Category Archives: Hardware

ALESIS Products Reset Procedures

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alesis_logoSo, recently I was setting up a new rack of effects for processing vocals, and when I turned on my ALESIS Quadraverb … it was not working. Just a blank screen though the backlight was lit. What’s the point you ask?? I’m glad you asked that! In the process of troubleshooting my unit, I found a long list of reset procedures for lots of ALESIS products. So, I thought I’d post that list here for anyone that may need it. Plus, it’ll help make sure that this information doesn’t disappear by having it on another site. Here is the list:

  • ADAT – Power up while holding PLAY and RECORD. “Drum on” Hrs will not be reset
  • ADAT-XT – Power up while holding PLAY and RECORD. “Drum on” Hrs will not be reset
  • BRC – Power up while holding PLAY and RECORD
  • AI-2 – Power up while holding STORE. (Adat tape header information will also be cleared)
  • D4 – Power up while holding OUTPUT and VOICE.
  • DM5 – Power up while holding OUTPUT and VOICE
  • HR-16 – Power up while holding ERASE, DELETE, and RECORD
  • HR-16B – Power up while holding ERASE, DELETE, and RECORD
  • Midiverb III – Power up while holding INT PROG and STORE
  • M3 – Power up while holding BYPASS and PROG
  • Midiverb 4 – Power up while holding PROG and D
  • MMT-8 – Power up while holding ERASE, PAGE A and PAGE
  • QS6 Keyboard – Power up While holding number ZERO and THREE buttons
  • Quadrasynth – Power up while holding DATA buttons 1 and 4. Note that this only clears the edit Keyboards buffer. Currently there is no hard reset/re-initialization routine available.
  • Quadraverb – Power up while holding BYPASS and PROGRAM
  • Quadraverb GT – Power up while holding BYPASS and PROGRAM
  • Quadraverb 2 – Power up while holding PROGRAM and COMPARE. This is a soft reset (sets global to default, clears edit buffer but leaves user memory intact). Power up while holding PROGRAM, COMPARE and >BLOCK. This is a hard reset(set all functions to default and clears user memory).
  • S4/S8 Sound – Power up while holding DATA buttons 1 and 4. Note that this only clears the edit Modules buffer. Currently there is no hard reset/re-initialization routine available.
  • SR-16 – Power up while holding ERASE and PLAY
  • X2 Console – Power up while holding ALT, ERASE FWD, and DEC. This is a soft reset Factory mute parameters will be loaded into memory. Currently there is no user hard reset or Re-initialize routine available

This list was originally found on Sweetwater’s website, their page is here. If you have never bought anything from Sweetwater and you want or need music gear, those guys are amazing to work with. Their support after the sale is second to none in my humble opinion. I hope this list helps anyone that may need it!!!

NVIDIA Nerfs GPUs To Combat Crypto Mining

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nvidia-logoTo address the GPU market supply shortage, NVIDIA has now decided that they are not happy with people that use their GPUs for mining cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.). Trying to make some good PR in the process, they are saying that they (NVIDIA) are for gamers and they are trying to hurt the miner’s bottom line to dissuade them from buying GPUs. I for one don’t think they care about gamers or miners either way, they just want to look good so they can sell more cards (when they can get them in stock) and look better to the public and their shareholders.

So, what is going on? Well, if you have tried to purchase a GPU (a.k.a. video card or display adapter) any time recently, you have probably noticed that they are usually out of stock right away from vendors selling them new. Continue reading →

Arduino, wow, cool stuff!

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arduino_logo2I have recently become familiar with the Arduino project, an open source board and CPU design for hobbyists and beyond to build all sorts of neat things with. I have seen people build robots, remote controlled lawn mowers, music playing computer hardware and all kinds of things. I got myself one of these nifty boards because they are wicked cool to work with and not expensive at all. If you are into electronics, and/or love to or want to learn to code (in C and C++) then I highly recommend getting one of these boards and going to town. Being an open source project there are lots of resources on the web, and there is tons of information practically everywhere. I’ll be sharing what I know and learn and what I run into that helps like books and stuff. So stay tuned and come back to see what new pops up.

arduino

Oracle Sun Microsystems T2000 (and similar) ALOM/SC Password Recovery

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ServerSo today, I am working on a nice little Sun Microsystems T2000 server. It was purchased used by my customer and I am setting it up. Right away I ran into a snag, naturally, because I didn’t have the ALOM (Advanced Lights Out Management) or SC (System Controller) password for this machine go to this web-site. According to the person that sold the server, it was pulled from a working environment, the drives were wiped and it was sent out to be sold. This means that I had no way to get the old password from anyone, therefore I had to get past it myself.

Let me lay it out for you. In this situation you can’t really recover the password or see what it currently is. The only option at this point is to go in and clear out or erase the ALOM NVRAM so that you can then get access and setup a new password. In order to do this, you will need to connect your laptop to the serial management port. You can do this with a laptop or PC or whatever but for the sake of this article I am going to just use laptop. You will also need access to the power cords, because you are going to have to physically cut the power to the server to get started. OK, ready? Got everything in order? OK, let’s begin. Continue reading →

DVI De-Mystified – Dual-Link DVI versus Single-Link DVI Explained!

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DVI Dual vs SingleToday I was doing some spec hunting for my PC, trying to track down exactly what make, model and frequency were supported by the Wi-Fi card that came with my machine. As I was doing so, and eyeballing the rest of the specs, I ran across the information for my video card. One thing that caught my eye was the description of the video or DVI port. Specifically it mentioned that the DVI port was a ‘dual-link’ DVI port. Well now, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about computers, including hardware, but I hadn’t heard of a ‘dual-link’ DVI port before. Now, in my defense, I have spent the last many years concentrating on hardware by Sun, Hitachi, NetApp and the like. Things you will find in a full up data center, not at home in your desktop PC. I haven’t been knee deep in PC tech for a while, but I have kept up with most things.

So, naturally, I had to find out what ‘dual-link’ meant. I did some searching and found a wonderful article that explains what ‘dual-link’ is, what ‘single-link’ is, the differences between them and more. I am going to give you a brief summary (I don’t want to keep everyone in suspense), but I am also including a link to the original article, go read it and really get learned up.

Basically, the way I see it (the quick version) is like this:

  • Dual-Link DVI –
    • Has 24 pins in the plug instead of 18
    • It uses two TMDS digital signal transmitters instead of one
    • It can transmit data faster using 8 wires instead of 4
    • It can support much higher resolutions up to 2560×1600
    • There is an increase in signal quality and refresh rates

 

  • Single-Link DVI –
    • Has 18 pins in the plug instead of 24
    • It has one TMDS digital signal transmitter
    • It transmits data of 4 wires instead of 8
    • It cannot support resolutions beyond 1920×1200
    • Basic signal quality and refresh rates are observed

And there you have it, a run down of the basic differences between ‘dual-link’ and ‘single-link’ DVI. I think finding out and learning information like this is way cool. I love to learn new things and figure out how stuff works, it’s a lot of fun in my book – but then, more than a few people have called me crazy because a day of fun to me is sitting and coding all day! LOL

DVI All Types

DVI Plugs
All Types
(Click to enlarge)

DVI - All Types of Plugs

DVI Plugs
All Types
(Click to enlarge)

Now, for the sake of completeness, even though this doesn’t really apply to the dual-link or single-link question, I wanted to include another image or two that show other versions of the DVI plug. Since you are likely to run into one or all of these plugs out there somewhere, I figured you might want to know what you are looking at. These two pictures (click to enlarge), show you that aside from the digital DVI-D plugs, there are also DVI-I plugs that are analog and digital, plus some other older plugs. Of these older plugs, the Super-VGA there on the bottom is very common and one that you probably will see a lot. It was used for many years before the DVI option became common. I have seen many video cards that have DVI and VGA on the same card.

Check out the article on DVI dual-link versus single-link here.

Anoying RAID messages in logs on Debian

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Recently I ran into an odd recurring message in the log files of some 64-bit Debian servers I had setup, and although it wasn’t causing me any problems per se, I hate for things to just go on like that and not know why and what to do about it. Now, these were virtual machines (VMs on ESX 4), running the latest Debian Linux 64-bit, and therefore being virtual they had to specialized RAID hardware or anything like that dedicated to the servers themselves. The servers just had your regular virtual SCSI disks as if it was a physical box with single drives in it.

What I noticed in the logs was an error pertaining to mpt-statusd, and that it was detecting “non-optimal” RAID status. Well, duh, there’s no RAID in it! Of course it won’t be optimal. Here is what I was getting, and you can see from the time stamps of this snippet that I was getting quite a few:

Aug  3 18:58:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:08:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:18:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:28:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:38:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:48:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 19:58:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:08:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:18:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status
Aug  3 20:28:36 mail mpt-statusd: detected non-optimal RAID status

After I did some digging into this mpt-statusd package, I found that it’s main purpose is to check on the RAID status out of mpt and other controllers, which explains why it was complaining since as I said above, there was no RAID installed. Here is the full description of mpt-statusd:

“Description: get RAID status out of mpt (and other) HW RAID controllers The mpt-status software is a query tool to access the running configuration and status of LSI SCSI HBAs. mpt-status allows you to monitor the health and status of your RAID setup. Tag: role::program”

The fix for this is to uninstall mpt-status, assuming you don’t have RAID setup on your server. Once I removed the package, my log files where free from the unnecessary clutter!  I still don’t know what the trigger was that got it installed in the first place, but at least it was easy enough to remove once I found out I didn’t need it.