PM | Comments (0)
Cleaning Up
Well, it was finally long enough since the last time I tried cleaning up users/schemas and tablespaces that I forgot what a miserable experience it is. So, all smiley and happy, I tore into some old and long-forgotten schemas and tablespaces on AERO - a real Spring cleaning. Ring,ring (it's the phone). "Do you know anything about the kiosks in the libary?" - um, no, why? "They quit working." oh,oh. Now I remember why clean up is a dirty word!
Well, after a couple hours, much help from Michael, and a few lucky breaks, the dropped user was replaced, the missing package was replaced, and the kiosks worked once again. The package has been moved to a more suitable schema, but now I'm gun shy and have quit deleting stuff!
Posted by rossm at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)