Tag: Dell

Reworking a Dell Latitude XT in 2024

Intro

I had an old Dell Latitude XT (first generation) in my posession since... quite a long time. One of the first tablet/convertible laptops by Dell, released in 2007.

It was quite a nice machine, but it suffered from multiple issues. On the one hand, the ULV Core2Duo and internal 1 GB of DDR2 memory are nothing to write home about - but the biggest problem in my opinion - is the used mass memory, a 1.8' 5400 rpm harddrive. And no, you read correctly - 1.8'. What's that? Thats basically the size and model of HDDs used in Apples iPods: They are awfully slow and even more prone to break.

Actually, I used this laptop quite a lot during my masters studies - and I had it breaking 2 drives in a short amount of time. I used it during a space campaign later, but after that it started to develop Read/Write Errors again and I shelved it - until now.

1.) RAM

The easiest thing to "solve" is the memory issue, solve - however - is a big word. You can extend the memory to a total of 3 GB by plugging in another SO-DIMM DDR2 667 MHz module, but sadly thats it. The CPU can address a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, but as 1 GB of RAM is already soldered to the mainboard - well, it ends with that upgrade, sadly. I had really hoped someone would have tinkered around with the BIOS and found out how to extend the memory by accepting 4 GB modules or such, but I have not found anything on the web - if you got something, please let me know :).

2.) CMOS battery

Being that old, (2008-03-26) the CMOS battery has long been dead. Sadly, the usual issue arrives - the laptop quickly turns on - then shuts off and does not boot. The first thing to do is to remove the keyboard bezel and keyboard - to be able to remove the battery altogether to allow the system to boot again. Removing the battery reveals that it has three connector pins: 2 GND and 1 VCC pin. Removing the shrink wrap shows its just an ordinary Panasonic CR2025 cell:

So, creating a new battery is very easy. As I did not have another CR2025 at hand with solder tabs, I just took a new CR2032, put the soldering iron to 420 Degrees Celsius and quickly soldered the connectors directly to the battery. But be careful, you need to be very quick to not damage the coin cell.

In the end I put it in shrink wrap...

... but I found out that the battery got too thick to be inserted beneath the keyboard. So I ended up in soldering ground directly to the GND terminal of the battery and the positive terminal to the side of the battery case - and keeping the solder as low profile as possible. As the shrink wrap also added too much height I put it into kapton tape.

Good thing - it worked out in the end :).

3.) Harddrive replacement

Getting a new harddrive for the ZIF PATA socket would be quite expensive - and the 1.8' drives will be slow and fail anyway after some time. So I looked for alternatives. There are ZIF Sdcard connectors, but they are also expensive and while Sdcards can be faster, they are still not a good memory media for hosting the OS of an Desktop computer. There are also ZIF SSD drives, but - again - very expensive. But the last thing I found was interesting: An ZIF to mSATA adapter for some bucks on one big online shop.

The most important parts of this adapter was that the ZIF socket did not correctly fit the original adapter cable from the Latitude XT and my mSATA SSDs passive components collided a bit with the adapter board, so the first thing I did was to use some kapton tape to make sure we will not create any short-circuit:

Then I lined up the original connector cable with the board, as shown, metal contacts up:

As written already, the original connector cable was "too thin" to be correctly grabbed by the ZIF socket, so I applied two strips of kapton tape to the backside of the connector to make it a bit thicker - this worked like a charm:

The last issue was that the drive was floating around the case - only dangling by the delicate ribbon cable. So I printed a little baseplate which would fit into the slot neatly:

Upon this baseplate I alligned the overall construct and made some notes so I could apply some doublesided tape...

... after I enclosed the new construct in the "rubber frame" I took off the hard disk drive and screwed it all into position.

Luckily it fit and even the old battery still had enough clearance to slide into position.

After that, I could use the SSD as any other internal harddrive and install Debian 12 on the system, which run quite well (the only exception were the lower touchpad mouse buttons and the very old Broadcom Wireless Card). The best part was the impressive speed the system now boasted - in contrast to the old clunky harddrive. Really nice!

4.) System Battery

Well, the main battery does still charge - but only to a certain degree until the battery icon starts blinking red and it becomes a bit... toasty. So, I took the battery out. Sadly the laptop is quite top heavy and tends to tipover if its used without the battery. There are still spare batteries around, but I wonder what the life expectancy of those would be, probably nothing fancy. I am thinking about dissassembling the battery and removing the cells, inserting some lead or other ballast to just have it in its original look (the main battery is an important part of the case which looks a bit... funny without it) and useability. But, thats something for later.

[Dell] Using the Update CDs to get Dell Servers to latest firmware

Dell has an very comfortable way of getting new firmware to nearly all of its server components: The bootable media / ISO or Update CDs. You can find them on this website and very useful. On a basic level, you pick your server, download the ISO, compare the MD5 checksum and burn the ISO onto a DVD. After that, you should get the Servicetag of your server and check for BIOS and iDRAC updates - these should be installed manually first. After that, boot from the DVD and let it install all the needed firmware. Basically, the DVD will cycle through all firmware of components ever installed in the series of your particular server and installs updates if needed. After another reboot, you're done :).

Thanks Dell for being so helpful to your users! 🙂

[Dell] T30 Intel AMT Blank Screen on Ubuntu Fix

The Dell T30 is an awesome little Homeserver, packing a punch with the Xeon E3-1225 V5 - and being affordable at about 399 €. It also comes with Intels Active Management Technology / AMT which is an extension of the horrible Intel Mangement Engine (which was all over the place months ago when some genius figured out how to stop that Man-in-the-Middle-always-on chip with some simple commands) - but quite useful - nonetheless. The good thing about this, is that it acts like an DRAC (Dell) / ILOM (Sun) / IPMI (Supermicro) card - so it is an KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse, not the virtualization thingy this time, sorry ;)) extension which allows you to control the server via network as if you were plugged in directly.

There is an awesome guide from Christian on goNeuland, written in German on howto setup that thing without the need to buy VNC Viewer Plus.

However, my Ubuntu instance came in as blank screen after successfully connecting to the system. In the end, that turned out to be that way, as Ubuntu decided to deactivate the graphics unit - due to no monitor being attached.

Different solutions were talked about here, here and here.

In my case, following helped:

1.) Open your grub, i.e. sudo vi /etc/default/grub file

2.) Add nomodeset to your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line, so that it would read i.e. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="reboot=force bootdegraded=true nomodeset" (your commands will vary!)

3.) Save and close the file

4.) Update grub via sudo update-grub

And after a quick reboot, everything worked out :)!

[Dell] PowerConnect 2824 Switch

The Dell PowerConnect 2824 is an oldie but goldie 24 port Gigabit Managed Switch (with ports 23/24 being shared ports like on the Cisco 3560 PoE 8 - which have Gigabit Cooper Ports as well as SFP ports - but you can only use one at  a time :)).

You can get them for about 80€ / delivered on eBay as used products and they are qualitywise very good and got an reasonable (although ugly) webinterface as well as SNMP and the usual stuff. They can work as managed or unmanaged switch, which can be switched via the "Mode" port on the front (holding it for less than 7 seconds during operation, it switches the Mode, longer than that -> reset).

To clean a newly acquired switch:

  • Connect to Serial port via Null Modem Cable, 9600, 8, None - the usual
  • Powercycle switch
  • An "Autoboot in 2 seconds" will show up. Press ESC during that time to enter a special menu
  • Enter 2 to "Erase flash file" and enter config to delete the config file. Press ESC to exit and boot
  • You will see that the switch will be boot in Unmanaged Mode, and the "Managed" LED will turn off. Now Press the Mode switch for about 5 seconds, and it will turn to Managed Mode
  • You can now setup the switch via Serial Console, or just wait 60 seconds for it to start up with the default values: 192.168.2.1 as HTTP Interface and admin as username - no password

The latest Firmware for this Switch 1.0.0.45, A07  (more exactly Software Version 1.0.0.45 / Boot Version 1.0.0.13) can be downloaded here: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/powerconnect-2824/drivers - you can update this Firmware via TFTP or Web Interface, you will find the option under System -> File Management -> File Download and need to switch to "Download via HTTP" to Upload the Firmware files (Boot Code = rfb, Software Image = ros) via the Web Interface and then reboot / reset the Switch (System -> General -> Reset)

On word of advise if you want to use this system with VLANs - which works a treat: Switch -> VLAN -> VLAN Membership. Chose you VLAN ID, give it a name and then click on the Switch Picture the Ports to the correct mode. Just a grey field means nothing, T means the VLAN comes on this port as VLAN tagged, U means untagged.

To put this into perspective: Grey - No connection, U - this port can directly be connected to a PC or other equipment and got the VLAN as native / vanilla LAN on its port, T - it is tagged and good to transport of multiple VLANs / i.e. trunks.

Trunk config would be like that, i.e. Port 3 of the switch. With 3 vlans, I would go to my native VLAN 1 and set it to U, VLAN 2 to T and VLAN 3 to 3. From then on, I got VLAN 1 as native VLAN on the port and 2 and 3 tagged - and with that a nice little trunk to my i.e. Server.

Configurationwise, the Switch has some sensible defaults like Rapid Spanning Tree on all ports, Green Ethernet enabled. You should maybe remove all Community Strings from SNMP and disable it, if you would not use it and set some secure password. Other than that, good to go :)!

[Ubuntu] PERC6/i on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

To use the PERC6/i i.e. the

03:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 1078 (rev 04)

on Ubuntu, megacli is the best tool - but rarely available due to the demise of LSI Logic. Good thing that the guys from https://hwraid.le-vert.net put together a nice repo to host the latest RAID files. And yes, for everyone that does not like the idea of including a foreign repo - sorry to disappoint here :/.

# Add GPG signatures
wget -O - https://hwraid.le-vert.net/debian/hwraid.le-vert.net.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

# Add Package Repo
echo "deb http://hwraid.le-vert.net/ubuntu xenial main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hwraid.list

# Upgrade and Install
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install megacli

After that, megacli is installed and can be used:

# Basic Commands
# Info Controller
sudo megacli -AdpAllInfo -aAll
sudo megacli -CfgDsply -aALL

# Info Virtuelles Laufwerk
sudo megacli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL

# Info Battery
sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL

I picked out the most important infos for me and wrote this little script

#!/bin/bash

echo "Some Infos are commeted out in this script to not overwhel the user ;)"

#echo "----------------------- RAID Controller"
#sudo megacli -AdpAllInfo -aAll

#echo "----------------------- RAID Controller Config"
#sudo megacli -CfgDsply -aALL

echo "----------------------- RAID Battery"
#sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL
sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL | grep "Battery State:"
sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL | grep "Charger Status:"
sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL | grep "Relative State of Charge:"
sudo megacli -AdpBbuCmd -aALL | grep "Next Learn time:"

echo "----------------------- RAID Virtual Drive"
#sudo megacli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL
sudo megacli -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep "State"

echo "----------------------- RAID Harddrive Status"
sudo megacli -CfgDsply -aAll | grep "Drive has flagged a S.M.A.R.T alert"

 

Additional infos can be found on:

http://erikimh.com/megacli-cheatsheet/

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wiki/MegaRAID_Controller_mit_MegaCLI_verwalten

[Dell] BIOS Upgrade on a Dell Precision T1500

Hi there, I just got hands on an old Dell T1500 workstation. It is not the beefiest monster - but still kicking. And I got it for a bargain :). So, while I was refurbishing it, I wanted to do an BIOS upgrade, like usual. Turned out, Dell only offers a combined "DOS/WINDOWS" Upgrade File. I tried upgrading via an FreeDOS USB Stick, created with Rufus, however - it failed. Ok, lets try Windows: I installed Windows 8.1 x64 - and the tool "worked" - however, even after reboot, nothing had changed. Reset CMOS, Load Default in BIOS, nothing. Darn... Well.. All the Dell support stuff for this machine was around Windows 7-ish versions, so I thought "last chance" 😉 - and yes! It worked:

You need to install Windows 7 x64 and upgrade the Bios 2.0.2 to 2.4.0 via your Windows install. DOS seems to be not working - and Windows 8.1 won't work either. Also for good measure, load the default settings before upgrading and leave all other settings (especially the disabled fancy CPU stuff!) untouched.

Also, you'll see directly if it works: During the Win 7 upgrade, it disabled the USB mouse I was using and it took way longer. On Windows 8.1 - I could move the mouse as I wished. Oh, and one last thing: Administator rights, please ;).

ESXi 3.5 on Dell Optiplex 745

- Exchange oem.tgz on root of ESXi 3.5 Install CD with new oem.tgz
- Install with CD with OEM Community Version or IC8 oem.tgz  (SATA on Normal Mode)
- Boot from Knoppix 5.1, copy OEM.tz onto hda5 / Hypervisor Partition  (SATA on  Legacy Mode)
- Boot, works!

Hints:
- Use UltraISO und BurnISO to modificiate / burn the stock ISO
- http://www.vm-help.com./esx/esx3i/customize_oem_tgz.php