Accessing the RAID setup on an HP Proliant DL380 G7

When the HP Proliant DL380 G7 boots up the only displayed BIOS options are F9 for Setup, F11 for the boot disk menu, but neither other these take you to the RAID setup. To get to the RAID setup options, when the screen appears showing the F9 and F11 options press F8 every second or so, and you’ll first get the ILO configuration. Exit ILO, and next you’ll get the RAID configuration options. I found this tip mentioned in this post on the HP forums here.

My DL380 G7 has the HP R410i RAID controller card. Here’s step by step getting to the RAID settings:

First from the ILO settings, Exit from the File menu:

After exiting ILO you get the RAID controller options – press F8 for the Arrays Utility:

Now in RAID settings, create your Logical Drive from your available physical drives:

Here I have added 2 500GB drives to a RAID 1+0 array:

Configuring Ubuntu to access a wireless HP printer

hplip is an opensource project to support multiple HP printers on Linux. On Ubuntu 12.04 I already had this installed, but running ‘sudo hp-setup’ gave me this error:

kev@ubuntu:~$ sudo hp-setup

HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.12.2)
Printer/Fax Setup Utility ver. 9.0

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

warning: Qt/PyQt 4 initialization failed.
error: hp-setup requires GUI support (try running with --qt3). Also, try using interactive (-i) mode.

A quick Google turned up this post, and installing hplip-gui installed the missing libraries and got me up and running.

sudo apt-get install hplip-gui

Starting up hp-setup again and following the wizard to point to the IP of my printer was all I needed to get my printer working.

$99 HP TouchPads find the sweetspot

Despite being cancelled by HP and knowing that there won’t be any future upgrades or support, with the price lowered to $99 to clear the remaining unsold stock the TouchPads have been flying off the shelves.

The reason the product wasn’t selling wasn’t the product itself, it’s just that it was priced too high. With a lower price, and even despite the fact that the product has been discontinued with no future support or upgrades, the $99 price point for a tablet has the things flying off the shelves. That has to be a marketing lesson for someone…