TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

As previously described, my Xperia X10i sometimes refuses to reconnect to WIND Home after trips outside of the WIND zone.  Seems the phone gets confused as to which network to try. The 'trick' of recycling the SIM card through another phone - GSM or AWS - does work.  I've managed to fix my card a few times that way. Today I stumbled on a better way that doesn't involve a second handset. 1.  Go to launcher and start "SIM Toolkit". 2.  My version has "English", "French", and "Roaming Setting".  Select "Roaming". 3.  Tap "Select Visited Network". 4.  Reselect "Roaming Setting". 5.  Tap "Automatic". The Xperia should re-acquire WIND Home at this point. Note your handset may be sluggish for a minute, as it "catches up" to the changes that happened while it was offline. Hopefully this saves somebody some grief.

After hours of research, I decided to get a Samsung Vibrant (T-Mobile version) for my wife to work on WIND. Shortly after, I found the Vibrant can have an issue where it doesn't pick up WIND Home properly.  You have to manually lock it to WIND Home, which disables WIND Away i.e. roaming. My wife won't know how to do this, so this is a big problem. Bell has the Vibrant.  I calculated out WIND vs. Bell, and it's around $200-$300 higher at Bell depending on how long you go (1, 2 or 3 years).  Not overwhelming, especially if it fixes the network problems and gives her transparent roaming when she does the occasional travelling. But here's the kicker - the Bell version has problems too!  Many Vibrant owners have complained that to keep the phone from randomly locking up several times a day, you have to lock the phone to 850 MHz only.  Sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it? Maybe Froyo fixes this, I don't know yet.  Samsung took forever to push out Froyo an...

Yes, my Xperia X10i still gets into a state where it refuses to connect to WIND after it loses the network. This is incredibly annoying.  I don't travel enough to remember to shut off the phone when going outside the city.  Yet if I don't, I lose my connection until I get home and cycle my SIM through my old phone. Sony will never fix it.  They're releasing the Arc, which spells the end for X10 support, and have already said they're leaving Xperia phones stuck on Android 2.1 with no possibility for upgrades.  Certainly not upgrades to fix 'minor' bugs to fringe AWS-enabled models to correct problems with a few country-specific regional networks. But you know what?  I stopped caring once I found out about the HTC Pyramid and Samsung Galaxy S II.  These are the Droid X-like Android monsters I have always wanted but could never get.  And they're both AWS-enabled for T-mobile. Mockups have already told me that I can live with a 4.3" phone, but a 5...

Although I suspected my storage server power supply wasn't up to the task, I nevertheless went ahead and loaded up the last 3 drives for a total of thirteen live drives, two hot spares and one cold spare.  The installation went really well, so I started the migration process and was about to stop worrying about it.  However, during the migration a drive went and got some power problems, and ended up disconnecting both itself and a second drive from the array. After several hundred error messages, I finally got down and removed the bad drive, but the damage was done - I now had a RAID6 volume in the middle of a migrate operation with two drives missing.  The 3ware manual is silent on what happens in this case - it only says the migration process may not be aborted. Kudos to the 3ware engineers, though.  The 9650SE not only went ahead and completed the migration on the degraded array, it then immediately picked up the two hot spares and began a full rebuild....

I've had the Moxa Uport 407 for a while now.  Not sure why I didn't write about it before, guess it slipped my mind. I got it because I needed a real powered USB hub.  Not these rinky-dink pieces of crap you see everywhere from Best Buy to Memory Express, that purport to deliver 500 mA per port out of a 300 mA AC adapter. (Seriously, what is it with USB and powered hubs?  Do people really have to put up with that crap?  Or do people basically not care?  Probably the latter, as 99% of the people have no problems and don't know any better.) Anyway, I cared because my USB peripherals were not behaving properly.  I'd lose communication with my CD printer (A fantastic little Primera Z1, by the way, too bad they're discontinued), or my scanner, or whatever - randomly.  The final straw was getting a Thermaltake BlacX USB drive dock that kind of crashed the whole thing. So, after much reading, I went with the Moxa.  Yes, they're expensive.  ...

I got these for my home server.  I knew I was taking a bit of a chance because of the mixed reviews, but I bought one module to try out. These units are fine, IMHO.  They do what they're supposed to do, and are well made.  They're not crap is what I'm trying to say. Yes, they could possibly be stronger, but what couldn't?  If you're not stupid, and handle your stuff with reasonable care anyway, you will have zero problems with these units.  They're not junk and work just fine, thank you very much. You will want to try them out in your case first, if possible.  They are large and need additional depth, plus the side panel design might not be compatible with some cases.  In my case, the server uses drive rails, and these bays work fine. I bought four of these, plus one 4-in-3 bay (MB674SPF-B).  I have this giant, old doublewide server case that nobody has ever been able to identify, and it has four bays on the left and ten on the right, plus...

As there's not much in the way of information on this, here's a brief guide towards expanding your RAID array on the Escalade 9650 series controllers using 3ware Online Capacity Expansion and OpenSUSE 10.1. Note that you can also use this to migrate between RAID5 and RAID6, assuming you have the correct number of extra drives. 0.  Back up everything.  [May be hard with big arrays - consider using a USB drive dock.] 1.  Hook up your new drive(s).  Usual disclaimers about not hot-swapping, etc, apply. 2.  Log in to 3DM2 at http://192.168.1.111:888/ 3.  Go to Management/Maintenance. 4.  Check your main RAID array and press "Migrate". 5.  Check the drives you want to add.  Select the correct RAID type (RAID5 or RAID6) and stripe size (64k stripe is default).  Press OK. 6.  Wait for migration.  Can take a while. 7.  Reboot to remount new RAID volume.  The OS will not see the expansion yet. 8.  Bac...