How to Service a Mira 723 Shower

I realise this isn't the expected post for a system engineer, but still, if you happen to have this type of shower and need to know how to service it, then here you go! I was in a situation where my shower worked, but to turn it on was so stiff it was almost unusable. After speaking with the people from ShowerDoc, link below, they assured me a service is all that was required. Well, they were right!

Either way, this guide is only really a set of notes to help me remember how I did this and hopefully help someone else who's in a similar situation. I don't pretend to be a plumber/DIY man or anything close, but I refuse to pay a plumber down in London over £500 to 'fix' a shower where a £40/50 service kit did the trick - plus I learnt something along the way!

Anyway, here goes:

This guide assumes you've already turned the water off from your shower. I take no responsibility for any damage you may do to your shower/flat/house in following the below notes!

Firstly you need to find the Mira 723 maintenance guide also available here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/patrick.beane/mira723maintenance.pdf

Secondly you will need the service parts which I found here: http://www.showerdoc.com/shower-spares/mira/mira-parent-87-mira-723


Following the guide, remove the fascia to be left with something similar to the below:

Remove the four big screws on either corner of the cover and pull to remove:

Remove the temperature control (coil looping around the main cartridge) to be left with (note, if the whole cartridge comes out in one go, don't worry!):

At this point remove the white/beige deflector and then pull the who cartridge straight out of the enclosure (may take a bit of a wiggle and a good pull!):

Note the locating pin on the centre bottom of the enclosure - you'll need to know about this when putting back together again.

Dismantle the cartridge to be left with the below components:

After cleaning and o-rings removed:

Note the bottom of the three is the flow control. Mine was ceased together with lime-scale, so required a vice and the correct spanner to undo it (I tried every known limescale remover/dissolver in B&Q and made absolutely no difference. To unscrew, hold the 'chamfered end with the spanner notches' still and turn knob end anti-clockwise, which should reveal the below:

As per service manual, clean up the components, grease, replace o-rings, washers and put back together again!

Knob should turn with a bit more than a fingertips force and should turn four or five full turns before being full on.

Hope that's helped someone out there!

Citrix Applications Hanging on Vista

Recently ran into a problem where any Citrix application i ran from home, remotely connecting to the office via Citrix, would hang. The app would load, but then sit there 'Not Responding'.

Solution - stop the Print Spooler service. Not great if you want to pront, but has solved my problem for now. WIll update if i find a full solution.

VMware Virtual Machine does not sysprep properly

Finding information from this log:

c:\windows\temp\guestcust.log i discovered the following errors:

Rpci: Sending request='deployPkg.update.state 4 101 C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\vmware-imc\guestcust.log@The system cannot find the file specified.
'

Rpci: Sent request='deployPkg.update.state 4 101 C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\vmware-imc\guestcust.log@The system cannot find the file specified.
', reply='', len=0, status=1

...which was stopping me being able to 'Deploy Virtual Machine from Template'.

To resolve this I uninstalled the Altiris Endpoint client.

Windows 2008 Cluster loses one node of cluster

Setup in this instance:

2 x IBM x3650 bother containing the following:
2 x Emulex FC Cards
4 x Broadcom NetExtreme II 5709C NICs
2 x Broadcom NetExtreme II 5708C NICs

Issue - building a Windows 2008 Enterprise x64 cluster containing just a Quorum and a test service/applciation, one node would intermittently fail, reporting it lost connection with the quorum

Cause - Trend Micro OfficeScan 10 and SP1 - TDI Driver

Resolution - Disable Startup of TDI driver via the following steps:

Open Device Manager
Select View > Show Hidden Devices
Expand Non-Plug and play devices
Select Trend Micro TDI Driver > Properties
Go to Driver tab
Under Current Status press the stop button (this may or may not work, if not, do next step and reboot both nodes)
Under Startup change the type to Disabled (Uninstalling the driver didn't work, because it was installed automatically at the next boot.)

Do the same on both nodes and reboot.

This has also been discovered to be the case in Trend Office Scan v8 SP1 as per folloing blog:

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/dario/archive/2008/12/15/trend-micro-officescan-on-server-2008-cluster.aspx

Program file stopping services starting

I recently ran into an issue where servers were no longer starting any more. The problem coincidentally happened after i'd run a simple batch script on the machine in question. After lots of investigation it turned out the reason for the service no longer starting was a file called:

c:\program

After lots of investigation I found this to be caused by using the full path of c:\Program File in my script (even though it had quotes round it). To stop it doing this I used the c:\progra~1 notation. I also wonder if this was to do with my computer being Windows 2000 rather than XP, as this didn't happen with XP, and not specifically selecting cmd.exe to run the script.

FTP for Apple Mac

I was having problems the other day ploading files to a Windows FTP server from a Mac - MacOS was complaining about insufficient permissions to upload a file, even though the permissions were correct. Now i'm sure there are thousands of ftp clients out there for Macs, but i found this one to be good, so thought i'd give it a mention:

Cyberduck (freeware)

http://cyberduck.ch/

Roaming Profile not Working

If you find your roaming profile isn't working, ensure Offline Files and Folders are switched off on the client pc:

My Computer -> Tools -> Folder Options -> Enable Offline Files (and uncheck the box) - instructions for Windows XP

This link also:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287566