tl;dr: My Fiery is back up and running after being down since May 22.
Back in late May, during Graduation season, the Fiery print controller for my color printer died. I came in to work that Monday morning and found the Fiery and printer were both powered off. We'd had storms over the weekend, so it was either that, or the person who worked on Saturday powered them off before they left. When I powered them back on, the printer came up just fine, but the Fiery didn't. The monitor gave me an error message of "no signal found." So I placed a service call.
The tech arrived and said it could be the power supply was bad, or possibly the motherboard. He was hoping it was the power supply, and ordered a new one. He checked, and found that there were no motherboards available in the US, that they were on backorder.
The next day he arrived and discovered that they sent the wrong power supply, so he ordered the correct one. It arrived on Wednesday, and when he swapped it out, it didn't solve the problem. He researched the status of the motherboard, and learned that it was going to be at least 3-4 weeks to get one in. I passed that information on to my managers, and went about my day.
I could still make copies on the printer, but could not print. Since the last time I had a hard copy original from a customer was several years ago, this meant that my printer was useless. It does have the ability to print from a USB flash drive, but our IT department has blocked access to USB flash drives on all district computers, so I have no way of getting files onto a drive.
On May 26, my Director emailed her contact at Xerox to make sure they were aware that it was completely down, and that the parts were on indefinite back order, and what could they do about getting it back up, or replaced.
On Friday, June 9, my Director forwarded an email from Xerox letting us know that they'd be providing a loaner Fiery while we waited on the part, and that it should arrive early the next week.
The loaner arrived on June 13, and the tech arrived later that day and got it set up. It didn't have all the features that ours had, but I was able to print. If I wanted to use the Impose function, I had to transfer the file from mine to the Fiery on the first floor, then go down there and impose it, then go back up to the 5th floor, retrieve the imposed file from the other printer, and print it.
The tech came out again last week because some parts arrived, but they didn't solve the problem.
This Monday (July 17), he showed up again, because the motherboard finally arrived. It was the wrong motherboard. He couldn't figure out why, and started researching it. Turns out there are three versions of Fiery for this printer, all with the same model name (EX 280). They all have the same decal on the front, so there's no easy way to tell which one you have. While he was explaining to me that there are three different service manuals for the EX 280, I noticed that there was a sticker on the bottom of the computer case (he had it on the side so he could replace the mobo), and that sticker indicated that it was a Version I. The mobo he had was for a Version III. He made some calls, found the correct part number, and ordered it.
On Tuesday, the new mobo arrived. He installed it, and it still didn't work. He even tried to connect the bare minimum of peripherals (power supply & monitor only, no HD) to see if it would boot to BIOS, but it wouldn't even do that. He said that the only other thing it could possibly be was the CPU, but he'd never heard of a CPU going bad, and highly doubted it was that. But he ordered one anyway, and said it would arrive the next day.
Yesterday I had to take my cat to the vet dentist for a 6 week follow-up for his Full Mouth Extraction, so I arrived to work at 11am. When I got there, he was sitting at a work table doing paper work. I said hi, and he said that my Fiery was back up, that it was, in fact, the CPU that had gone bad. He still wasn't sure how that happened, and wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't happened to him. In the 30 years he's worked on Fierys, this was the first CPU to go bad. He'd never even had a CPU go bad on any other computer, either. I said that statistically it makes sense that one would go bad at some point.
I've worked with Fierys since 1999, and this is only the second one to go bad in my experience. I still don't know what was bad on the first one to go bad - they replaced everything on it, and nothing worked. They ended up simply replacing the entire unit. Now that I've had this one, I'm thinking that maybe the CPU had gone bad on that one, too. That was the only part they didn't replace when they were troubleshooting it.
Anyway, my Fiery is back, fully functional, and I'm happy.