Author: Adam Fowler

Nokia Lumia 1020 Whinge

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

This post is not about how amazing the 41 megapixel camera is on the Nokia Lumia 1020 (because it is), it’s about my personal experience in actually using the phone, and some of the pain that followed.

Firstly, it’s always cool to get the new toy, and open it. This doesn’t mean it needs to be filmed – as a kid, how much fun was it to go to someone else’s birthday party and watch them open all their presents and be really excited? Yeah.

So, this wasn’t my first Windows Phone 8 device either, as I’d previously had a Lumia 920. A rather hefty phone that could most likely stop a bullet, but had an issue with the speaker that made people talking sound like they had a sock in their mouth. Annoyingly I had to send it back to my carrier, who sent it back still faulty, then sent it straight to Nokia to finally have it fixed about 3 weeks from the start. These things happen, I had no major issues after that.

The Lumia 1020 however, has been a different story. At first it seemed fine, although I couldn’t register my Microsoft account as part of the setup process because it couldn’t connect to the internet. I skipped that, and then connected it to wifi to be able to do so. I then took it home, and it seemed to be functioning fine. Simple so far…

Then, while I was out I just wanted to Google something (sorry about that Bing). I couldn’t, it had no internet connection again. I was showing 4G and had great signal, so what was going on? I tried rebooting but that didn’t help. I gave up for that night.

At home again, it’s working fine – so I ignore that issue for the time being. Instead, I go through the process of connecting the Bluetooth to my car (inbuilt bluetooth of a Hyundai ix35, or a Tuscan overseas). That seemed to work, but then 10 minutes later it would just drop off and reconnect. A bit annoying. Then, next time I get into my car it wouldn’t connect at all. I had the brainwave of turning bluetooth off and back on again on the Lumia, but pressing the ‘off’ switch seemed to take several minutes. I rebooted the phone after waiting that long, and then bluetooth could be turned on again. Turning it back on then seemed to let the phone and car start talking again. Getting weird…

This bluetooth problem happens about every second time I get in the car. I’d previously used a Samsung Galaxy S3 without issue for over a year, so I knew it wasn’t the car at fault generally (although it may have just not liked something about how the Lumia was doing bluetooth). Every time I’d try and turn off bluetooth it would never let me turn it back on, and just rebooting the phone without turning bluetooth off first seemed hit and miss.

At this stage, I’m getting annoyed. I reach out to Nokia via twitter, and pretty much get told to check the car supports it, after telling them that the 920 is supported as per their website.

I’m now waiting to hear back from Hyundai about this.

While this is going on, I then get back to work and my internet connection has stopped working from the phone. I realise it must be to do with 4G, so force the phone to go back to 3G and things start working. Getting onto my carrier, they say they’ll trigger off the carrier settings to make 4G work. My phone reboots, I figure what they did must have caused that to happen. 4G starts working so I’m happy… until a few days later, where the internet connection fails for 3G. I reboot the phone to fix that issue.

In the meantime, the phone itself has started to reboot randomly, roughly once a day on average. Sometimes I’ll take it out of my pocket or just look over at my phone and see the lovely startup screen:

clipboard3d1

 

Other times the phone will just freeze during operation, and I’ll have to hard reset it by holding down the power button and volume down button to get some life into it.

I decide to call Nokia Care Australia to see what they have to say about all this. This is where I am now, at the time of writing. I list off all the issues, and the first suggestion from their support is that maybe I have too many apps running.

I’m somewhat surprised by that statement, and they say to hold down the arrow button and go back to get rid of any open apps. I told her that wouldn’t explain all the other issues I’m having – so she then says to reset the phone to factory settings.

I go through that fun process but after going through it 4G doesn’t work again. The next gem of information given to me is the explanation that it’s a coverage issue, and I must be in an area that doesn’t have 4G. I tell her that I am because I have other devices on 4G next to me working fine through the same carrier, but also that the only reason the phone will display 4G up the top is if it has 4G signal. She disagrees, is still sure that it’s just the setting enabled and continues to say it’s a carrier issue in her broken English explanation. I ask why it goes back to 3G when I go home without me changing any settings. She isn’t sure, but still ‘knows’ it’s to do with the coverage.

Annoyed, I give up asking about it and get the phone functional on 3G. She then tells me if there’s any issue to call back, and hangs up the phone.

Now I’m rebuilding the phone, and finding out the tedious way to re-download your apps is via this method.

TL;DR version of the phone’s issues:

  • Random phone reboots
  • Random phone freezes
  • Random bluetooth dropouts
  • Bluetooth freezing when being turned off
  • 4G data not working
  • 3G/4G data not working until phone reboot

Anyway – this is my experience with a single Nokia Lumia 1020. Maybe it’s faulty, maybe the factory reset will fix it. Yes it’s a whinge, but it’s been a frustrating process to go through. Plus this is a blog about my experiences :) If you’ve had a similar or different experience, I’d love to know.

 

Update 10/10/2013: Phone was still rebooting randomly, freezing, mobile data fails and dropping bluetooth. Called the carrier who very quickly organised a replacement phone to be sent out (after first convincing them it was still under warranty, and then convincing them that it’s < 30 days so should be a swapout rather than a repair job). New phone arrived the next day…

New phone had the 4G issue, which I got back onto the carrier. My sim card needed to be swapped over, which then completely fixed the 4G issue. Thought all was well, but after trying to wireless charge with the wireless backplate fitted, nothing happened. Tried 3 different wireless charging stands and no luck, but don’t have a spare wireless backplate to test. It worked perfectly on the last phone though.

Called carrier again, they’re now organising for a 3rd replacement handset to be sent out. 3rd time lucky?

 

Update 15/10/2013: 3rd phone arrived a few days ago, and it’s been perfect. Wireless charging works. 3G/4G is fine. Not a single unexpected reboot or freeze. Bluetooth hasn’t dropped out at all. I’m calling it as being faultless! An extra note for at least those in Australia – if it’s less than 30 days and you find your phone faulty, ring the carrier you got it from and ask for a replacement rather than a repair. They may offer the repair, but should do an instant swap if you ask. Otherwise, a repair can take weeks.

3rd time IS lucky!

 

HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 – Real World Usage

Posted on by Adam Fowler

You may have read my previous blog post, covering an initial overview of the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8. I’m still very happy with the hardware as a whole, but had some issues in updating firmware using the Intelligent Provisioning OS. First, if you want to get the latest (at time of writing) version of Intelligent Provisioning 1.40, you can download a 921mb ISO of it it from here: hp.com

My home internet is rather slow, and I think this was the main issue with the firmware update process timing out. I decided to download an iso of all firmware for the server called HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2013.09.0 (B), which you can also download from here: hp.com – note you have to sign up for a hp account first, and the download is 2.9gb.

I was able to install Windows Server 2012 R2 using Intelligent Provisioning, which nicely installs all the required drivers without you having to think about it and that worked perfectly.

Getting the lid of the case off and on was very simple to do, just two thumb screws at the back lets you lift the entire sides and top off in one piece. You can access pretty much everything internally you need to at that stage due to the convenient design.

Next up, by default the server can take 4 x 3.5″ HDDS, and a 9.5mm CD/DVD drive. Luckily this means if you don’t need the CD/DVD drive, you can have an extra 2.5″ HDD as your OS install, leaving the other disks for your actual data. A good idea since you can use the remaining SATA port on the motherboard, but there’s no spare SATA power cable, as the CD/DVD drive uses the old style floppy disk power connector (as per the green arrow on the photo below). There’s a molex connection nearby (red arrow) so I pulled that through the gap, and added on a double adapter on the molex, then added a molex > sata adapter to finally get power to the extra hard drive.

WP_20130928_23_29_10_Pro

When I had a drive in the first bay, the server decided that was the preferred boot device. To fix that, I changed the boot order to use the second SATA controller first, as it seems the spare SATA port on the motherboard is connected to that. The first controller goes to the first two HDD bays, and they run at 6Gb/s, compared to the 3Gb/s of the 3rd and 4th bays plus the separate onboard SATA port. This is worth keeping in mind for what drives and data you plan to configure.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, there is a MicroSD slot on the motherboard as well as an internal USB port – neither are useful for a Windows OS unless you’re using Windows To Go. The MicroSD is a bootable device, but also it’s handy as a swap drive or pagefile. Other OS’s that support running off a USB such as ESXi can be used too.

The hard drive bays aren’t hot swappable (unless you buy a separate RAID card, put that into the single empty PCIe 2.0 slot, and connect the drive bay to that instead), but that’s not really a problem anyway. They are quite easy to use, so at least when you have to add or remove a hard drive, you won’t have any physical complications.

For the RAM, I first tried a few sticks of NON-ECC DDR3 sticks, but the server wasn’t happy with those (one was even HP branded). After putting in the first ECC stick I could find, it worked and was bumped up to 4GB. I’m not planning on running VM’s off this thing, so that’s plenty for me.

On the switch side of things, the HP PS1810-8G is a nice fit. Resting on top, it moved ever so slightly when pushed down on so I decided to put it below the server instead, and it is now rock solid. It’s fanless, so you won’t hear it. It can also be powered by PoE, which isn’t very useful in a small business environment, but would be useful if you had an upstream PoE switch – which in that case, you wouldn’t have this MicroServer on top or below it. Regardless, there’s no harm in it being there :) Either way, It runs at 7.2 W maximum, so it’s drawing even less power than many of the standard power saving  compact fluro bulbs.

hp switch

The web interface is plain but very useful with a decent amount of options.

Instead of running three separate network cables to the server, it is nice just to run one to the switch, then have three cables going up to both NIC ports and the iLO, which makes it much more self contained.

Over at GeekZone, Mauricio Freitas has also been playing with the HP server, and had a thread about it along with pictures. Worth having a look. I also found a thread at avforums.com which had more great info, and there seems to be a configuration consideration around trying to use the spare SATA port on board (used for the CD/DVD Drive) as a boot device when the HDD bays are fully populated. I agree with the fix of adding in a PCIe Sata controller, which will then let your extra hard drive be bootable. This in turn could allow you to attach an SSD to the 5th internal SATA port, and then with Windows Server 2012 R2’s tiering options you’d have a pretty decent HDD setup!

Pricing – there’s no RRP that I can find, but you’re looking around the $500 mark. Shop around of course.

So, it’s still a great bit of kit, but as with most things there’s a lot of considerations and adjustments to be made to make it fit exactly how you want – but that’s where the fun is.

HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 Overview

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Many of you would have heard of, if not used, one of HP’s ProLiant MicroServers. They are relatively cheap cubes of servery goodness, designed to do a much better job than just a standard desktop box. HP released a few months ago the Gen8 version which has a bunch of new features. Cosmetically I think it looks a lot nicer than the older models, and it’s also really simple and smooth to take apart. It’s also closer to being a proper cube than previous models, shorter and stockier.

WP_20130925_18_49_58_Pro

Why get this instead of a normal desktop? It’s low powered (150w), has two NICs onboard, Hot Swap hard drive bays (holding up to four drives, supporting 0/1/10 RAID), and an ILO 4 connector. For a small business, this means you’ll have your data on redundant drives, can double your throughput via the second NIC (NIC Teaming in Windows Server 2012 is awesome and easy) and if you can’t get to your server for some reason, the iLO 4 is HP’s Management Engine that will let you both monitor the server and connect to it, as long as you’ve got power and a network cable plugged into the ILO port. The iLO 4 interface has a lot of management options, and some interesting things like a 3d heat map!

temp

There’s even an Android and iOS App for iLO (screenshot from my Samsung Galaxy S3, using Remote Control) – just another cool little feature.

Ilo

I’m testing the Base Model rather than the Entry Model, detailed specs available here hp.com (check the Pre-configured Models)

  • Processor (1) Intel® Pentium® G2020T (2.5GHz/2-core/3MB/35W) Processor
  • Cache Memory 3MB (1 x 3MB) L3 cache
  • Memory 2GB (1 x 2GB) PC3-12800E DDR3 UDIMM
  • Network Controller HP Ethernet 1Gb 2-port 332i Adapter
  • Storage Controller HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i Controller
  • Hard Drive 500gb SATA2 (no hard drive standard, added on)
  • Internal Storage 4 LFF NHP SATA HDD cage; includes 4 LFF hard drive carriers
  • PCI-Express Slots 1 standard (1-Low Profile) PCIe 2.0
  • Power Supply 150W Non-Hot Plug, Non-Redundant Power Supply

Another nice features are a MicroSD slot on the motherboard – I’m still unsure if this can actually be used as a boot drive or not. Even if that’s not the case, next to the MicroSD slot is a USB port that you can plug a USB drive into for booting, seperate to your disks in RAID.  Then there’s HP Intelligent Provisioning which lets you stream your Firmware updates and  kick off OS installs, adding required drivers as part of the process hp.com – there’s a lot of other nice menu driven options in the Intelligent Provisioning system too (accessed by pressing F10 at startup) including diagnostic checks and modifying system settings.

One of the Operating Systems that this unit is designed to work well with, is Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials. For up to 25 users, there’s no other client access licenses required, but it must be the Active Directory Domain Controller. Officially supported Operating Systems are:

Microsoft Windows Server
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

As an aside, I was speaking to a colleague about the new MicroServer as he is running two of the older models at home – overall he was very impressed between the two models and the extra features this one has – but it does come with a bigger price tag. It’s much more of a proper business server than a business class desktop.

There’s a lot to cover about this kit, so in another post I’ll delve deeper into items like RAID and the optional HP PS1810-8G Gigabit switch which fits snugly below or on top the HP MicroServer hp.com. If you have any questions or anything you’d like tested, please comment below and I’ll do my best to include that in the next post. I’ll also be looking at how I’ve chosen to set it up for myself, including getting the Firmware updates working via Intelligent Provisioning, which I think is failing due to my slow 512k upload speed, being shared with other things going on.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention – you can have your HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 match your mood! Changeable front plates can match your outfit if required :)

c03896598

I’m rather impressed with this server – it would be even better if it had RAID 5 on board, but it’s designed really well for ease of access. Some online discussions I found have been around noise concerns, but I found the unit I have to be rather quiet.

Note: Hardware was supplied by HP and ivyworldwide for this review

Update: I’ve also published an article on Real World Usage of this server http://www.adamfowlerit.com/2013/09/30/hp-proliant-microserver-gen8-real-world-usage/

System Center 2012 Configuration Manager SP 1 Cumulative Update 3

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Last Friday (18th September 2013) Microsoft released CU3 For SCCM 2012 SP1. This has a few little fixes, but the most important part is the addition of Windows 8.1 support.

Information about the update, and the hotfix itself is available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2882125/en-us

The install is required on Primary and Secondary sites, but not Distribution Points. It’s actually quite a nice installer and does the standard pre-requisite checks and has links to deployment instructions. It’s recommended to close all consoles, but a reboot of the server isn’t required (it will shut down a bunch of services anyway, so consider it an outage). Funnily enough, the installer says to restart your computer at the end also.

sccm2

As part of the install, it will ask if you want to create packages to install the updated client, the console and server. With the push towards Applications rather than Packages you think they’d do both, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Note that you can’t update a standalone install of the console with this update, you’ll need to either deploy it, or manually run it. The install file should be located at “\\yourSCCMserver.yourdomain.com\SMS_PAA\hotfix\KB2882125\AdminConsole\i386” and the install string: “msiexec.exe /p configmgr2012adminui-sp1-kb2882125-i386.msp /L*v %TEMP%\configmgr2012adminui-sp1-kb2882125-i386.msp.LOG /q REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=mous”

You can take out the /q to actually see the install rather than waiting for msiexec.exe to disppear from your running processes :) I also needed to reboot after updating the console.

The install process went without a hitch for me, hopefully you’ll experience the same.

Thanks to @sam1310 for alerting me to this update.

Update: To clarify, this patch is for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 management, not deployment.

To officially deploy Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 you still need SCCM 2012 R2. This explains it quite well: http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2013/09/23/windows-8-1-management-path/

 If you are still running System Center Configuration Manager 2007, the SCCM Team has announced that they will be providing an update for Windows 8.1 (and Server 2012 R2) to make them fully supported clients. However, just as Windows 8 there will be no support for Operating System Deployment.

 

Also from Technet:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configmgrteam/archive/2013/09/16/support-questions-about-win-8.1-and-winsvr-2012-r2-for-configmgr-and-endpoint-protection.aspx

 Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2

As with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1, we are adding the following operating systems to our client support matrix in Configuration Manager 2007 with SP2 (includes Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and Configuration Manager 2007 R3):

  • Windows 8.1 Pro
  • Windows 8.1 Enterprise
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

Note: Though these will be fully supported as clients, there is no plan to add support for deploying these as operating systems by using the Configuration Manager 2007 operating system deployment feature. Also, no site servers or site systems will be supported on any version of Windows Server 2012 R2.

Upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 Experience

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Windows 8.1 has RTM’d! Now that it’s available on TechNet (R.I.P.) and MSDN, I thought I’d try an inplace upgrade from my home Windows 8 Enterprise machine to Windows 8.1 Pro.

The first thing I did after downloading an ISO was to use the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to make a bootable USB for Windows 8.1 which is incredibly easy. Then after launching the setup.exe from the USB, I was first greeted with a screen asking for a key:

keyA bit strange that an update needs a new key, but once you enter it,  it will run a quick online check before letting you continue.

It’s zero touch from there, it’ll do it’s magic and get to the end, asking you for your Microsoft ID similar to the original Windows 8 way. A very easy upgrade process!

From here on in, it’s going to be a list of issues and comments I had:

  • The first thing I did was run Windows Update – which took about 15 minutes then came back with an error. I tried again and there were updates this time – I’ve done this on a fresh Windows 8.1 build and had similar results, so I’m guessing it’s not something you should do straight away :)
  • Next it didn’t detect my video card properly as I was stuck at a lower resolution and only 1 of my 2 screens, so I had to download the Nvidia graphics driver. There’s already Geforce drivers for Windows 8.1 in beta, so I grabbed them and they seemed to install fine, brining me back to 2 monitor glory.
  • Now that I have a start button, I can right click on it and get a handy menu. Strangely, once this menu is on screen you can’t move your cursor to your other screen… unless you move the cursor really fast! Moving it slow gets you stuck on the edge of the screen, but rapidly move the mouse and your cursor will jump over the other side. Coming back to the first screen is exactly the same, weird!
  • Right clicking on a file in Windows Explorer was fine, but if the contents of the folder you’re in change, the menu disappears. This is rather frustrating if you’ve got a program making changes to files in a folder. I’m hoping this one is a bug.
  • The default bright yellow background I received wasn’t overly pretty, but being able to set the desktop and new Windows 8 interface backgrounds the same makes for a less jarring change between the two modes. You can set this under Taskbar and Navigation properties, Navigation tab, Show my desktop background on start.
  • Also under the Navigation tab is ‘Show Start on the display I’m using when I press the Windows logo key – another good option to enable so the new full screen start menu shows on the screen you’re currently looking at.
  • Having to install all your programs again is a bit annoying (the data of the programs isn’t lost in the upgrade, so you can either install over the top or hopefully just run the exe file depending on the program)
  • Hints pop up randomly telling you how to switch windows or some other tip. A good idea.
  • The latest Java is incompatible with IE11 at the time of writing this (IE11 gives a warning saying “Several add-ons aren’t compatible with Internet Explorer’s enhanced security features and have been disabled”) , but you can still use other browsers.
  • My Computer in Windows Explorer is now called “This PC”. I guess that makes sense, but you can rename it if you don’t like it just as you could before.

That’s all I’ve hit so far, I’ll update this post with any other unexpected or interesting finds.