April 2011 Archives

In case you've forgotten your Express Service Code to enter when calling Dell support service:

It's the same as the Service Tag. Dell claims it to be a "mathematical conversion", in fact it's just another representation.

Dell's Service Tag uses the digits 0-9 and the letters A to Z. So each digit of the Service Tag can be from 0 to Z. 0 represents zero, A is 10, B is 11, ..., F is 15, G is 16, H is 17, ..., Z is 35 (10 numerical digits, 26 letter digits). The service tag is a "number" in a base-36-system.

Example:

B78FWQ8  (this is a random example!)

B: 11, 7: 7, 8: 8, F: 15, W: 33, Q: 26, 8: 8

So at the end the "Express Service Code" for Service Tag B78FWQ8 is:

11 * 36^6 + 7 * 36^5 + 8 * 36^4 + 15 * 36^3 + 33 * 36^2 + 26 * 36^1 + 8 * 36^0

equals 24382049408. This is the express service code.
 

is easy to be solved.

Problem was/is: After upgrading to CentOS 5.6, the ssh server did not start which can be somewhat "embarassing"...















On the console I get the following:

[root@douala pascal]# /etc/init.d/sshd start
Starting sshd: Auto configuration failed
9009:error:0E065068:configuration file routines:STR_COPY:variable has no value:conf_def.c:629:line 228
                                                           [FAILED]
[root@douala pascal]#

Explanation and solution is very simple:

It has gone.

But it can be brought back in life by this little extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/rss-icon/