Where I’m @

20080213

!$@%#!&* Dell GX620s
In the summer of 2006, we bought 23 Dell Optiplex GX620s for one of the student labs/classrooms at the office. Under two years later, ten of them have had their power supplies and motherboards replaced. (Well, technically, nine have. One had to have the procedure done twice.) That's a failure rate of nearly 50%. Not so good. We could only find one public record of this kind of significant failure count, but we have spoken with an acquaintance at another higher ed institution who says some of her people have seen an unusually high failure rate with these. We'll be talking with our sales rep about this. Not a comforting thing.

Labels: dell, frustration, troubleshooting

20080205

How To Get the MAC Address for a Nokia N810
We needed to get a colleague’s shiny new Nokia N810 device on the wireless network, and here at Yale you have to register wireless devices. Interestingly, the manual didn’t seem to have any obvious instrux on how to find the MAC. (Note: We did not RTFM cover-to-cover. That's what searching a PDF is for.) However, the first result on Google for “nokia n810 mac address” contained the steps. We reprint them here for brevity, since the original site contains much more info than necessary to solve this specific problem.

• Click the four-blocks icon at the left
• Choose “Settings”
• Choose “Control Panel”
• Choose “About Product”
• Record the “WLAN MAC Address”

Found at http://www.arachnoid.com/linux/nokia/

Labels: handheld, MAC address, networking, open source, wireless