HP printer back to its original problem.

[yogi]

USB hubs may not need drivers, but most likely in your case the Windows OS can't tell exactly what hardware is connected. The problem is in the USB firmware/software on the motherboard, or the hub itself giving a false ID. It's akin to Linux looking for a printer on the bus and finding it but cannot tell what model it is. Thus it tries to use the generic driver. The list of supported models needs to be updated, but the updates for Windows 7 these days are practically nonexistent. It's nearing it's end of life and Microsoft is pushing Windows 10. It might be worth updating the firmware for the motherboard. Intel, or in your case AMD, may have an updated version of the USB bus driver.

The connection to the worldwide web is generally via hard wire between a modem and the network. That modem in turn is often connected directly to a router. From there it gets complicated.

As you know most routers (but not all) have both hard wire and RF (WiFi) connectivity to the devices on your local network (LAN). Just having this much gives you the ability to directly communicate with all the devices connected to the router. The path is from Device-A to the router to Device-B. However, it is also possible to communicate peer to peer, i.e. Device-A directly connected to Device-B. This peer to peer device connectivity is what Bluetooth is.

I've seen people with an earphone and microphone plugged into their heads. There is a wireless connection from that earpiece to their cell phone via Bluetooth. This peer to peer connectivity gives the user the ability to walk along the street apparently talking to themselves. They are actually talking into the microphone built into the earpiece which is stuck in their ear. That, in turn, is tethered via Bluetooth to the smartphone in their shirt pocket or purse or wherever. Another example of Bluetooth connections would be wireless speakers. Your computer can output music to the wireless speakers directly without going through the router, thanks to Bluetooth. The most familiar use of Bluetooth is with wireless mouses and keyboards. Of itself neither Bluetooth nor WiFi connects you to the Internet. You need something else to get you there; such as a modem. But to the uninitiated it looks like a direct connection to the Internet.

My printer, with the web server built into it, is connected to my router via WiFi. It's just another device on my LAN, but it's a device that can bypass my control of how it communicates to the outside world. I could simply connect it directly to my computer via hard wired Ethernet (or USB cable), but then nobody else on the network would be able to use it. Well, not easily.

[Kellemora]

I only have one Router now, it has 8 ports plus WiFi.
Prior to buying it, I had two Routers, an 8 port, and a separate one for WiFi which plugged into the 8 port router.
The WiFi was only used for Debi's things in the house, like her Kindle, and Netbook, plus my Laptop I rarely if ever used.
But mainly for when we had company and they needed a WiFi connection.

I know I've mentioned this before, but I tried going WiFi to save having to replace the old CAT 5 LAN cable with CAT 6.
Even with putting a repeater up in my attic near a gable vent, so it was direct line of sight to my office, we never could get a solid connection.
One guy who installs WiFi in businesses said he could get it going for us. He messed around for a couple of hours with more expensive equipment than we had, and still could not get more than a 1 bar connection to my office.
Since he couldn't do it, there was no charge.

The odd thing is, I can bring up the WiFi here on the Silver Yogi and see several Routers on my street, some with excellent signal strength, but the few times I could see my own, it had less than a bar or bouncing between no bars and one bar.

I think I know why he had so much trouble. Although my house is concrete block/stucco/now with vinyl siding. All of the walls and ceiling inside the house have a layer of aluminum foil sandwiched between the layers of drywall. The ceilings have two layers of aluminum foil plus an air-gap between sheets of drywall. Sometimes a cell phone does not work in certain areas inside our house, like the bathroom. Underneath the tile and drywall, is a layer of aluminum foil, and under that a layer of plaster over metal mesh, over lath. It's the only room in the house that had a professional plaster job. The rest of the house was originally tongue and groove like Wainscoting, before it was removed and drywall put in it's place.

Still no word from the printer repair man.

[yogi]

Going to Cat 6 cable would reduce crosstalk and not degrade your signal over a long length of wire. Cat 5 cables are just as good for most applications. I think you are onto something with the theory of aluminum walls dampening your WiFi signals. The solution would be to place the repeater inside your office. You're welcome.

As I recall the Silver Yogi was shipped sans any WiFi capability. Apparently you changed that in the meantime.

I don't know why you are seeing your neighbors' networks, The carrier frequency is either 2.4 GHz or 5GHz; both being microwave and vulnerable to interference from aluminum wall shields. By the way, you can take advantage of WiFi in a metal box from a security point of view. They sell metal curtains you can put on your windows to eliminate RF leaks from your WiFi to the world outside your window. That, plus your metal walls, should prevent the outside world from eavesdropping on your LAN. Of course, it works in both directions. You should not be able to receive anything from outside your metal box.

[Kellemora]

The Silver Yogi has a WiFi card installed and working, it has two antennae that stick out the back and are turned upward. This is how you sent it to me.

The WiFi signals I do pick up are from my garage office, no metal up here.
And we did try a repeater up in my attic, just behind the louvered vent you can look out and see my office, so no metal their either. The IT guy said my house is like a black hole, hi hi.

The only thing I took out of the Silver Yogi is the GFX card, because the slot it mounts in must have broken solder joints.
I was going to trade it in to my computer guy for a discount on another computer, but never came up with the cash for him to build one for me. This computer works super great, and I do have an older machine as a backup. So no sense in wasting money to appease my ego, hi hi.

I'm still trying to figure out why large companies do not have to backup their data. All I'm told is it is spread across so many servers if one fails all the data is still out there on the rest. I don't think they mean servers, but perhaps nodes?
They do backup their operating system, which confuses me also, as in a server farm, isn't each server a computer with an OS on it? Maybe I'm just asking too many people who are familiar with different systems and how they work.

Oh, and I do know they do lose data from time to time, because I'm a victim of lost data every once in awhile from an on-line source.

[yogi]

I stand corrected about the (Syslink?) WiFi card shipped with the Silver Yogi. I disabled it and never had a need to use it so that my mind was thinking no rf NIC card. The presence of that card would explain how you can see your neighbor's networks.

When I suggested putting the repeater inside your office I was thinking of a ceiling or wall mount above your computer. If you still don't get any signal with that direct line of sight setup, then you do indeed need to go Cat 6A cable or cut down the length of that cable. I think the limit is 300 feet without total loss of the carrier.

After I left Motorola's IT group more than one person has told me there was no such thing as a RAID 7 configuration. Maybe not, but in retrospect I'm certain that is what we were using to preserve our data. Basically we had seven independent hard disks with all our data on them. So, if one disk developed a fault in reading a track, for example, it would simply go to one of the remaining six to get that data. All the data is there all the time. There would be no need for a backup unless you wanted to preserve some archive data on a separate storage system.

Servers are indeed computers, but they are not intended to run executable programs or applications. A given server might have a RAID storage attached, but it's two separate entities. Think of your NAS as an example. You have computers and you have NAS which all work together seamlessly, but either one could break and not affect the other. If you run a very large business, you might also have an application server in the mix. That would be where you keep all the programs and apps people use. Their desktops then become dumb terminals because all the software is located physically someplace else in the app server.

You may end up with several different LAN's with a mission critical network. Availability of emergency power is a given in those cases. Disaster recovery would be a good example of why you might need a backup of the RAID system. If somebody nukes your corporate tower with all the enterprise servers in it, there should be a way to get back on line within a few hours. The tricky part of all this is testing it out to make sure it will work when needed.

[Kellemora]

Before I forget to ask. Have you ever had a problem with the LAN cable dropping out, due to humidity messing up the plug-in connection?
Every once in a while, I think the Internet is down because I get that warning, No Internet.
I now check another computer to see if it really is down, and if not, I just reseat the plug and it's back to working again.
I bought a cable with gold connectors to see if that would stop the occasional drop out, but it still happens about once every other month, and then only like today when the humidity is 100% for a couple of days.

I was running 200 feet of CAT5 with never a problem, was even getting 1gig at what I thought was OK.
But after we replaced it with CAT6, everything did run faster, which was technically only discernible when copying large files over the LAN, or downloading a new version of an OS. I don't stream anything so it's not really relevant to me.

You know I had a RAID system for a short time. Remember my fear of the Controller Card going bad and my losing everything. Well, it did happen, when we were hit by lightning. The drives themselves were OK, but the RAID program for the disks on the controller card were apparently proprietary, because I could not find a program to recover the data. No biggie though, my fear caused me to back-up the RAID NAS to be safe. So, I didn't lose anything other than maybe two lines on a page of something I was working on at the time.

A few years ago, I played with Ubuntu's Server, forget the name now, but it did not do what I thought it would do. True it did use workstations and/or thin clients, old computers as workstations. But you had to buy multi-user programs. This is when I learned the actual programs should be installed on the individual computers, and only use the server to hold all the shareable data. Like four different people using the same accounting program, such as Cougar Mountain.

On my old IDE computers, I played around installing 4 HDs in one of the computers, and set it up as a RAID server, sorta like a NAS. That was how I started my File Server. Then I backed the entire thing up to an external HD I name File Server. Then if you recall, I had a duplicate external HD down at the house I would carry up to my office each week and copy the File Server external drive, to the Secondary Backup external drive, then carry it back down to the house.
When that old computer died. I just took the external I named File Server and shared it on my LAN, and it took the place of my home-brew Raid System. After that I bought the 4 bay NAS which used RAID 1 or 2, I forget now. The one that put everything on each hard drive, so you had two identical hard drives. Only problem was, they were not readable by anything other than that brand of NAS unit.

I asked a friend who has quite a bit of important data he doesn't want to lose. He said all of his stuff is now in the Cloud, and costs him around 40 bucks a month because he has so much data stored there.
He too used to have a 6 disk RAID system, but he said it was eating drives like crazy, and he was losing too much data. He's never lost data from the Cloud server company he's using. I just can't afford to pay for Cloud storage, but do have some free Cloud storage I use. They say they do not maintain backups though, so we should still keep things backed up ourselves.

At my age, I'm trying to simplify a lot here, so somebody else can find my data after I croak. There is much they will need access to.

[yogi]

I have had connectivity problems here in Missouri, but not up north. You might think that is odd because up north I used DSL over the phone lines and down here we have coaxial cable all the way up to the wall sockets. Even then the coax is connected to the TV decoders directly. Coax also goes to the modem, which is my interface to the Internet. However, feeding the modem is my router and all the equipment connected to it. Those router connections are all wireless or CAT 6 Ethernet wire. The only readily visible indication of internet connectivity problems is an LED on the router or the flashing data transfer lights on the modem (sitting on my desk within eyesight). When the cable signal drops out, that light on the router comes on and the flashing modem lights stop flashing.

I don't have very many connectivity problem incidents, but the fact that I have any at all makes me suspicious of the Charter/Spectrum cable company's reliability. AT&T never dropped out on me unless there was a break in the phone lines due to a natural disaster or automobile crashing into a telephone pole. I ran CAT 5 cables up there because the bandwidth peaked at 7MHz, or something like that. I can't say that I recall a time when the Internet here failed to connect but the television signal remained active. It has happened the other way round where wife loses the TV programming and I am still connected to the Internet. It's the same coax with both signals so that it's hard for me to say it's a connector problem. We do have problems with the HDMI cable from the decoder to the TV screen. It needs to be reseated from time to time and I have no idea why. I've never had to clean or reseat the Ethernet cables. When the Internet drops out, which is very rare, I just sit back and do something locally until it comes back on. It always has of its own accord.

You bring up an interesting point about the RAID controller. At Motorola that did not seem to be a concern. I'm guessing that was true because we could get service within a very short period of time if we needed it. No data was ever lost to RAID as far as I know, but we did have to replace a drive or two. I'd go to the server room every day just to look and see if the right lights were still blinking. LOL In your case you lost it all because you did not have a deal with the controller manufacturer to replace the card in the event of a catastrophic failure. Motorola had such a contract, not to mention other RAID systems that could read the disks. Your only fail safe option was to do exactly what you did. Copy the RAID data every day to a backup device.

Most software purchased by the general public is single user. Many are single machine licensed. Thus you are not allowed to share your software with anybody and when you upgrade to a new computer you are supposed to get a new license. It is indeed possible to get a multi user license from most places. Those are the programs that run on an application server. It's cheaper to get multiple user licenses in most cases but the big reason to use a server is when it comes to upgrade and patching. You only have to update the server software and not dozens of client machines. IT people like that idea a lot.

I think you are right about the free Cloud services not backing up your stored data. They keep it a long time, but there is a limit on that too. The truth is that you would be better off keeping your critical data up in the cloud, but it is also true that you can make your own cloud. I'm not sure if that NAS you have can do that, but it is readily available. In effect your server/NAS storage scheme is your cloud. It's just not formally organized or set up for zero downtime.

[Kellemora]

I still have an older computer here that uses IDE drives. I have a power plug and connector fed to the outside of the case so I can shut down, plug in one of the IDE drives then boot the computer back up to access the data stored on the drives.
I did have a couple of IDE to USB adapters with power supplies that I used until they went kaput.

I went with RAID 1 on another computer. It had the main drive for the OS, and I used bays 2&3 to create RAID 1 storage. The nice thing about that was, it was Software RAID and both drives contained identical data.

I remember now too, the 4 bay NAS I had used RAID 10, which was set up like RAID 1, two of the drives were mirrors. But this is the one that used proprietary controller, the one the lightning took out.

I've had my best luck, simply using External HD's and buying them 2 at a time, and using the second matching drive as a mirror, using CRON and RSync to make sure they both matched at the end of each day.
That was all and good locally. But it was a royal pain in the arse to try and mirror my drives to drives located in the house.
You probably can set up doing this with ease, but for me it takes a lot of study to create a media folder that is I think it is called symlinked to the drive at the house.

You might find this hard to believe, but I have 17 IDE drives sitting around on shelves here, most of them are under 100 gig in size, a few only 2 to 10 gigs if that.
I bought a 4 terrabyte Sata External Drive, but couldn't afford to buy two of them at the time. My goal was to copy everything from the IDE drives over to the new big Sata drive. Then compare each of the files on each to weed out duplicate files. The problem with that is, I can't find the program that looks at the file, not just the name of the file. I know from before when I went hunting for duplicate files, I found hundreds that were not really duplicates at all.

Imagine if you will, that I have about 5,000 file folders, and inside each of those file folders are sub-folders of identical names in each. Such as Group, Individual, Face, and Misc. then inside the Misc. folder there are sub-folders named, Houses, Cars, Pets, etc.
Software that looks for identical files will ask me if I want to merge the 5,000 folders named Group. That's when I hit the kill button for the program.

Last but not least. I thought I saw a RAID software system that said you could use any size drives together. I wanted to study how it worked, not that I would ever use it.
I should also study up on the NAS I bought from you. I think I can connect an external HD to it. I know it has a lot of features I've not looked into yet. Started to, then got sidetracked with important things I had to get done.

I'm rambling again! Sure sign of olde age, hi hi.

[yogi]

I'm rambling again! Sure sign of olde age, hi hi.

It's called rag chewing and us old timers live for it.

One of the coolest things about the last computer I built is the case from Corsair. Among it's many great features it has a sliding door on top with a SATA HDD connector underneath. It can accommodate multiple sizes of physical drives. It's beauty is that I can plug in any hard drive and copy to or from it. That is how I migrated from HDD to SSD in fact.

I've run into a need for finding duplicate files a time or two in my computing career. There are third party programs for Windows and Linux which do a fair job of finding them. However, nothing is better than the native capabilities of UNIX or Linux. All those systems have something called 'grep' built into the kernel. You can look for files with identical checksums and list them out, or move them, or delete them, or anything you care to do. I never was good at shell programming but the people I worked with were. It's amazing what you can do if you know how to use all the options of grep. Given what you told me about your memory I don't expect you to recall how to use bash or it's ambiguous commands. However, it might just be worth your time to figure this one out if you have a lot of files that need cleaning up. It's no harder than running an RSync cron job.

The NAS I have now is the next model up from the Synology drive you have. Mine has external drive capability and I suspect the model you have does as well. In fact my router has room for external storage too. Perhaps yours does as well. I tried using that feature on my router once to see if the transfer rate would diminish. I was copying a lot of large files from HDD to USB at the time and it wasn't going very quickly. I used the Linux in the NAS to copy to the external drive but can't say that I noticed any significant decrease in time to copy. So, I now just do it the convenient way via Windows file explorer. I think the problem is the file system itself. It doesn't just copy bits from one location to another. A lot more goes on to assure integrity of the transfer.

[Kellemora]

I ordered another HP MPF M477 printer, only this time I bought the fnw model which does not have duplexing. I've never used duplexing anyhow. It was also 150 buck cheaper and is the same machine.
Talked to an agent who has around 14 of that model printer in his offices. He loves them and has never had trouble with any of them. And here I've had two bad ones in a row. He's the one who suggested buying the fnw instead of the fdn model. So, once again I'm sticking my neck out with HP.
I looked into the Konica Minolta business color laser printers with scan, fax, etc. The color model without a scanner I currently have has skyrocketed in price, over 500 bucks, which is cheaper than all the models with scan capability.
Almost bought an HP color laser without a scanner, and was going to buy a scanner separate, but can't find drivers for them. The scanner built in with the HP printers will scan without even being connected to a computer.

I still never heard back from the service tech who was going to take a look see.

As far as copying from one drive to another, internal or external, RSync is 100 times faster than using copy n paste, even on the first pass. You already know all saves after that only copies the changed files so is lightning fast.
I often have to copy a folder of large files, and I've timed it doing copy n paste, and using RSync. RSync wins hands down every time.

The NAS you sold me does have a couple useful features that simplifies trying to get data from the office to the house by doing it in reverse. Let the NAS fetch the files, rather than sending them from the computer to the NAS. I just never figured out how to let it do it automatically when I was studying up on using it right after I got it.
And yes, you can plug an external drive to it. It appears in the Index as a file folder of whatever name you gave the HD.

On another note:
Poor Debi is back to using her slow as molasses in winter Win10 computer.
The Win7 computer from her son keeps hanging up in Bios during boot.
A few times I got it going by unplugging and plugging the internal HD plugs.
Another time by moving the keyboard and mouse wireless USB thingy to another slot.
It's a Dell Alienware with A07 Bios, and was a super gaming computer in its day.
Hundreds of posts are folks who have trouble with Dell, and Alienware, with the A07 Bios.

It's just a shame when you buy something brand new for someone and it is so bad and slow, using it is an exercise in frustration, which is why her son gave her his old Win7 computer. Lighting fast compared to Win10, but still slow compared to Linux.

For file comparing, I need to be able to see the actual file to be copied or deleted, and compare it to the existing file.
I have the Original File which may be named Scan70897, which I do not want to delete.
Then I have renamed copies of that same file, only one I want to keep.
However, here is the killer problem. If it is a group picture, aka Scan70866, I will have a named copy of that file placed under each persons name in their respective folders.
Using a search for duplicates program will show all of them and want to delete all but one. This would really mess me up. The program needs to show me where and what folders each copy is in, and only eliminate two identical copies in the same folder, allowing me to select which name for the file I want to keep.
I know that's a lot to ask, hi hi. But at one time I did have a program that did that, just can't remember what or when it was I used it. I also had a great facial recognition program, again, don't remember the name of the program.
Oh, well, I don't have time to do all of that right now anyhow.