pdfforge Toolbar 1.0

Watch out for the “free” pdfforge Toolbar that installs with PDF Creator and then “helps you” redirect to a “helpful” search page.

Windows 7 Beta Homegroup (Sharing) Problem

If you refuse to create a homegroup during installation, it cannot be created later (even though your PC may be on a home network).

The solution that worked for me with the current beta version (as of writing this post) was to:

a) go to System > Device Manager and delete the network adapter

b) rescan for hardware changes

c) go to Network and Sharing Center and create a homegroup.

Virtual Server could not open its emulated Ethernet switch driver

If you’re here that means you’re probably having problems with MS VS 2005 R2.

I have a Broadcome NetXtreme GbE NIC (only one). Unlike blog posts found in top Google searches, my case didn’t involve any change of configuration that I know of. It just stopped working one day. I therefore used a less invasive approach:

a) Update the Broadcom GbE driver (broadcom.com)

b) Uninstall VM Network Services

c) Reboot the box and install VM Network Services again.

This worked for me. Maybe b & c alone would have sufficed.

Hardware Junkie’s Incremental Fix

This is totally irrelevant (yeah, I know, not different from the rest of the blog), but I blew few hundred bucks on few new toys for my home:

a) Even more Power Over Ethernet (PoE). I now have a dedicated home network for non-multimedia data.

b) A nice 24″ 16×9 monitor for … I don’t know for what, but I bought it and it looks great even when it’s powered off.

c) A “home” (read: el cheapo) GbE switch for the five data-intensive computers. Wow, I didn’t realize I’d use up all the ports the first day… If the thing had four ports (or if I had six computers), I’d go nuts.

What’s my point? Well, this was one of best investments in my hardware junkie carrier.

Benefits (so far):

1. Can watch TV and movies over existing Power-over-Ethernet and at the same time copy ISOs or run backup over the new PoE network.
2. My notebook backup that used to take like 6-7 hours over WLAN (during that time I couldn’t do much with it) now takes 2 hours. I do connect the notebook to GbE LAN now (for some reason the notebook connects to GbE switch at 100Mbps – maybe it’s the cable – but at least the backup server runs at 1000Mbps).
3. The monitor is awesome. This was the most expensive of the three and I have to say I bought it “just like that” (snapping my fingers) – didn’t do any research, just pointed at the nicest & largest of the monitors in the shop… Ah well. Anyway, the benefit is that I can open like nine shell windows at the same time (of course, I mean without overlapping, cascading, etc.) . And when I start Excel and leave Excel Zoom at 100% I can still see up to column W and row 57.

Windows Live Messenger: Do They Analyze Crash Reports?

For close to a year (well, at least six months) I noticed that my Live Messenger crashes easily when network connectivity gets flaky (especially on wireless networks).

I’ve been diligently submitting crash reports, but it’s bene close to a year, so I can’t help but wonder:

a) Does anyone look at those reports?

b) As I’m (probably) not the only person encountering this bug (and to me it happens weekly), why is it taking them so long to fix it?

Windows XP x64 as Hyper-V Guest

After another late night of fruitless trying, I have to ask: has anyone managed to get Winows XP x64 to work (including network) as guest OS in Hyper-V?

Last night I tried for 3rd time (less than 3 hours before that I deleted the OS VHD from my HDD ), this time using a “Legacy Network Adapter”. The result was consistent with previous attempts (failure). The x64 display drivers seems to work, but others (most importantly, the NIC driver) don’t and after installation Device Manager shows a yellow exclamation mark. Maybe I should just trust the docs – not supported and can’t work.

Out of despair I previously tried the same guest OS on VirtualBox and VMware Workstation 6.x – neither support x64 guests. And this was on Windows Server 2008 SE x64 on which Hyper-V RC0 does support x64 operating systems. I ran that VMware test proggie to make sure and indeed my fairly new Intel Core Duo processor obviously won’t do. Luckily I’ve no this problem with Hyper-V.

Update (2008/09/28): In the meantime Hyper-V RTM (with Windows XP x64 SP2 support) shipped, but for some reason my OS didn’t get the update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/95005) so I just wasted a day on  troubleshooting  this stuff…  Wonderful.

Expected to Crash Often

Today I came across this page with some tips for NFS clusters (emphasis mine):

“The server side of NFS allows no real configuration for performance or reliability. Default asynchronous writes are not very risky unless you expect your disk servers to crash often. “

Maybe the fact that the page is about redundant NFS clusters tells us that do expect the servers to crash often enough

Getting Windows 2003 Service Pack into a Hyper-V Guest VHD

You install Windows 2003 Hyper-V guest and you can’t install add-ons required to get access to the network because it’s a pre-SP1 Windows OS. You can’t copy/download the SP to the VM because it’s got no network adapters.

Solution 1: the VHD mount script posted here. Shut the VM down, mount the VHD and copy the SP (and whatever you want) to that disk. I used the PowerShell version because it’s shorter and – of course – again got stuck with the unsigned PowerShell script problem. This time, though, I reused the “worst practice” workaround that I wrote about here. Done! To unmount, Save As… and add “un” before “mount” in the last line.

Solution 2: In your Hyper-V manager right-click on your (host) server and select Edit Disk.

So far I’ve been happy with Hyper-V although I’ve unnecessarily wasted too much time trying to get Windows XP x64 going (not supported).

Buying Wireless Access Point – Again

I’ve had enough of crappy wireless access points. I won’t name any of the vendors (isolated cases, possible user configuration error, etc.), but after the latest problem I have to blog about this.

Here’s a short list of crap I’ve had to deal with the four WLAN APs I’ve owned in the past two years:

AP1: no support for authentication and no support for anything else (invisible SID, MAC address control, etc.). It was OK for a while (you could see an occasional neighbor sharing your bandwidth), but then P2P folks got on board. Had to go get rid of it.

AP2: generally flaky, after eight months started suffering from frequent random reboots. Yes, maybe those were attack-induced crashes. In any case, the vendor didn’t have any firmware updates and neither factory defaults nor different attempted “tunings” helped. The vendor’s service center helped by restoring the firmware (?!). Of course I had tried that myself already. Had to get rid of it.

AP3: bought a new piece of crap – with “draft N” support (although I don’t have any draft-N WLAN cards, I wanted to go high-end and be future-proof). Woo-hoo! Yes, but woo-hoo only until I realized that several applications on my LAN and Wireless LAN had major difficulties establishing connections through this AP (e.g. it’d take Outlook many minutes to connect to Exchange). Again, tons of wasted time with no ROI. Additionally the thing didn’t support bridging so I couldn’t add additional access points to my home. Oh, and clients struggle for minutes to obtain a DHCP lease. And finally, its antennas were hard-wired to the body (can’t replace them with a high gain antenna without breaking the damn thing apart). Fine, let’s get another one.

AP4: bought a stable (piece of crap, as it turned later). I set it up alongside the AP3 (AP4′s WAN port is connected to AP3′s LAN port and I connect to AP4 via WLAN). Good, now DHCP leases are always obtained and they’re obtained quickly. Bad: now I have two APs to troubleshoot. Take two: reverse the roles – make AP4 Primary and AP3 its LAN client. Badness – firewall and DMZ settings on AP4 are all-or-nuthin’. Great. Now I have to make AP3 the DMZ server, disable firewall on AP4 and manage firewall settings on AP3 (I already know that my WLAN clients have difficulties dealing with AP3). With great certainty I predict more wasted time and frustration in the very near future.

At this point I’m ready to shell out a pretty penny for a good AP.

By good I mean:

1. Stable
2. Can maintain 500 sessions/connections
3. Reasonably rich firewall and NAT functionality (not enterprise-, but power user-level)
4. Supports bridge mode
5. Supports DMZ (perhaps more than one host only and perhaps in a granular (by port) way)
6. The vendor should have good history of firmware maintenance for their WLAN products
7. Supports external high gain antenna
8. Everything else that’s reasonable to expect in a mid- to high-end wireless access point for home/SOHO use.

By the way, I do not want to ‘roll my own’. I looked at open source firmware for APs, but I already spend too much time on maintenance of home IT stuff. I just want something high-end that works properly. Suggestions?

No Hibernate / Suspend with Hyper-V

After reading few good experiences with Windows Server 2008 I decided to use it on my new workstation. I also enabled Hyper-V, but then I discovered that my power saving settings are gone. You can shutdown and that’s pretty much it as far as power saving goes.

Now I found out (here) that when Hyper-V is enabled, power saving actions such as hibernate and suspend are not available. Oh, well..  If it’s worth it, I’ll stick with it. If not, I might consider some other virtualization solution.