Archive for the ‘Product Reviews’ Category

The WAPPOE and WAPPOE12 Unofficial Compatibility List

Friday, May 1st, 2009
The WAPPOE12 Linksys PoE Injector

The WAPPOE12 Linksys PoE Injector

I purchased the WAPPOE12 for a customer who had a WRT54GX. The original tech who installed the Router opened up the cable and built a 12V injector using the unused pairs within a CAT5 cable. As much as this is a functional method of doing POE, and as many times I may have done this exact same thing in the past, I much prefer to go the standard compliant route when installing commercial solutions. For this reason I bought what seemed like a solution to all my problems, the WAPPOE12. Unfortunately as soon as I plugged it in the WRT54GX started to blink up a confused storm, I ran out and bought a WRT110 which is not on the compatibility list however and it works just fine. To make matters even more confusing the power adapter from the WRT110 works on the WRT54GX without any problems. Anyway, to conclude the WAPPOE and WAPPOE12 are finicky and the compatability list from Linksys is truncated and out of date. For this reason I’m going to be using this post as an unofficial compatability list for users looking to buy one of these products. If you know another product that works, or does not work leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

Compatible:

WAPPOE12 (12V)

  • ADSLMUE1
  • AG041
  • BEFSX41
  • BEFW11S4 v4
  • RT31P2 v1.2 and 2
  • WAP54G v2
  • WCG200
  • WGA54G
  • WPS54GU2
  • WRK54G
  • WRT54G
  • WRT54GS
  • WRT54GP2
  • WRT110

WAPPOE (6V)

  • WAP11
  • WAP11 v2.2
  • WAP11 v2.6
  • WAP11 v2.8
  • WAP54G,
  • WAP55AG
  • WAP51AB
  • BEFSR41
  • BEFSR11
  • BEFSR81
  • HPRO200
  • BEFVP41
  • BEFW11S4,
  • WET54G
  • WET11

Not Compatible:

  • WRT54GX (12V)
  • WRT54GL (reported via comment)

Posted in Product Reviews | 1 Comment »

Why you shouldn’t buy a Cisco IP Phone

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

(unless you’re using CallManager)

That’s it, I’m done. I think that Cisco must hate their customers so much that they intentionally mutilate their products. Let me get the first thing straight, Cisco IP Phones are amazing. They are built with a sturdiness and a level of quality that I have yet to see matched by any other brand. There is a reason why they are the universal telephone of business. With that out of the way, Cisco seems to get some sort of sick pleasure out of torturing customers who use SIP. Their business model seems to focus on frustrating customers into buying CallManager.

Cisco’s forray into IP Telephony seemed to start strong. The 7912 have relatively good SIP support. But as time went by the 7940, 7960, 7970 are just not gauged towards the SIP audience.

Here’s a list:

1. SmartNET contract to download firmwares, seriously?

2. The Cisco 7970 is the most beautiful phone I’ve ever touched, and it doesn’t work because Cisco engineers don’t care.

3. We paid 600$ for this phone, why can’t you give us a simple web administration panel?

4. How long are we going to have to wait for SLA? OR BLF? Seriously.

5. Broken NAT Support, needs to be babied

This leads me to my theory, call it a conspiracy theory. But I think Cisco doesn’t want Small Business customers to buy Cisco products. I think they want you to buy a Linksys IP Phone. Linksys (a division of Cisco) produces excellent SIP phones using many of the same parts from the Ciscos. They are sturdy,  support all of the features that the Ciscos do not, and best of all…they work.

If you were planning on buying a Cisco 7940/60/70. Don’t. Go with a Linksys SPA-94x series phone. They don’t have the same luxurious screen or top notch speaker phone as the Ciscos but you won’t regret it.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews | 4 Comments »

Hostway.com is the worst Host I’ve ever dealt with.

Monday, March 30th, 2009

This is my rant. I’ve dealt with enough hosts in my day. Some were great (Hostgator.com) some are pretty good (Godaddy.com). Some are just plain mind numbingly terrible…Hostway. Apart from spending long amounts of time on hold just to get confusing answers from customer service people who have no idea what they are doing. I’ve repeatedly been told that my customer is unable to do a variety of things on his account because “it’s too old”. They’ve literally told me on the phone that the loyalty of my customer was the reason why he was unable to perform certain account functions. When I asked if I could upgrade the account in anyway to perform these functions, I was blunty told no. I’m used to deprecated systems and confusing answers from customer service, it wasn’t until I realised that I was unable to set DNS records on my customer’s domains without buying a hosting account for the domain. I realised it was time to move on. Here are the reasons why you should avoid Hostway like the plague.

1. Terrible Customer Support.

2. They’ll nickle and dime you for things that should be free

3. The account panel belongs in 1997 (takes around 200 clicks to transfer five domains)

4. FTP is Painfully slow

5. Terrible Customer Support.

Now the domain I’m transfering’s whois record has mysteriously disappeared without the transfer beginning correctly. Let’s see how many days it takes hostway to get back to my support email.

It’s a long slow road to migrate these accounts off of here, I just hope I can spare some else this frustration.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews | 2 Comments »

How to Install Windows XP on a Dell Vostro 220 or Vostro 1520, the Crashless way!

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Steps that you must perform before Windows XP will Install: Below is a narration.

Switch Hard Drive Controller from AHCI to ATA:

  1. F2 at BIOS Screen
  2. Standard CMOS Features
  3. SATA Mode: Change from AHCI to ATA

Make sure your Windows XP CD is Slipstreamed to SP2 or 3

  1. Download nLite from here
  2. Download Service Pack 3 here
  3. Use nLite to Copy files from XP CD, Slipstream and make ISO with the new disk image.

I customer brought in a machine I had ordered for them needing Windows XP. I had ordered it with Vista and assured her that everything would be okay. Well, unfortunately the hospital she works for will not support Vista. So with my foot in my mouth I put in my trusty Windows XP Home CD for customers. The machine loads up the first part of Windows Setup then crashes with a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Saying that I need to run chkdsk /f , along with some other information that I didn’t read. Well first thing this makes me think is SATA Controller? That’s exactly what it was.  Windows XP apparently doesn’t work well with AHCI (out of the box), so you’ll have to use the above steps to switch the machine to ATA mode in the BIOS. After that I got almost to the same place then I got a pci.sys error. Which is apparently caused by another piece of hardware not supported by Windows XP until Service Pack 2. My Slipstreamed SP3 disk is was having CD-KEY issues with the Pre SP3 OEM key so I had to slipstream a new one using nLite. Once I had those two things out of the way Windows XP SP3 installed swimmingly

Watch out on the License Keys, you may have to use SP2.

Update 28 Mar 09:

Eric reports that if you install the chipset drivers before installing the other drivers you can end up experiencing a variety of strange issues. Eric reports that you can solve the problem by installing “Desktop System Software (DSS)” which is found in the System Utilities section [under Vostro 220 on the Dell Support site]. When checking the offerings I noted that one download was recently updated and marked “Urgent”.

If you found this article helpful, please link to it from your blog, or vote it on one of the Share and Enjoy links below. Google determines quality based on your link-support!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews, Walk Throughs | 53 Comments »

NC91-230-LF Linux Installation Guide / Howto / Rant

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

My new Jetway Mini-ITX ATOM Motherboard as part of my Jetway JBC110C91-230-B Barebones wasn’t as easy as I had hoped to get working. I’m trying to build a PBX and router to replace my current Trixbox PBX and WRT54G running DD-WRT. The hardware seems very capable and speedy but I’m having serious issues getting Linux to run properly on the hardware. Most of the issues I’ve been dealing with seem to be hardware related. The chipset according to Jetway is the INTEL®945GC + ICH7 Chipset. Here are the chronicles of my journey.

UPDATE

After I gave up and installed two Intel NICs, someone else got everything working alright! Here is a walkthrough on the Trixbox Forums, I haven’t actually tried it yet. It looks pretty similar to what I did, perhaps they fixed the problems in the kernel that were causing my crashes.

I will break down the issues based on Operating System:

Gentoo: x86 and amd64 (x86_64)

  • Must start with option “nosound” or else startup hangs.
  • LiveCD detects IDE hard drive as /etc/hdc then when machine boots it detect as /dev/sda
  • Kernel Panics with unable to mount FS (filesystem) even when grub menus are edited to correct hard drive
  • IDE Controller driver issues? Did I screw up menuconfig?
  • Trys to load RTL8139 Driver module, which will not load (Solved; See Below):

I actually had a separate PCI RTL8139 NIC installed in the machine so I didn’t immediately realise the solution to this problem. What happens is the onboard NIC detects as needing the RTL8139 module, however it is incompatible with it. You must compile support for the card into the kernel to be able to use it correctly, it’s under hardware support / Ethernet

  • Unable to test onboard NIC once kernel support is compiled because of IDE issue.

CentOS (PBX in a Flash, Trixbox  and CentOS 5.2)

  • Will not boot hangs on LiveCD startup, caused by overzealous realtek drivers.
  • centos-crash-1Above error message in Trixbox, PBX in a Flash and CentOS 5.2 LiveCD below.
  • centos-crash

The issue is with the rtl8169 module. It is not compatible with the onboard NIC but it doesn’t seem to know that. So it attempts to load anyway. This was also happening on Gentoo but I didn’t notice it because it is compiled as a module rather than part of the kernel. The solution is to Disable the PCIE NIC in the BIOS, do the installation with a PCI NIC or a USB Ethernet Adapter and then install the correct drivers.The CentOS Website has an article on the Acer AspireOne which has the same family of NIC as we do.

To get the Onboard NIC to work follow the follow steps under a CentOS based Distro:

Here is what you need to do to get the network adapter working. You can compile it from scratch but I’ve noticed no improvement over the binary.

  • Download a version of the kernel module from here
  • rpm -Uvh kmod-r8101-1.009.00-1.i686.rpm
  • modprobe r8101
  • nano /etc/modprobe.conf

Add the Lines:

  • alias r8169 off
  • alias eth0 r8101

If you see it; Remove the Line:

  • alias eth0 r8169

You may issue a problem whereas the machine will crash anytime you try to unload or disconnect the interface. You’ll get an error “BUG: soft lockup – CPU #0 stuck for 10s”. I know I do. I might just disable the onboard network adapter and use two PCI NICs. It’s apparently a known issue. I wasn’t able to determine if they solved based off of googling. It seems as if in order to get the PCI Bus to work properly they had to do a little hacking. The end result is that Linux views the PCI Bus in doubles causing it to get confused. That apparently compounds the r8101 problem, and there are some ACPI issues thrown in for good measure. It seems like they developed a patch but I’m not able to gleam any additional info from the bug tacker.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews, VoIP | 5 Comments »

Jetway JBC110C91-230-B Product Review

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

I just picked up the Jetway ATOM 230 Mini-ITX

Jetway ITX Barebones w/ Laserjet 1200 for Scale

Jetway ITX Barebones w/ Laserjet 1200 for Scale

For specific issues in Linux click here.

Barebones machine from Newegg. I have to say, I love it. So far there are very few things I can complain about. Generally the case is a good size, there is plenty of extra room inside. The case is made out of a pretty sturdy metal that I was impressed by. It also comes with metal mounting bars that you can attach to the case if you want to screw it down somewhere. Airflow seems more than reasonable, I have yet felt the heatsink anything hotter than cool to the touch. Even when compiling Linux Kernel 2.6. If you’re looking for a barebones project box, you can’t beat the all in one deal with the power supply and the case.

The ATOM 230 isn’t a powerhouse by any means, but it’s fantastic for what it’s designed to do. Unlike the N270 that’s in my ASUS eee PC, the Atom 230 supports x86_64. It also feels a bit more powerful than it’s netbook cousin.Although it may lag behind a similarly powered Celeron 1.6 it is definitely bearable. Jetway and Newegg have a similar unit minus the PCI slots in the near and with the Dual Core ATOM 330. If you’re looking for some extra oomph I’d definitely recommend it. I only veered away from it because I needed the PCI slot, and I may be distributing these for a Not-For-Profit. As far using it as a router or a PBX, I can’t imagine there being any problems with it, but we’ll soon see.

Now I do have a few complaints. The PCI slot covers are nearly impossible to get out, when you do finally bend them out the case is warped, and then you find that normal PCI cards cause the slot cover to not sit right. It’s frustrating to say the least but with a little bit of bending, and one less screw the case closes cleanly without any problems.

Software-wise so far I have been having a nightmare trying to get it to work in Linux. I intend on building a Router/PBX out of it to replace the variety of other appliances I have. But so far I have had a lot of trouble with it. Gentoo seems to have a variety of strange troubles with the ICH7 southbridge. I couldn’t specifically diagnose the problem but I was having difficulty booting from CD as well as experiencing an issue where the drive would alternate between detecting as SCSI (/dev/sda)  and IDE (/dev/hdc). To get Gentoo to boot from the livecd I had to use the “nosound” boot option or else it would hang when trying to start the Audio module. I’m going to try CentOS derived Trixbox soon as I’m starting to get frustrated with Gentoo. I think I’m not compiling the proper drivers into the kernel and it’s causing the IDE interface to go wonky.

All and all, I’d definitely recommend this little guy. If you don’t need the PCI slots like I did, pick up it’s Single-Core or Dual-Core cousin with a smaller case. I don’t recommend it for Media, or emulation. Realistically it can do SDTV and SNES Emulation just fine, but for anything more intensive it might make sense to go with a full-powered processor.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews, VoIP | 1 Comment »

eee PC 1000 Product Review and Windows XP Installation Guide

Friday, January 16th, 2009

I recently bought an eee PC 1000 the other day. So far I have to say I’m absolutely in love with it.  It’s a fantastic product.

Firstly I’d like to thank the eeeuser.com community for providing a wonderful place to share information. If it wasn’t for this wonderful resource I probably never would have managed to get my eee PC is a position where I’m very happy with it.

I purchased the Linux version which comes with a propreitary version of Xandros Linux on it. As much as I am a huge Linux fan I have to say I was a little disappointed. Although I would later find out that you could indeed get shell access to the Xandros Installation. After 5 hours of playing with the limited “Easy Mode”, I decided it was time to put eeeXubuntu on it. Turns out, support for the eee PC 1000’s hardware has not yet become available for eeeXubuntu. Meaning that out of the box I wasn’t able to access either the WiFi adapter or the Ethernet adapter. Rather than dealing with recompiling the kernel and modules for the adapters I realised that I was probably going to have to put Windows on it. As much as I may love Linux, I realise that Network Connectivity is more important.

I also found this SD Card on Newegg.com, it’s only 26$ shipped, and it’s 16GB. Obviously I’m not the first person who has thought of using an SD card to hot-swap Operating Systems as it actually has “Eee PC” in the product name. I’ve had it for a few days now and I love it. It’s a great way to experiment with alternative Operating Systems on the Eee without having to worry about overwriting your carefully configured Linux or Windows installation.

Installing Windows XP was a bitter harder than I hoped, but not terribly so. I’m obviously not the first person whose been through this and I was able to find able documentation on how to install WinXP on my eee. The easiest way to do it by far is to get a External USB enclosure and install straight from the WinXP CD. For those of who don’t have an external enclosure, or whose enclosure has burned up…. like me. You’ll have to copy Windows XP onto a USB Flash drive.  There are a number of guides out there that essentially use the same process, here is one. They walk you through the process of preparing your installation, and installing WinXP. Be certain to follow the instructions very closely, the process is very picky, ready carefully, don’t assume.

When all was said and done I had to go back and edit my NTLDR file. The flashdrive took the first drive position. Which is peculiar for installation media. I had to change Windows’ Position from:

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
to:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

That fixed the problem.

It wasn’t a big deal, but it was a pain, because now my Windows installation Drive Letter is D:. It may not be the end of the world, but it is annoying. I’ve read that one can change the System Drive letter, but having tried in the past I know it can end in misery. I’ll deal with it for now. One of the first things I did was change the Temporary Files folder. This helps because although the read speed from the internal SSD drive is very high, the write speed at times seems deplorable. I’ve found that if I spread my writes across the drives it helps a lot.

Installing drivers was relatively painless, all of the windows drivers are available from ASUS Support. Make sure you install the ACPI driver first. Typically I don’t install a lot of these drivers because I assume they are just going to install some bloated branded software. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. The ACPI driver gives you the ability to turn on/off hardware to save your battery power. It’s a necessity on the eee PC as it has no dedicated WiFi on/off switch.

Once all the software is installed, I went ahead and did my usual customisations to reduce bloat. Disabling various themes, start-up programmes and customising applications to best take advantage of the tiny screen. All and all the eee PC way outperformed my expectations. It runs exceptionally well for it’s size and speed and the battery life is phenomonal. The price point of 399$ is unbeatable for the ultimate tiny computer.

The next step of course is tethering it to your iPhone which is coming up next.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews | No Comments »

Acer X193W Product Review

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

I just picked up this new monitor during Newegg’s Black Friday Presale. Beware, there are two version of this monitor, the X193W and the X193W+DB. But as part of Black Friday it was only 99.99, shipped. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. 

 

Acer X192w at Newegg.com

The monitor is pretty nice, the colour’s are rich, and I’m starting to become spoiled having the wider screen. Watching movies in the correct Aspect Ratio is a completely new and splendid experience. The monitor seems to support refresh rates of 60 and 75hz, which is fine by me since I rarely venture out of 60hz. My one real complaint is the max resolution. The max resolution on this monitor is only 1440 by 900 (1440×900). Based on the pixel width of the monitor, that would seem big. But the 900 vertical pixels is painful, especially if you’re used to 1280 by 1024. When I move between screens I have to re-size windows and lots of information I’m used to having in one screen-full gets cut off.

A few days after I ordered this monitor, Newegg ran the DVI version which supports all of the resolutions I could ever want for 89.99$ after rebate (Retail $139.99). I was heart broken. I tried to call Customer Service and get them to swap mine out for the DVI version, but they said that my analog only version was already on the loading dock. Apart from this little hiccup this monitor is really pretty satisfying. Apart from two other minor complaints. The buttons underneath the monitor are difficult to reach, and finding what exactly to press takes a little bit. Furthermore the stand that elevates the monitor is far too close to the ground. I had to resort to putting a book underneath it to elevate it to the same level as my other monitors.

The price however, is right, from previous experience if a monitor sells at Black Friday for $99.99, it usually will be MSRPed at that price by year’s end. If you have the option to get the DVI version, even if it costs 20-30$ more, it’s worth it. It’s the best way to unlock what this monitor can do.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews | 1 Comment »

Antivirus 2008/2009 Removal

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Recently it seems like this virus has gotten almost out of control. From what I understand and I have seen it’s not so much a virus in it’s own, but a downloader for other much more nefarious programmes. It seems as if everytime I see this virus it has different attributes, different executables, and libraries. At first before most spyware programmes could detect it, I would spent a very long time removing the individual files and startup entries using tools like Unlocker and Spybot’s TeaTimer. Between these two programmes there are very few viruses/malware that can survive.

Once the startup entries and processes are removed, TeaTimer will prevent new changes. Alas, here was the catch this last time. The virus had hijacked the TCP/IP stack. Meaning that all of my web traffic was being routed to fictious pages. Furthermore attempts to download Spybot and download updates for various anti-virus programmes were blocked.

I was having a hell of a time until I tried Malwarebytes Anti-malware. I had seen this software on customers’ computers before. But this was the first time I used it myself. I have to say, it’s a miracle worker. It removed the files, and the startup entries. And to top things off, it killed the processes. I still had to do some cleaning up with HijackThis. But all in all, I’m very impressed. For the first time a Freeware Antimalware programme did the job. I’ll definitely be using it in the future, and recommending it to clients.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Field Work, Product Reviews | No Comments »

HP Officejet J4680

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

To this day I have yet found a wireless or wired print server that worked right under 100$ that wasn’t a HP. They never cease to amaze me how good their products are compared to the other consumer electronics manufacturers. My customer was looking to print wirelessly, and having previous experiences with USB Wired Print Servers I suggested a new printer with a print server built in.

I ended up getting a HP Officejet J4680 for the customer. It was a steal at $114.99. I was surprised to find that on top of having integrated 802.11g and a fax. It had a document feeder and flatbed as well. Although it didn’t have the exciting LCD screen that some of the other HP Officejet’s do. The simple screen had a surprising number of options, and allowed for configuration of the wireless network. Make sure you avoid using the software that comes on the CD. Instead get the IT Professional Software from HP here. The setup was really fast, detected the printer and finished up without any drama. The best part was it does not install a tray app or any other bloatware.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Product Reviews | No Comments »