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May 18, 2010
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 May 18, 2010 9:06 AM
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