Tuesday, October 3, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast, pear banana smoothie. Student computing committee meeting. Preferred e-mail address followup. Barracuda followup. Distributed final list of students to staff. Listserv updates for Claire. Today Joel brought in some snack platters he made himself for Pollyanna's last day this Friday. A variety of vegetables, green apple slices, fig-wrapped proscuitto, crackers, hummus, pita bread, goat cheese. He's good like that. Helped student MKS with connecting an iPaq to our wireless network. Lunch with Joel at You See Sushi. Purchased additional licenses for network scanning to the Brother MFC-5440CN. Installed network scanning software for two workstations. Dinner at home with Patrick: flank steak strips over salad, bread and margarine. Troubleshot problems with the SMC SMCWPS-G print server and the Brother HL-5250DN laser printer. Here's what I discovered. When I called technical support for Brother a man with an Indian accent answered the phone. We spent about 15 or 20 minutes together trying to resolve my problem: the default password did not work when attempting to access the embedded web server after having successfully set up the device using the Windows-only PSAdmin application that SMC includes on the CD-ROM. He eventually said that if I could not get it to work when connecting the print server directly to my computer with an ethernet cable and going to http://192.168.0.10 then I should return it to the store. I said it's been more than 30 days and the store was not likely to take it back but he insisted they would and he also said if that happened I should call him back. Turns out if I did a factory reset and did not use PSAdmin for setup then going to the embedded web interface worked as expected. I simply didn't bother setting a password on the embedded web server to prevent access problems, and it's inside my local network so I'm not worried. If anything did happen, I can simply factory reset it again. And the WPA2 encryption does work as expected—this was the main reason I bought this device. The embedded web interface duplicates the functionality of PSAdmin. And the embedded web interface seems to work better than PSAdmin except that every changed setting requires a restart of the print server—very tedious and time-consuming when you're setting things up initially and changing a lot of settings. They didn't provide a way for it to save all your changes amongst the different tabs and then restart the print server when you're done changing settings. However, everything is now working again—I can print successfully and wirelessly (remotely) from all 4 computers. I'll wait another day or two before deeming this setup completely fixed since last time I encountered printing problems after one night without changing anything. Another interesting thing I discovered was that we tried 24-pound paper this time around—OfficeMax OM44008. 24-pound paper is harder to find, and 20-pound is much more common. When printing simplex pages, this 24-pound paper does not curl like the other office paper we tried before. However, when I tested duplex printing, it did curl, but in the opposite manner of the previous paper—instead of curling lengthwise, it curls widthwise. It doesn't curl as much as the 20-pound paper did when printing only simplex, so I'm a little disappointed to say that I'm going to keep this printer as long as the SMC wireless printer server also works out. (If the 24-pound paper curled as bad as the 20-pound paper, I had vowed to return the printer.) I realized for the first time tonight that my journal entries are showing up on sneeper's livejournal friends page—neat and creepy! Well, not creepy really. But you know what I mean. Late meal: leftovers.