Paul’s esoteric meanderings

I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.

One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital  My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.

The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.

If you have a corporate wallpaper pushed to your desktop / laptop, chances are it’s being done with Windows Group Policy. It’s likely this is a PR rather than IT initiative, IT being there to service rather than brand the customer.

You can override this wallpaper with some local settings, although this *may* have impacts down the track where other settings are also blocked. This may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective. It will definitely mean that IT won’t be happy as your PC is no longer standard and may not behave as they expect. This isn’t really a big stress, as with the advent of the Internet and web applications, no machine is the same as another anymore, despite opinions to the contrary. Your mileage may vary.

OK - it came time to rebuild the media centre.

Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.

The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.

After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is

• Case - Zalman HD160 Case (IR, Display & Card Reader disabled)

I’ve been trying to have the whole digital home experience for a while now. I’ve reviewed Vista Media Centre, Home Server, Wireless N before, the experiences there are documented.

The impossible dream I am thinking of consists of seamless integration between:

• So lets look at the current state of play for these things.

C’mon guys - no logins for Technet subscriptions - if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.

Jesper had a similar problem last week.

This is why I learnt a long time ago - if you have an AD problem - it’s probably DNS.

Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration - especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.

I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.

When I first heard about Windows Home Server (WHS) - I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.

OK - at it’s simplest WHS does three things

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/SSR/Mypapers/whatknow.htm

And this is why we have to wean business off Excel.

Just like programming - it’s all mistakes mistakes mistakes.

Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.

I had the same problem as before - Activesync changing my Proxy settings in my Jasjam to use the work proxy, breaking web browsing on the thing via my Telco.

Activesync is different to the Mobile Device Thingy on Vista and although the fix was the same, it took me a bit to find.

Think of this as a Vista Version of KB915151

My Vista SP1 Laptop refused to connect to our MS ISA VPN for work at some point. There was no error given on the connection interface, but the Application Event Log recorded an Event ID 20227 - RASClient

The user somewhere\someone dialed a connection named WorkVPN which has failed. The error code returned on failure is 800.

Some searching showed others with similar results. The common cause is Windows OneCare. It’s interaction with the Windows Firewall blocks VPN protocols by default. I’m not sure why it doesn’t prompt to allow the traffic, a problem with the application.

So with today’s perspective on updates vs uptime, is that impressive, or scary?

I’ve been a Toms fan forever, but don’t get there much anymore. This is an excellent article.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/video-streaming-need-to-know-part-1,review-760.html

I recently swapped out my noisy old model Pioneer DVD burner in the flaky media centre for a new Pioneer DVR-215BK with the grand price of $37.

I am pleased to say that it reads DVD’s reliably, which the last one didn’t from new and is quiet, which the last one wasn’t either.

Now I’m not saying it’s silent, but combined with a Media Centre built this way, I can’t hear it.

5/5

Although the Media centre is still a flaky piece of crap.

I’ve been moving all my home PC’s over to wireless as I reshuffle the rooms in my house. As part of this I have had a nightmare of a time with one machine being unable to connect to anything, the media centre dropping connections to the server, and other general weirdness.

I tracked it all to the Browser service and lack of decent name resolution. I have never really liked the browser service, it’s never reliable, but in this scenario, it should perform fine.

I have seen this one a few times and it’s always entertaining to watch and hard to fix.

Lets say you have a domain name of company.com.xx and you host it yourself. The primary is stored on your DNS server in your DMZ and the secondary with your ISP.  

Now someone in your country will be hosting the .com.xx records. They will have a DNS server with a listing of delegations, that is who is responsible for sub-domains under .com.xx like your company.com.xx 

This is where it gets interesting. Delegation is done by hostname, not by IP address. In this case it will be delegated to something like NS1.company.com.xx and NS2.YourISP.com.xx

If you get an EventID 14148 on your ISA Server (2K4 in this case) and it’s running on an IBM Server, chances are the IBM ServeRAID software has stolen port 8080 for it’s own use. Specifically Miniwinagent will be using it. The docs on IBM’s site say it’s not critical to the ServerRAID management software and only used for firmware updates. If you want port 8080 back you can either uninstall and reinstall without the feature, or just disable the Service.

A while ago due to a combination of circumstances I decided to build a Windows Media Centre PC. A few friends had them and spoke highly and being stuck on an island it seemed like a bright idea to pass the time between dives, fishing and drinking. I started, but never had the time to get it completed.

Then I moved back to Oz and it got put in a box for 12 months.

I recently resurrected the project and decided to fire the thing up with Vista. This is the story of woe that followed.

My Jasjam won’t browse the Internet successfully. It’s actually Windows Mobile 2005 at fault.

Turns out the Proxy settings buried under Start - Settings - Connections - Connections - Advanced - Select Networks - Edit - Proxy Settings

Are set to my work proxy, and it learns this every time I plug in to use ActiveSync, it learns them again.

The fix and why is here.

I was installing Vista Ultimate onto a PC a few weeks back. The machine had a HDD installed that used to have XP on it. The HDD was configured as a Dynamic Disk and a single partition.

Vista could not install. Vista could see a single unrecognizable partition. Fair enough I think, it doesn’t like dynamic disks, I’ll just delete it.

Errgh, No. Vista doesn’t let you delete partitions from dynamic disks though the installer. The only solution I could find was to either boot to a 3rd party utility CD (which wasn’t handy) and nuke the partitions, or, the one I chose, to pluck the disk, drop it in an external USB caddy, and delete the partition from there on another XP PC.