Recently i bought a CD player listed as broken on eBay, on it arriving, it read cd’s and played but the audio was broken up, distorted and the cd was skipping.
After some consideration i decided it could be the laser assembly, so i attempted to swap the transport with my other Sony CDP, alas i was foiled as the two transports are not interchangeable. However, the laser assembly is, so i did that.
Success i thought – except it wouldn’t read any cds, knowing this was a good laser, i did a bit of searching about and all i needed to do was adjust the laser focus by turning a small pot on the side of the assembly.
In the picture below under the large red letter ‘L’ is the adjustment pot, making minute adjustments to this and re-testing enabled me to fix the CDP back to full working order. Annoyingly i could have done this with the original laser assembly, and saved myself the bother of swapping them all about.
So theres your tip, if your CDP has started skipping or not reading cd’s, try adjusting the laser – if you’re resigned to getting rid of it anyway, you’ve got nothing to lose.
We got a couple of SRW248G4′s at work for the 100meg access ports and they’ve been a lot of trouble. For somthing claiming to be a ‘Buisness Class Device’ it really isn’t.
For starters, the web configure interface only works in IWE5.5 – 7 (note not IE8), it’s also slow and buggy. There is a workaround for IE8 where you limit the number of connections it makes to the server (your browser will make multiple connections to get better performance), but that is a workaround and not a fix.
So now you’re thinking ‘so what if the web interface is rubbish, we can just use the CLI’ well, you’d think that, but the CLI doesn’t give you access to all the configuration options making it pretty useless. That’s the same for Telnet, SSH and Serial/Console.
Software update 1.2.2b fixes some of the issues with the web interface – it certainly seems more reliable.
All of this was fine as i had them configured and they just sat there, the web interface occasionally crashing (but i’ve not seen that on the new software), until recently that is. Suddenly we started getting dead ports – now a total of 8 dead ports on one switch (i’m RMA’ing it).
So i thought i’ll export the config from switch one (running sw 1.2.1b) to switch to (sw 1.2.2b) and there wouldn’t be a problem. However the software doesn’t include any version checking on the config file, so it just resets back to factory. After manually migrating the config i was able to migrate all the hosts over to the apparently working switch.
Performing factory reset on the broken switch had no effect on the problem, although i did notice these errors in the log
%ERHG-F-SEND: BOXP_perform_smi_scan_of_devices_in_slot: invalid device type is found: 4523 on device 4 ***** FATAL ERROR ***** Reporting Task: ROOT. Sof
tware Version: 1. 2. 1b (date 31-Aug-2006 time 13:47:21) ***** END OF FATAL ERROR *****
%SYSLOG-F-OSFATAL: FATAL ERROR: GOAH: ABORT PREFETCH exception ***** FATAL ERROR ***** SW Version : 1. 0. 0. 24 Version Date: 31-Aug-2006 Version
Time: 13:47:21 Instruction 0x6f743d3c Exception vector 0xc Program state register 0×60000033 ***** END OF FATAL ERROR *****
Many many people are having problems with these switches, this switch has all the features required from a company now owned and run by Cisco, so i thought the support and quality would be up to Cisco standards. Obviously not, Cisco need to either fix these problems or they’re going to ruin their brand reputation (if they hadn’t re-branded it all as Linksys by Cisco and moved the support over they wouldn’t have this problem as it’s more clearly defined as a sub-company).
