notnow

Hello. We have 66 Dell Instant I-AP225 access points (Rebadged Aruba I-AP) in a cluster (No Controller). We have always had strange issues with connectivity since they were installed in the summer and this half term we have managed to spend some time with the system trying to tweak it. We have updated to the latest firmware and we have noticed that the management interface does not show the same 2.4Ghz channel on the AP the clients can see on the AP. If I reboot all the APs then the channels are reported correctly on the management interface for an hour or so and then they start to drift apart due to the dynamic adjustments. This happens on random APs with random master APs so there is not a pattern. There is no channel bonding and we have tried setting "client aware" on and off. In my tiny mind this is going to confuse the Automatic Radio Management unless it works in some mysterious way I can't work out. Does anyone else see APs on different channels to the management interface on Dell/Aruba Instant APs or is it just us? Regards, Richard.

Hi Ant, We used to get this issue a lot on our old Aruba system so it is not specific to Meru. I can't prove it but I have a feeling many odd issues disappeared when we recreated a lot of our group policies from scratch that had been around since Windows XP/2003. Worth a try on your Wi-Fi policy and check the settings if you haven't already done this. Regards, Richard.

The new Linx 10.1 Windows 8.1 pro tablet (education edition) arrived this morning. It does indeed have Windows 8.1 Pro 32 on it and to answer the previous questions it reports a disk drive of 29 GB. This is the stock build and is broken into 100MB EFI, 24GB C:\drive and a 4.88GB recovery partition. There is 19.98GB free on the C:\ drive. Currently all working exactly as you would expect and I am about to patch it with about 370MB of updates...

There isn't a link as far as I know as it was only made available to the reseller as a special education build, at least that is what I was told. You can't get these as Win8.1 Pro version tablets from anywhere but the reseller. "Insight" is the reseller I was using in this instance. However, I only have their word for it that it is exclusive to them. @jamiehill1231 - My team were not able/didn't have time/lost the will to fix any of the issues described which was why I got back to the reseller. I haven't had the replacement yet so I can't tell you how much space is left on the 32GB drive. I'll post back info when I have the replacement given the interest shown here.

For info. The reseller that I used to buy our evaluation Linx 10.1 tablet has just informed me that there are 2 versions of the 10.1 tablet. A consumer version running hamstrung Windows 8.1 with Bing and an education version which is running Windows 8.1 Pro. Apparently they are the same price. I only found this out as it turns out we had the wrong version and our reseller is now ordering the correct one to replace it. We had the same problems as everyone here with screen orientation, power and network card drivers when we tried to rebuild it with normal a Windows 8.1 build. If the Windows 8.1 Pro version works as it is supposed to and then this little tablet PC looks very interesting.

Depending on quantities and what I am buying I can purchase PCs via a consortium or directly from a supplier and the direct route is generally the same price or cheaper. However the hassle of going through a consortium or a tender to European standards and the regulations you have to abide by do add a hidden cost it's difficult to quantify. Stone aren't cheap which is a surprise being as they use cheap components and cases, presumably leading to the higher than expected failure rates we have seen (5% requiring a call out fix on the Stone PCs in the first year compared to less than 0.2% on the business class HP and Dell PCs). The big manufacturer PCs are much higher quality and generally cheaper but only if you go direct. If you are going to a reseller then you probably pay more unless that reseller asks for a "special bid" from the manufacturer. The only gotcha I have learned is not to buy Dell PCs at the beginning of their sales quarter as you can't get as good prices as at the end of the quarter. The HP PCs tend to be more consistent prices throughout the year.