JetDirect Card not recognized (fix)

HP Jetdirect cards are often do not recognised to the same old failure- cold solder joint under big ARM processor mounted by BGA technology on the PCB.
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers use several models of network cards with same typical failure after several years of work. Those are cards HP Jetdirect 600N, HP JetDirect 615N, HP JetDirect 610N


Easy fix with almost no tools available:

1. You get hair dryer and heat BGA chip for 10-15 minutes
2. Let it cool slowly without moving.
3. Test it in the printer.
4. Leave comment including model of your card and printer here.

Usually those 3 steps are enough to make it work again.

If you are for example graduate student and have wonderful toys to play around such as temperature controlled furnace you can do the following:

1. Remove white plastic top plate with name of the card on it.
2. Place card horizontally the way it suspended in air inside furnace (see picture)
3. Heat it to temperature of 160C (320F) for 15-20 minutes
4. Let it cool without touching
5. Test it in printer.
6. Leave comments here including model of your card and printer.

Good luck champions! :-)

Install Midnight Commander (mc) on FreeBSD

It is quite easy to do from packages.

sudo pkg_add -r mc

and you ready to roll :-)

it will install all dependencies which you can see:



# pkg_info


gamin-0.1.10_4      A file and directory monitoring system
gettext-0.18_1      GNU gettext package
gio-fam-backend-2.24.1_1 FAM backend for GLib's GIO library
glib-2.24.1_1       Some useful routines of C programming (current stable versi
libiconv-1.13.1_1   A character set conversion library
libslang2-2.2.2_1   Routines for rapid alpha-numeric terminal applications deve
mc-4.7.2_1          Midnight Commander, a free Norton Commander Clone
pcre-8.02           Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library
perl-5.10.1_1       Practical Extraction and Report Language
pkg-config-0.23_1   A utility to retrieve information about installed libraries
png-1.4.3           Library for manipulating PNG images
python26-2.6.5      An interpreted object-oriented programming language

Update FreeBSD 8.0 to FreeBSD 8.1 on VPS (binary)

If your hosting provider was lazy and told you that you cannot get 8.1 yet but 8.0 is available updating is your fast and one choice.

I should not that it is a best option to update on brand new system since it is much easier than dealing with dependences later.

We will explain how to do binary update vs compiling custom kernel and ports since it will save your time and some space on your virtual box. This will be done in 3 easy steps followed by reboot!

First:

freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.1-RELEASE

This command will download all the necessary files and verify what needs to be installed/merged/replaced.

Second:

feebsd-update install

This command will actually install/merge/replace all the necessary files. Once complete we will need to reboot before continuing.

reboot

Third:

freebsd-update install

to finish updating the userland components.

Congratulations on your new FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE VPS box!