Category: Hardware

Categories
Hardware

Rasberry Pi Print Server

Amazing!

I snagged this bundle and set-up my Pi using an existing 4GB micro SD card following this article.

But I ran into some trouble, I kept getting an error saying this file could not be found when using the Linux PPD driver for my printer (a Samsung ML-1740): /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertospl

I tried the universal print driver from here, but no dice! Frustrating… I hate having to turn my desktop on just to print. And, I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy something like this!

Fortunately my Google-foo skillz led me to this answer on StackExchange, and it saved my bacon. Thanks, Intarwebs.

After installing Splix I was able to select Samsung ML-1740, 2.0.0 as a print driver and it worked like a champ. Happy computing!

Categories
Hardware

Wired LAN woes & DD-WRT

Some DD-WRT firmware has a bug that prevents wired devices on your LAN from communicating with one another, this appears to be related to a VLAN configuration.

The fix:
Run this script on router start-up:
swconfig dev eth0 set enable_vlan 1
swconfig dev eth0 set apply

Many thanks to William Reading, I stumbled across this gem and it saved my bacon!

The story
So, you’ve got a nifty DD-WRT router on your home network, but wired devices can’t communicate with one another?

Here are the devices I used while troubleshooting:
* a wired desktop
* a wireless laptop
* a wired NAS
* my phone (on wifi)

The desktop could not ping the NAS, the laptop and phone could ping  each other (both on WiFi). The only time I could get the desktop to ping the NAS was when they were plugging directly into one another…but not very helpful for the long term!

The laptop could connect to the NAS…unless it was on a wired connection with the WiFi disabled. This is what finally tipped me off…I’m slow.

Things I tried that did not work (with the help and patience of Google):
* make a static ARP entry (I got an access denied message, just valid IP addresses of wired devices, even when I was an administrator)
* using Wireshark to hopefully find useful nuggets (while pinging, I saw that my ARP broadcasts were not getting a response)
* Resetting Winsock via netsh (no dice)
* Resetting my router to factory defaults (no dice)
* Statically addressing the NAS and my PC (no dice)

Categories
Hardware

The magic of checkdisk…be patient

Earlier today my desktop was suffering, it has two Western Digital 1TB disks (WDC WD10EXEX-60ZF5A0) and they were mostly at 100% in Task Manager. My system was crawling, the drives are mirrored, but I was still worried!

I ran “chkdsk /r” and rebooted at 10:00am…ten hours later my computer has risen from the ashes! Normal disk performance, baby!!!

Morale of the story? Be patient out there…happy computing.