The new i3 is perfect for this. Enough CPU grunt to ditch the 3rd party video card power hog, everything on board. I’m an energy saving nut, so this is the lowest power system I could put together.

A low power media centre PC.

Specification

1. CPU – i3 530 2.93GHz
2. MB – Gigabyte Motherboard GA-H55-USB3
3. RAM – 2 x 2GB
4. HDD – 1.5 TB WD Green
5. DVD – ASUS DVD Multi
6. Case – Zalman HD160 Case
7. PS – Antec Neo Eco 450W 80+
8. Remote – Microsoft IR Remote
9. Logitech DiNovo Mini Bluetooth Keyboard
10. Windows 7

Config

1. Video – HDMI
2. Audio – SPDIF Optical
3. Windows 7

Power = 70W avg

Has some minor Audio / Video glitches, seems to be driver related

CPU Fan noisy – too high an RPM. Coolermaster helped, but speed still too high. Now running CPU fan from Case Fan socket on MB.

Media PC Power Consumption History

1. ASUS MB w/ Moblin 1.6GHz Mobile on desktop CPU, Video Card – 95w
2. ASUS MB w/ AMD 5050e 2.6 GHz CPU, Video Card – 120w
3. Gigabyte + i3 530 and Antec Truepower 2.0 – 85W
4. Gigabyte + i3 530 and Antec Neo Eco – 70W

Dropping from 120w to 70w will save me about $100 / year in electricity costs.

The problems ranged from

1. Failure to ring
2. Low Volume
3. Dropped calls mid call
4. One way voice
5. Poor call quality

After 12 mths of drama’s I found only Panasonic DECT handsets where reliable with the VOIP solutions.
I also found that running a “single box” solution is less hassles than “multiple box” solutions.
DECT has a much greater cordless range than most other handsets.

Here are the combinations I tried and the issues associated.

Routers

Netgear WNDR5500 + Netgear DM111p + Open Networks 812L VOIP

1. Rubbish combination, awful reliability, even after warranty replacement.
2. VERY unreliable, mostly due to router
3. Telstra DECT and Uniden WDECT = heaps of problems as well
4. My WNDR3300 review here

Netgear DG834G v3 + Open Networks 812L VOIP

1. Very reliable, very stable, but limited features
2. Reliable with fixed handset
3. Unreliable VOIP with Telstra DECT and Uniden WDECT Handsets

Billion 7404VNPX

1. Single box resolves interop issues on volume and ringing
2. Took a few firmware versions to improve reliability
3. Still needs rebooting for DHCP reliability
4. Fast
5. First unit was buggy, replaced under warranty
6. Reliable calls only with Panasonic handsets
7. Billion recommends only using fixed handsets, not cordless (from their support line and whirlpool)

Cordless Phone Handsets

I prefer to use 1.8GHz DECT handsets where possible, they have MUCH (2x-10x)greater range than 802.11, and don’t use the same 2.4GHz wireless spectrum. 5.8GHz has worse range than 2.4Ghz or 1.8Ghz. Higher frequency = less range.

There seems to be some issues with call stability and cordless handsets. I can only guess from all my testing that it relates to off-hook detection. I played with every setting under the sun, and nothing helped. 12mths of stuffing round to find that Panasonic handsets work well.

1. Telstra Touchfone T200
   Fixed handset – works well in all circumstances, if the router allows the call in.

   

2. Telstra DECT Cordless – Poor quality and hang up problems, poor call quality and cheap handsets.
3. Uniden WDECT – LOTS of problems with VOIP, don’t bother. AWFUL.
   The problems are twofold. Radio interference is a nightmare, even when seperated by 10+M
   The on/off hook sensing of the router and the base station appear incompatible, hanging up on calls all the time.
   
   
4. Panasonic DECT – Worked well
   
   
5. Panasonic DECT – Works VERY well
   

QoS is somewhat of a confusing area. The most common method of marking packets at Layer 3 (IP) is with a DSCP tag. This method replaces the earlier Type Of Service (TOS) tag, and uses the same space in the IP header.

Whilst DSCP has a far greater range of values than TOS, there are some that are commonly used in most implementations. DSCP values also overlap with TOS values.  There is a table showing the relationship between DSCP and TOS here. This is all likely to lead to confusion in implementation.  

Whenever talking about this stuff, there is one very common area of confusion. Numbers. That is, whenever a number is given, is it in Decimal, Hex, or a “type” number. It can also be given as a full byte (non-offset) value – -effecting it further. The DSCP table linked above helps show the different ways a single value can be represented.

eg. 34 = 0×22 = AF41

Be VERY sure you know what they are using in any document you read. The vendors switch between the values in their own documents with remarable dexterity and no explanation.

So – back to Microsoft’s weirdness.

VOIP traffic is generally tagged as “EF” (Express Forward), one of the highest priority values. Microsoft chooses however to use DSCP marking of “CS5”. That would make sense if they where tagging using TOS, as that matches the common practice for TOS values. BUT, their own documents state they are using DiffServ which is based on DSCP markings. DSCP recommends EF for voice, not CS5.

In short, it looks like they have mixed up the older TOS standard with the newer Diffserv standard, and gotten confused along the way. This causes problems with the mappings not classifying correctly if you are using vendor managed L2 prioritisation such as Telstra’s IPWAN DCOS services on their MPLS networks.

This behaviour is consistent across:

LCS 2005
OCS 2008 R2
Server 2003
XP
Vista
W7

The only take away I can get is that Microsoft does not recommend the use of QoS in general, and offers that OCS using RTAudio codecs does not require or recommend the use of QoS due to the protocols in use. I have found however that on services that suffer from congestion, it helps improve the quality of the service.

LCS / XP – Defaults
Video – DSCP 0×18 – 011000 (24) – CS3
Voice – DSCP 0×28 – 101000 (40) – CS5

XP – “Conforming Packets”

Reference

DSCP and Live Mtg
http://nwsmith.blogspot.com/2009/08/dscp-qos-microsoft-office-live-meeting.html

MS QOE Doc
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=05625af1-3444-4e67-9557-3fd5af9ae8d1&displaylang=en

Tearing down the walls that limit business

A series of articles on designing Open Networks – Jericho Forum

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-04/bh-us-04-simmonds.pdf

http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/

TechEd Australia ‘08 Locknote

This is the future of IT over the next 10 years as predicted by Microsoft’s chief navel gazer. I gotta say, I think he’s right.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/dd819085.aspx
You want the session by Miha Kralj
How IT will change over the next 10 years and why you should care

http://www.craigbailey.net/live/post/2008/09/07/TECHED-Lock-note-ndash3b-Predicting-the-next-10-years-in-IT.aspx

http://www.crn.com.au/News/84240,opinion-navel-gazing.aspx

Cheaper Servers

Why Commodity Data Centres are cheaper than your server room, directly from the people building them.

http://loosebolts.wordpress.com

http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/our-vision-for-generation-4-modular-data-centers-one-way-of-getting-it-just-right/

Article
http://unthrottled.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3B07BABB3D3318AA!638.entry?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=860819746

Rebuttal
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9080738&pageNumber=1

Response to Rebuttal
http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/out-of-the-box-paradox-manifested-aka-chicago-area-data-center-begins-its-journey/

StorageMojo’s Take

http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/18/clouds-over-berkeley-the-radlab-reviews-cloud-computing-pt-1/ (read the overview and original article)

http://storagemojo.com/2009/02/21/clouds-over-berkeley-the-radlab-reviews-cloud-computing-pt-2/ (read the overview and original article)

http://storagemojo.com/2009/03/04/the-amazon-keynote-at-fast-09/

http://storagemojo.com/2009/03/04/belts-suspenders-and-scale/

One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.

When I looked at the system I was mighty confused. Four high pressure cylinders indicate a high pressure non-liquefied gas. Makes sense when you look at the mix – Nitrogen, Argon, CO2 – not likely to liquefy under pressure at room temperature. A large diameter medium pressure line led to the room with no valves on it. This line was open at the room end with a simple nozzle, no valves along the way.

There was a valve on each cylinder, but no controls to any but the first one.

The first cylinder below has a both an electrical and manual release attached – but what about the other three bottles?

The control valve on each slave cylinder is the interesting bit. When pressure is sensed in the line, it opens the bottle, and remains open until the bottle is empty. Basically it’s a pneumatically operated slave. The pressure in the line is created by the first bottle’s discharge, triggered electrically, and the restriction of the line and nozzles.

And yes, they installed vents in the room to let out the extra air. When you add another 50% of gas to a room, the displaced gas has to go somewhere, or develop an unlikely amount of pressure. They would not be the first to forget the vent.

I have toyed with various options, but the most obvious was using the other machine that was on 24/7 – the Vista Media Centre.

I found some info on running Windows Home Server as a virtual guest, but nothing on the impacts to the Vista Media Centre host. My host was not particularly new, a 3yo PC with the following specs:

• MB – Asus N4L-VM-DH
• CPU – Core 2 Duo T2400 1.8Ghz
• RAM – 2GB Kingston
• HDD 7200RPM 500GB WD
• Silent Heat Pipe Video Card
• Antec Truepower2 Power Supply (pre 80+ standards)
• 100MBit Ethernet to router

I figured it would be a stretch for this machine to run a VM as well, but it was worth the try. It is a fairly power efficient machine, the Core 2 Duo being a laptop CPU and noted for it’s efficiency. The current video card pumps out heat 24/7 and could do with improvement, I’m waiting for the new Intel Nehalem CPU range to arrive and come down in price, by which stage on board video should be suitable – more power savings.

I grabbed a couple of 1TB WD Green drive, as my experience with them inside WD MyBooks showed them to be very quiet and efficient.

I used VMWare Workstation 6.5 as I had it, but you could use VMWare Server – it’s free. You could also use Windows Virtual Server, but I felt (possibly incorrectly)  VMWare may have slightly lower overhead and better direct hardware and USB support. Virtual PC / Server have no USB support last I checked.

The Asus MB has 3 x SATA ports, and a PATA port. Two of the SATA ports were already in use with the DVDROM and host HDD, so I ran the first HDD on the spare SATA socket expecting great results. It was awful, woefully slow, rendering the machine unable to even record TV shows. Turns out he extra SATA slot is for RAID, and due to firmware / drivers, IRQ’s went through the roof consuming 60% CPU time. A two channel PCI SATA card fixed this problem.

With that nailed down, I installed Windows Home Server w/ PP1 onto an 80GB Virtual Disk on the 1TB HDD. The host OS and TV recording was all onto the original 500GB HDD.

Virtual machine config was easy. , Setup a Virtual Machine as Server 2003 w/ 512MB RAM, an 80 GB IDE Virtual HDD and mount the Home Server CD ISO. Sound and other unnecessary things were removed.  I elected not to fully allocate the 80GB HDD, although this may impact my performance later.

Home server will install on the above with no major configuration steps. All drivers are fine. Once the install is finished, install the VMWare tools, run Windows Update, and activate your Home Server. There are instructions here – but they use a virtual SCSI HDD, greatly complicating the install for no benefit I can discern. I would use a virtual IDE.

Once mine was installed I added the extra disks. Initially I tried the disks as Direct Physical access. They were setup with a partition, but no drive letter, as per the vmware help. The VM would not even boot and there was a disk access conflict. Nothing I did could resolve this problem, so I had to settle for a couple of 900GB virtual disks (not pre-allocated) on the 2 x 1TB HDD’s (930GB formatted capacity NTFS). I tried VMWare Server 2.0, but it doesn’t support direct physical disks anymore, and also broke my Remote Desktop to the host. VMWare Server 1.08 wasn’t compatible with my VM, so I gave up.

The benefit to using Physical Disks is threefold:

• The entire disk is allocated to Home Server, maximising space
• The disks can be unplugged and read anywhere
• There is no possible conflict with access to the disk.

Unfortunately it was not to be – so virtual disks it is.

The initial problem I had was WOEFUL disk performance and 100% CPU usage. Task Manager showed the “System Idle Process” to be hogging the CPU. Process Monitor showed it to be 60% used by IRQ’s. Google tracked that to the HDD not being in DMA mode, but rather PIO Mode 4 due to firmware / drivers / phase of the moon. As I couldn’t fix it easily, I bought and installed a 2 port PCI – SATA card. The CPU load is normal using this card as opposed to the on board port.I have since tried storing the VM 80GB “OS” drive on both the 1TB WD 5400RPM VM dedicated disk, and the faster 7200RPM disk shared with the media centre, and couldn’t detect a difference in performance either way. I have left it on the VM disk to optimise space for TV recordings.

Next issue was awful network performance between the Host and Guest. Guest to other network computers was fine – about 4-8MB/s, but Guest – Host was shocking – about 20Kb/s. Like all good technicians today I didn’t use my brain, but hit Google again. TCP Offload seemed to be a recurring theme here. The registry keys for XP didn’t fix it, but the advanced settings for the network adapter did. TCP Offload disabled on the host and now I get the same network performance anywhere. This is not a fault with VMWare, but does seem to be a common compatibility issue with many network adapters, my onboard nic being one of them.

The final hurdle was again performance related. The guest Home Server would be running, but very sluggish to respond to inputs if you had left it alone for a while. It’s like VMWare let it go to sleep, and took between 1-4 minutes to assign it resources again. I made two changes here. I disabled Memory Page Trimming in the VM admin interface and disabled Page File Sharing with the line sched.mem.pshare.enable=”FALSE” in the .vmx config file.
Both of these seemed to keep the Home Server in a much more responsive state when I wanted it. It still often needs two clicks to “connect” to the console – the first fails, but network shares and backup work perfectly. As the console is not something I regularly access, I’ll ignore this issue.

There are some other tricks that can help. I did the following on the host to reduce any possible performance hits:

• I don’t run Anti-Virus on my Media Centre, so exclusions for that weren’t necessary. If you run AV it’s recommended to exclude the VM files to reduce overhead.
• Snapshots on the HDD used by VMWare were disabled – won’t be needing them for backup.
• Recycle Bin disabled – don’t need that either.
• Added a shortcut to the VM to the startup folder so it auto-starts. (VMware took away this nice feature from VMWare workstation)

With the Home Server running and all updates installed (particularly PP1) it was time to install the connector to all the PC’s in the house, and configure backups. This is mostly straightforward. There is one trick – you MUST exclude the Virtual Machine folders from the backup when you install the connector on the Vista Media Centre Host. Otherwise it will try backing up itself to itself, decide it won’t fit, and have a heart attack.

Once everything was installed I copied over all the data using Robocopy. I found that the Windows Copy with that much data to the VM wasn’t particularly reliable, although that may have been due to not having all the above tuning done first. My sequence was a learning exercise.

Vista Media Centre has an option to add remote data to it’s library. I have added music, pictures, MPG4/DivX and DVD’s stored on the Home Server. You’ll need to use the DVD library reg hack to get the latter to work.

I haven’t tried using the Home Server to store recordings of live TV, but watching movies stored on it with either DivX or a ripped DVD works just fine. Network performance is as above.

I have also setup a 1TB Mybook using USB to be the backup drive. The USB seems to work fine and is setup to automatically connect. Backups to the external drive are the usual manual deal.

Now I have access to all my data, a large file store, regular backups, a quiet media centre and a single box that only chew’s 85w. Performance is acceptable, but not amazingly snappy. I think it’s an acceptable compromise. It doesn’t really take any longer than when the old server had to spin up it’s six HDD’s. I’m not sure if the HDD’s are spinning down under VMWare, there is a few more watts to save.

I’m looking into power saving inside VMWare next, but think I’m off to a pretty good start.

There are a few things I would like to do to improve the solution:

• Get it going on VMWare Server (and not break RDP / Remote Desktop)
• Resolve the physical disk access issue, I assume it’s to do with running under Vista, but have no evidence to back this up. I tried disabling everything that might conflict.
• The performance is still not snappy on the console. The host CPU, RAM and Disk are not busy, so what’s making it sluggish. Network transfers and backup are fine, it’s just the console that’s sluggish.
• How does WMWare interact with host power saving features?

Update Oct ’09
Now running VMWare Server.
No real difference. Still can’t use native disks.
I’ll go back to pyhsical once the new Pinetrail atom is out. Although it works, I’m sick of the ultra-long boot times.
I’l make the new WHS an Atom and the VM Host media centre an i3 w/ integrated Video.

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.

They support several power modes, and my current meter is not accurate enough to report which one they are in.

The WD 3/5″ Black is the 7200RPM desktop drive.
The WD 3.5″ Green is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyBook
The WD 2.5″ Blue is the 5400RPM drive generally in the MyPassport

The other thing I noted was that my new power meter (which is not rated as accurate below 10w) indicated that whilst sleeping, the 3.5″ and it’s power adapter were drawing less than 1w. The power adapter was only just warm, much better than the usual little heat wasters. Well done WD for killing the parasitic standby power.

Overall, they get my vote as low power green storage.

The Green 3.5″ and Blue 2.5″ drives are also very quiet – both operating and seek. The 2.5″ is quieter, but with half the capacity, may not stack up overall.

And you can always decode the Morse Code on the outside!

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)
• Cooling – Quiet Fans
• P/S – Antec Truepower 2 (120mm single fan)
• MB – Asus N4L-VM-DH (replaced 3 times under warranty)
• CPU – Core 2 Duo T2400 1.8
• RAM – 2GB Kingston
• HDD – WD WD5000AAKS
• DVD-ROM – Pioneer DVR-215
• Video Card – Gigabyte NVidea GeForce 8600 GT Silent
• TV Tuner Card – Hauppauge Nova Dual Digital T-500
• Bluetooth Keyboard – Logitech DiNovo Mini
• Remote – MS IR Remote Control
• Readyboost – Kingston Datatraveler 4GB USB Stick
• TV – Panasonic 50″ 720p Plasma – TH-50PX80A
• Amp – NAD T762 5.1 Channel Amp

I use the VGA cable to drive the plasma – other outputs have proven problematic in the past and I can’t be bothered trying again.

The Amp is driven off the Digital Out on the M/B – a coax copper digital connection.

This current hardware setup is MUCH more stable than the previous top of the line junk I tried.

1. Connect USB KB & Mouse (needed)
   BIOS – Change boot order – CD/HDD
   Boot to Vista DVD
   Long Delay – options page
   Select – English Australia
   Enter Serial Key
   Select – Do Not Upgrade
   Format HDD
   Create Account – Paul w/ pwd
   Set Timezone
   Approve auto-updates
   Network Location – Home
   Login
2. Windows Update – all updates
   Disable Sidebar Autostart & Exit
   Enable Readyboost on USB stick
   IE – set Google to default search provider
   IE – set startup to blank page
   IE – Install Flash Player
   Enable Auto logon
   Start | Run | Netplwiz
   Tick the box, and enter credentials
   Set Screen Saver – Blank screen – 3 mins (to protect plasma)
   Advanced Power Settings
   10 min display off
   HDD 10 min spin down
   Never Sleep (this MB won’t resume, your’s may)
   Bluetooth KB works – no drivers req’d
   Updates finished – reboot
   Disable Welcome screen
   Set resolution to TV screen native – 1360 x 768 (1366×768 native)
   Experience Index – 4.6 (CPU 4.7)
   Activate Windows
   Check Device Manager – all devices OK from Windows Update
   Start | Network | Click “Turn on Network Discovery” on top bar | Make Network Private
3. Install WHS Connector (if running Windows Home Server)
   Set Home Server to ignore AV errors
4. Vista Media Centre Setup
   Custom
   Setup Signal
   Accept 2 tuners
   Use Guide
   “your postcode”
   Guide Not Available
   Scan for Services
   Vista Media Centre – Audio
   Single RCA
   5.1
   Test OK
   Vista Media Centre – Display
   Flat Panel
   VGA
   Widescreen
   Keep display resolution
   Adjust
   Check Sizing and Centering OK
   Settings – “Start Windows Media Center when windows starts”
   Enable optimization at 4am
   Set storage to leave 60gb free (400GB)
   Stop recording 4 minutes after
5. Create restore point
6. Ice TV
   Login
   Setup Interactive Device
   Install ICE TV Software
   Follow install instructions
   Then do a manual setup and update guide
   Leave all settings default atm
7. Vista Media Centre – Setup Guide for VMC
   Download Guide
   Setup Channels
   Remove SD channels and doubles
   Keep HD7,HD9,HD10,HD ABC, HD SBS, ABC2
   Reset “Add Listings to channel” to get guide to update
8. Windows Update – Reboot
   Windows Update – Reboot (Req’d)
   Windows Update – Reboot (not stated)
   Windows Update – Reboot (SP1)
9. Install Lifextender
   Enable Automated Scanning – Midnight
   Untick “Display TV Show Info when uncommercializing”
   Set – Upon completion DELETE the original
10. Uninstall KB950126 (it’s a known bug)
    Reboot
    Windows Update – Check for Updates
    View Available Updates
    Right Click KB950126 – Select “Hide Update”
    Install other pending updates
11. Fix Lifeextender Auto-start
    Search – Task Scheduler
    Create Task – Lifextender
    “Run with highest privileges”
    Triggers – Begin Task – “At Logon”
    Actions – New – “C:\program files\yellow cup\lifextender\lifextender.exe”
    OK
    Delete Lifextender from Startup Folder on Start Menu
12. Enable Terminal Services Access (if running Vista Ultimate)
    Computer – Properties – Remote Access – Remote Desktop – allow connections
13. Enable Ripped DVD Gallery

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings
    ShowGallery -Play

    Change the Registry value data from Play to Gallery.

14. Install KLite Standard 4.1.7 – all settings default
15. Clean up Vista SP1 removal files – Start | Search | CMD | type “vsp1cln.exe”
    This will free up between 1 and 1.5GB of disk space

Presto – you should now have a system that can play most things, be reasonably stable and do all the things it should out of the box.

It’s only 98 real steps to set it up, not including all the “next, next, finish” buttons.

Wouldn’t it be great if this was how it came from Microsoft in Australia.

Depending on your hardware – your mileage may vary. This was FAR more stable than installing all the drivers from the vendor sites.

You may optionally want to

a)  Have Terminal Services Access without interrupting your TV (haven’t done this yet)

b) Improve your HDD performance, but also have increased risk of data corruption.

Update Sept 09 - due to hardware failure I’m not running W7 and new hardware.
W7 is much better. Full review coming.
Still needs help though.

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

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

Home Server

I reviewed home server here. It’s a great product that acts as a network store for your folders, and backs up all the PC’s in your house. It has a brilliant Disaster Recovery solution and one of the most innovative backup and storage solutions I have seen in a long time.

Unfortunately that’s all it is, and that means 40watts at idle 24/7 – 88KwHrs / qtr, and more if I make it work hard.

Media Centre

This thing‘s purpose in life is to record TV, and play content. In Australia it does an average job of both. It’s another 50watts 24/7.

Trying to get a PC to work well in a lounge room is an exercise in frustration. Noise, power, keyboards, mice and windows hiccups are just not fun. Add in the TV compatibility problems many experience trying to get TV interfaces and resolutions correctly out of a PC.

It’s great when it works, but it’s definitely high maintenance.

As many people have said before me, what about storing the videos on Home Server, and getting it to do the recording too. That way they noisy PC can stay in the back room, and one PC can have an excuse for staying up chewing power 2/47, not two.

I don’t really stream my video, I watch it off a remote file share. A performance comparison of Streaming vs File Serving is here.

Extenders

I can’t claim to have one of these yet. The reviews are average, and every XBox 360 I hear about dies an early death.

These seem to be the obvious choice for the lounge room. They are quieter, more aesthetically pleasing, have native TV interfaces (PAL, Component etc), and an interface that never needs a mouse to drive it. They also play games, so many people end up wit one anyway.

The well known issues with power consumption on some of these come up, but at least it’s only when being watched, and it’s probably not more than the plasma TV anyway.

A chipped XBox with XBox Media Centre was my weapon of choice for years. It’s an aging solution now, and doesn’t have HiDef, but as a media player for over the network content, it beat Vista Media Centre hands down.

I can see this being the future of the lounge room.

The current problem being the limited support for what can / cannot be streamed to the current extenders, and how to connect the things.

Game Consoles

The Wii seems to excel here, as  a pure games console. The best comparison i reckon is here.

If you want all the video streaming, it’s XBox 360 or possibly, Playstation 3.

Digital Picture Frames

Nice toy, chews power all the time, unlike an old fashioned photos. Be good if they only displayed when they sensed movement.

The wireless versions I have seen seen only work off Flikr and other web services. None seem to be connecting to a local PC to show photo’s from. Great for using bandwidth.

Media Players

Everyone has an iPod, even me. I dont’ use iTunes at all, so it’s solid MP3′s. Unfortunately Apple in their wisdom designed the thing on ID3 tags, not on files / folders. If your tags aren’t perfect, you’ll have all sorts of fun navigating the thing.

I’m still looking for the cheap simple, web managed, wireless MP3 player I can plugin to my amp.

An old laptop or Asus eePC is topping the list at the moment.

Wireless

I ran wireless G for ages – just plain G, none of the tricky variants as my laptops built in is only basic G. It’s fine for web browsing and acceptable for file copying, but coverage and streaming movies never really worked.

I recently threw a bucket of cash a a Wireless N solution, sticking to a single vendor to keep the process smoother. Netgear is more common that Linksys in Australia.

Well the coverage is mildly better, and it is a bit faster, and that’s all. The problem is that the speed is still very variable, so even though the average is OK, for playing movies over the LAN – it all falls down.

Luckily my house lets me run a cable underneath to the lounge easily, so I have a solution, but it’s a disappointment.

I will have no such luck with running a cable for the spare room with the kids TV and their (might get for XMAS) 360. The consoles also don’t support Wireless N, so that’s more kit to buy.

So much for the wireless dream.

Looks like some others agree with me here and here

Broadband

I’m got lucky here, with my house being able to get Naked (Unbundled Local Loop) ADSL2+. I get about 7 Mbit download speeds. Being ULL means I don’t have to pay Telstra any money, and that makes me happy.

I don’t quite understand why a GB is cheaper on ADSL2+ than the same GB on ADSL, but I won’t complain seeing as I get the service.

This is one part of the equation that works well for me.

I do however have to run THREE devices pulling another 40Watts 24/7. A Wireless/Firewall/Router, an ADSL Modem and a VOIP adapter, all pulling their own power, each with their own old fashioned power brick radiating heat.
Where oh were is the all in one Modem/Router/Wireless N/VOIP adapter that only pulls 5 watts.

VOIP vs VOIP vs VOIP

“Skype” vs “VOIP from my ISP” vs “Messenger”

And never shall any of the above meet. Good luck all ye who enter here.

Then we move onto Bluetooth headsets, Wireless Handsets, GSM Picocells, and Cordless phones just for laughs.

Desktop PC’s

These integrate acceptably into the home network. My biggest hurdles here are

• What version of Vista
• Remote Desktop
• Local User logons
• Authentication and Passwords for file / printer sharing

I’m used to domain authentication, and sharing stuff around a home network isn’t quite as simple as I would have thought. More work to be done in this space.

It is still common to email a file via their internet email address, that is in the same house as you! That tells me point to point file transfer is still way too hard.

Hmm – maybe device authentication is a better idea in this space than traditional user authentication.

Wireless Printers

I have a HP wireless (802.11g) All In One unit. It works well enough except for one critical problem. It gets it’s IP Address via DHCP from the Router. If I don’t set a reservation, this changes sometimes due to the alignment of Venus and Mars. The software fails badly at finding it when it’s IP address changes.

Tip for Wireless device designers, home IP addresses are very dynamic, plan on your drivers having to work with that.

A reservation fixes the problem – until the next firmware upgrade.

Cloud Services

And finally we have the latest set of toys, the one’s the world’s been saying will happen for years. Well it’s not there yet, even with ADSL2+, but I agree, it’s coming.

I do like some of the services and I’m using more and more over time.

• Google Docs is interesting for sharing stuff with my wife.
• Windows Live Mesh is a new toy – no comment yet
• Newsgator / FeedDemon
• GMail w/ Outlook IMAP (testing – it’s a hassle)
• Domain hosted with Bluehost
• WordPress for this

I tried online backup of 20Gb of data, and it does work, but it’s nowhere near as practical as Home Server for me. For small quantities of data it would be very good.

The whole area is changing, and local sync options are making it more interesting. Google gears enables some of this functionality and is worth looking for.

Security and privacy are significant concerns. Google can inform you about google here.

A single authentication solution like OpenID starts to make all of this much easier.

Summary

Well the seamless integration of all this stuff is still a long way off. The problems are solvable, but the maintenance is high.

All I want is devices that chew no power, work together seamlessly, is available anywhere in the world and takes no effort from me. It’s not too much to ask for is it?

Watch this space.

Jesper had a similar problem last week.

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.

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

1. It backs up all your home PC’s using what has to be one of the most innovative and useful backup solutions I have ever seen.
2. It’s a file server
3. It’s a Terminal Services & Web Gateway – you can get access to your desktop PC’s and Files from the Web

WHS is managed by a really easy to use interface – it’s not a web interface, it’s actually a Terminal Services Published App. Anyone with a modicum of IT knowledge can drive this thing.

The hardware can be any old PC with more than 512MB of RAM. I run 4GB so I can use VMWare are well for testing. It will need a few HDD’s, either internal or external, USB, PATA, SATA, eSata, it doesn’t matter. They can be any size and speed, it will sort out the storage. Ideally there are four HDD’s, one for Boot / Temp, two for storage with duplication between them, and an external USB/eSATA for backup. I’m using a WD 1TB Mybook Essential for backup as unlike many enclosures, it will spin down saving power, and has no fans making noise. I’m running 1 x 80Gb, 4 x 500Gb, 1 x 1TB USB.

Install

Installing and setting up the WHS is pretty simple. I had one weird error that caused it to fail due to it not liking the PATA setup on my M/B. Changing the DVD to it’s own controller solved that.

There is one strange requirement, that is the server must be plugged into an Ethernet interface, not wireless. It’s something to do with the compression algorithm and streaming of the backups. It’s documented, but I haven’t found the solid reason yet. The clients can be wireless, but not the server.

Next step is to configure any storage. Plenty of guides on that around. The very interesting technical brief / whitepaper on WHS Storage is here. It must be noted that WHS does NOT support RAID. You can run hardware RAID, but it’s not recommended. Please read the whitepaper to gain a better understanding. Basically any of the file shares can have “duplication” enabled. Initially to me this sounded like a mirror (RAID1), and as I was running RAID5, I wasn’t particularly interested. After reading the whitepaper, it is fundamentally different. Not better or worse, just different. I would kinda still prefer RAID5 – it’s more efficient, and protects the whole system, not just the file stores, but this is much easier to expand and configure. I’m neutral on this feature vs RAID5, but would be very happy to give it to a non IT person to run. I think that’s the main point, anyone could drive this and have their data protected. It does NOT protect the WHS OS in any way. It does not duplicate the PC Backups unless you hack it.

Once the server is setup and configured with storage you install the WHS connector on each PC in your house. There is a tray icon that will run on each PC in your house – it alerts you to any problems, provides shortcuts to the file shares, manages backups and allows you to manage the WHS. It makes it much easier to trust the status of the server than having to remember and check Event Logs every so often.

Backups

The backup function is split into two components. PC backup and File Server backup. The technical brief for the PC Backup is here

PC Backups

The PC backup runs once a day, waking the computers from sleep, and putting them back to sleep when complete. The backups are particularly clever, tracking each NTFS sector backed up. If any sectors are the same, either across backups of the same machine, or between machines, the sector is only stored once. This is all transparent to the user. The space saving is dramatic. My three computers at home are using 168GB backup space, and that is with plenty of data on each, and nightly backups for a month. The backups are cleaned up to manage space on a schedule you can define.

Restoring of PC Backup’s can be done in one of two ways. You can browse the backups to restore individual files, or you restore the whole machine like an image. The restore is particularly clever. You boot the PC from a generic “Restore CD” that comes with WHS. All the drivers for that PC are sitting in a folder on the WHS ready to go – it has automatically found them on the PC when it was backed up and prepared them for this purpose. They go onto a USB thumb drive. With the drivers available, the PC can get onto the local network, connect to the server and retrieve the backup. It will put all the files back, OS and all – presto – rebuilt client PC from backup. That is much easier than the usual “restore the OS first”. Unlike most Bare Metal or Image restores, there is no need to keep regular updated images, meaning less maintenance and less space consumed. It’s very elegant really.

Server Backups

The server backup can backup any of the file shares (not the Server OS or the PC backups) to any HDD in the “Backup Storage” list. The server backup must be triggered manually, it cannot be scheduled or automated (A glaring oversight). It uses NTFS Hard Links to make sure that any file is only stored once, even though it may appear to be copied up each time. This saves huge amounts of space, and can be read on any machine. Again – this is transparent to the user. The external backups must be cleaned up manually when you run out of space. It would be ideal in future versions if these external backups could be duplicated somehow, to allow for an offsite copy. The current solution would be to perform the backup twice. This is not a significant overhead, as the backup only copies any changed data using a very efficient algorithm.

Storage / Shares

The other function for a WHS box by default is as a local file server. It is very easy for anyone to configure this, and can be controlled with easy to manage user accounts and permissions.
The interesting feature in this area is “Duplication”. Each share can optionally have “Duplication” enabled. This will then have the server transparently copy each file to a separate drive. The process is described in the storage whitepaper. This is all hidden from the user by using NTFS links and other NTFS trickery. The advantage is that in the event of a disaster of some kind, the drives are fully readable on any machine. It also is dynamic enough that the drives can be any type  and size, it will share the data round and balance the storage as required.

Web Gateway

I haven’t played much in this area yet – I’ll update when I do. It uses UPNP to publish a site to the internet through your router. The domain homeserver.com lets you register a free subdomain to get to your data. You can access your files from anywhere. There is a Terminal Services Gateway function to allow remote access to your home PC’s – I haven’t investigated this yet. It probably depends on your desktop OS version, user account configuration and if the computer is asleep.

Add In’s

There are a reasonable and expanding number of AddIns that can be installed. These offer increased functionality through the WHS interface.

Notes

It is worth checking the Power Settings on the WHS, as mine was set not to spin the drives down. This wastes a lot of power and will reduce their life. I tend to set mine to 5 minute spin down, as this is longer than any streaming period. The machine isn’t user interactive – so spin up time is not a concern.

Non-WHS Apps

WHS is actually Windows Server 2003 (possibly with some SBS stuff – I have noted). It will run nearly anything W2K3 Svr will. BUT, you need to be particularly careful with your drive management. Use of Disk Manager can kill the special WHS stores. Whatever apps you install needs some careful thought as to where the data will be stored.

Conclusion

I’m very impressed with the data storage and backup solution used in WHS. It can be driven by anyone with a modicum of computer experience and meets it’s goals very well. It is more limited than a full W2K3 server, but offers some brilliant functions that are difficult to find elsewhere. It’s simplicity is wonderful, and with some care, offers a wonderful solution.

The Future

What should have been included that wasn’t? Hmm, well. I have a list, as do many others on the Connect forum. If I had to narrow it down it would be.

1. WHS + Media Centre in one – so you can just run extenders around your house.
2. Scheduled External Server Backups
3. OS Backups
4. A 2W Atom CPU / MB & 95% efficient CPU – drop the consumption from the 30w idle of my Home Server
5. Better power options. It would be good to have the box sleep for much of the day, waking only to do what was needed when we were home.

Good Resources

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/

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

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

Now for 802.11g, MIMO will improve your coverage, but seeing as N is just around the corner, and uses MIMO as part of the draft standard, it made sense to just jump to 802.11n. My house is two storey, and getting good reliable coverage over both floors has proved difficult. I always get a signal, but not a good one, and for streaming my Vista Media Centre from my Home Server, I needed a good signal. I could have run Cat5, it’s what I had done in the past, but I figure, in 2008, I should be able to make all this new fangled stuff kinda come together smoothly.

Just released by Netgear and Linksys amongst others are new Dual Band draft N equipment, this runs in both the 5.8Ghz and 2.4GHz ranges. The argument being that the 5.8GHz range is far larger in frequency space, and far less utilised by other things that can interfere. Made sense to me, and at a small price premium, was worth jumping onto. Teamed with a new naked ADSL2+ service, I figured I would “embrace the future”.

The new Netgear model is WNDR3300 and the Linksys a WRT600N. I was more familiar with Netgear, it’s cheaper, and more easily available in Australia. I teamed it up with a set of Netgear USB WNDA3100 adapters. The unit supports QoS for my new Naked ADSL w/ VOIP service and has the widest range of features of the current netgear lineup.

8 Weeks after ordering, the kit finally turned up, with delays from Netgear getting it into the country. Looks like this stuff really is new – oh bugger, that’ll mean bugs.

It looks the piece, big, black, no antennas thanks to the secret metamaterial. The power pack is switch mode and small, and it comes with a few cables. Inital setup is manageable. The flashy lights on top are very very irritating, allow an extra $2 for a roll of black tape.

The first problem was the Router doesn’t have an integrated ADSL modem. Guess I should have read the specs a little better there. It’s almost impossible to purchase an ADSL modem only unit in Australia today, everything wants to route. Two routers in series = problems. You can convert the DG834G into a modem, but I had another home for mine, so I bought a DM111P to run as an Ethernet to ADSL2+ bridge. Getting the DM111P to be a modem means putting it into “RFC2684″ mode, something not covered in any of the docs.  This way the DM111P handles the ADSL settings, but the WNDR3300 does the ADSL PPOE login with credentials etc. The downside is that you can’t see your ADSL line connection performance figures, and whilst the DM111P is in bridge mode, it doesn’t have an IP address, so you can’t get information off of it either. You have to configure your WNDR3300 to login with “Other” and not “PPTP” or “Telstra Bigpond”. Either way, I’m getting about 7Mbit.

Once running and configured I fired up the WNDA3100 units in my partners desktop and the Media Centre. Install went OK, although I hate the “app” type driver installs. I much prefer just having the driver and managing it through windows. I figured being new, that doing it the “right” way with the vendor, and having additional signal information would be useful. Longer term, once smoothed out, I’ll be uninstalling the netgear apps and just running the driver. That said, I have to figure out how to extract it, as it’s all packaged up, and not easy to get into. Finally, there is some sort of script it runs on every login, looks dodgy to me.

The coverage is good, and speed ok. Plenty of other reviews there, no need to re-cover that. Interestingly most of the clients could only see the 2.4Ghz signal. The 5.8 signal gets wiped out by my walls too quickly. As this review covers, you can only have DraftN on either 5.8 OR 2.4 at once, so I dropped the 5.8 signal and got the speed where I could. That pretty well negates the point of having Dual Band.

The comments I have had so far are below

1. Integrated WNDA3100 drivers mean more junk running
2. The pretty blue flashing ultrabright LEDS on the router are really really irritating, and there is no “off” option. (Update – press the dome over the lights – they turn off)
3. The router firmware is very flaky. It drops wireless signal every so often. (Seems better now)
4. The WNDA3100 drivers are less than ideal – more work needed here to improve performance.
5. My 802.11a/b/g laptop only wanted to see the 5.8 signal, not the 2.4, until I turned off the 5.8 on the router totally.
6. My HP printer wouldn’t work with WPA2, I had to turn on WPA/WPA2 compatibility mode.
7. If running in 2.4/5.8 Dual band mode, you get the option to run two different SSID’s. If you run the same one, your client can be confused as to which one to use. There is no guidance I have found on this function anywhere, and I’m still confused. Caused me some grief, until I made them different, at which stage the WPS auto config function stops working properly.
8. My Outlook w/ RPC over HTTP refused to work until I upgraded to the Beta firmware. (Fixed now)
9. Netgear has a Beta program going for firmware and some decent forums
10. There is discussion of other USB NIC vendors with the same Atheros chipset having performance issues.
11. The modem and power adapters all produce a bit of heat, meaning they are not particularly efficient. I am trying to cut my power use.
12. The DM111P comes with an old style power brick, whereas the WNDR3300 has a much smaller and more efficient switch mode power adapter. C’mon Netgear, catch up.
13. Coverage is much better
14. Speed is much better
15. No driver support for the WNDA3100 and Server 2003. I haven’t done video tests yet until I get a NIC for the server.

Next time I think I would consider the DG834N with the integrated modem, unless I had spectrum issues, possibly in densely populated areas.

Update (31/07/08)
I have updated to the latest release firmware – this has helped the stability significantly. Coverage is still ok, but not excellent. Primarily, I still can’t reliably watch DivX/XVid movies on my Vista Media Centre PC from my Windows Home Server. They play, but often judders and stall. The signal strength an quality are about 70% – but it still doesn’t cope. I think I’ll have to run Cat5 to the Media Centre after all. The Home Server is already running Cat 5 to the WNDR3300 – that is a requirement of WHS.  My house is two storey timber and no too huge. Due to placement, some transmission paths are less than ideal – high angle to the walls / floors increasing apparent depth.

 
Router

Router w/ VOIP adapter from Internode

 
Router, VOIP & ADSL Modem

WNDA3100

UPDATE:
I have decided to ditch the WNDR3300 and replace is with *something* else. I ahve gone through 5 versions of the firmware since I bought it. The 5.8Ghz is a waste of time, it has very poor penetration. www.smallnetbuilder.com shows average-poor wireless performacne in comparison from other devices. THe unit was replaced under warranty a couple of weeks ago when the QoS rules would not remain set to custom.

 The final deal breaker was my VOIP phone dropouts. I have an OPEN networks VOIP ATA behind the router, and frequently get “one way voice” on a call. I put this down to VOIP issues. Whilst the router was away under warranty I used my old DG834G – and had NO call dropouts. It doesn’t even have QoS and the call quality was better. As soon as the WNDR3300 went back in – dropouts came back. It’s going to be replaced, this time with somethign with an integrated ADSL modem.

I would not recommend this device.

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

As below

 
Go to “Windows Mobile Device Centre”

Mobile Device Settings – More

Connection Settings

This computer is connected to: Work Network (from Automatic)

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.

The fix is to enable VPN protocols under “Live OneCare Settings” – “Advanced Settings” Button – “Ports and Protocols” Tab – Tick “Virtual Private Network”.

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

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

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.

Google wasn’t a lot of help, although there were some hints. The MS Browser tools are all designed to work in a domain, not a workgroup.

What I found was that I had to DISABLE the Ethernet NIC on the machines having problems. Disconnected was not adequate. Now I had seen this in servers before, but not in a general home LAN. Retesting showed the same results.

I gave up before trying to track the browser election broadcasts, although a few packet captures showed name resolution wasn’t working correctly before the change. Event logs showed nothing useful.

So, if you have problems with your home wireless network and name resolution, disable the unused wired NIC’s and just run the wireless. All is happy now.

Next to solve the bandwidth issues.

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

Now for a remote DNS server trying to resolve a host on your domain – eg www.company.com.xx it can query for your ISP’s records just fine. Yours however are a circular reference. You are saying that to find records for your domain you have to ask your DNS server, but to ask your DNS server you have to know it’s IP address which is stored in your domain. To get around this little problem the entity hosting .com.xx will have created a “glue record” when your domain was registered and delegated. This is buried in their server and will be an A record something like ns1.company.com.xx 2.3.4.5. Now you have a record that is supposed to be inside your domain zone, hosted outside your zone. This has the potential for confusion. 

Now, if you ever decide to change the IP address of your DNS server, and you look in your DNS records, you’ll find some NS records and some A records. Changing these WILL NOT change the glue record at with your DNS registrar. Worse, no query you can do with NSLookup will show where the problem is once it’s changed. If you check with your registrar, they will show NS1.company.com.xx and NS2.YourISP.com.xx. NSLookup will show both of these to be correct. You can’t edit your own glue records, and most registrars don’t give you access to that area.

The only two ways I have found of proving the problem are to use NSLookup to directly query the registrars DNS servers for the glue record name and have them come back with an IP that is different to your NS records, or to start digging through your internal DNS servers DNS cache. It will have the incorrect record stored in there as that is where it is directed when it does a query about your domain.

Then ring your registrar and get it fixed.

I have seen this stuffed up generally in countries where the domain management is “less than ideal”, but also in Australia. It can be confusing for a first time exercise as the problem looks setup correctly, the broken record is one there you can’t see.

If you have a delegation problem, this is where I start.

“The Web Proxy filter failed to bind its socket to x.x.x.x port 8080. This may have been caused by another service that is already using the same port or by a network adapter that is not functional. To resolve this issue, restart the Microsoft Firewall service. The error code specified in the data area of the event properties indicates the cause of the failure.”

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.

OS Installation

Well, one would think that for a system designed to live in the lounge room displaying on your huge energy sucking plasma TV using a flash as wireless keyboard then you could install it as such. Fat chance. Installation pretty well requires you to plug in a normal USB keyboard, mouse and often LCD PC screen into something that is not supposed to need a keyboard, mouse and screen. DUMB

My disk had been used for XP. As I alluded to here, you can’t install Vista onto a Dynamic Disk with a partition on it. Pull apart your PC and play the HDD shuffle to fix this moronic decision. I haven’t had to do this since I chipped my first XBox. DUMB

Drivers & Hardware

Next step was to get the drivers to work. Scarily enough all the Hardware was over one whole year old, so I figured my chances were limited, seeing as it was released before Vista. Most manufacturers have a “don’t look back” policy. (If you think large company means better driver support – HP, Sony, Dell, IBN etc – you are kidding yourself, they are worse). I spent a significant number of hours throwing ideas round the XPMediaCentre website with little to no success.

Tuner
Dvico Dual Digital TV Tuner Card – Hours (many hours) wasted, drivers give combinations of “unknown devices”, single tuner only, or dual tuners with non visible to Media Centre. Nightmare stuff.
I replaced it with a Dual Digital Hauppauge to much greater success.

Video Card
I was recommended a HIS X1300 as it had the fanless option I was after. It’s up to the task, but the drivers are rubbish. They don’t have all the options covered on the ATI site. Support for varied resolutions or dual screen doesn’t exist. You can’t drive the VGA and Component outputs at the same time.

It’s impossible to get a colour signal through the component output to the TV. The TV is a native 1366 x 768 wide picture. The best the card will deliver is B&W at 480i. There is no option in the HIS driver to setup the component outputs. The ATI driver doesn’t work with the card. I would like to video switch with my amp, and component will give the best quality to do that. I ended up driving the screen with VGA @ 1360 x 768.

Comments on the boards abound about Video output, quality and alignment issues. The justifications given are basically that TV and PC signals are fundamentally incompatible and can’t work well together. I have an XBox that says that is rubbish. It should be very possible to get good TV support from cards with TV outputs, anything less is a sign of immaturity in the industry. VGA is analogue, TV is analogue. DVI is digital, HDMI is digital. Either way, a good signal at any resolution should be simple.

Case
The Zalman HD 160 looked good and had an excellent layout internally for quiet airflow. Unfortunately the drivers for it were a mess.

The card reader comes up an an Unknown USB device.

The IR receiver reception is poor and only works when the software is running.

The software doesn’t autorun, so you have to do that after install. It may also may stop receiving IR when the machine goes to sleep.

The display on the front does work when the IR software is running, however if you then use the MS IR receiver as it gets a MUCH  better signal, the two conflict. It is supposed to be possible to turn the built in one off, but I can’t figure out the software options. I gave up and ignored the display.

IR Keyboard
The Microsoft IR Keyboard is rubbish. Total and utter rubbish. There is a 70% chance that the key you press will end up on the screen. As it’s impossible to touch type on your lap, you have to look up and down after typing each key to see if it worked. This becomes frustrating after about the first 3 keys, before I gave up and plugged in a USB keyboard to work off. IR works, it doesn’t have to be that bad. JUNK

Lockups
These aren’t resolved yet, but I suspect the Asus MB. I’ll update when it’s solved.

Audio Out
The digital audio out seems to work OK, although my distrust by now extends fairly wide, so I would really like to see some sort of display to tell me if it’s decided to output Stereo vs 5.1.

Software

Codecs
Amazingly enough Microsoft bothered to include the codec to play DVD’s, I suppose MCE 2005 didn’t even get that. Unfortunately not being able to play Quicktime, DivX or XVid rules out a good 50% of the content out there. The codecs for these can be problematic, especially with AC3 audio. Quicktime is still giving me grief.

Lets get this straight, my chipped Xbox with XBox media centre written by a bunch of hackers worried about prosecution played more stuff, more reliably than Microsoft multi million dollar effort. That’s a JOKE.

Codecs and Media Centre
OK, so I have the Codecs installed and can play the video through Media Player. But not through MCE. It still doesn’t recognise stuff. So I still can’t play Quicktime through MCE. Great effort. You write Office for the Mac, but you can’t licence Quicktime. Marketing Morons.

Screensaver
I worry about burn in on my Plasma. It seems pretty simple to me. If a movie or TV is playing, don’t let the screen saver run. If a movie is paused or not playing fulls screen, make sure it’s enabled by default and kicks in after 5 minutes. Simple. Of course it doesn’t work that way. When it will kick in seems to be dependent on it’s mood, what erroneous input the IR receiver has seen or a set of undocumented rules, it may, or may not come on.

Guide
It’s crap in Australia. Enough said. If I pay for ICE TV it may work better than what Microsoft should have sorted out years ago. I mean they have enough experience in court, what’s another court case.

Library
You can only add shares to the Library, not individual sub-folders. What year are we in? They sorted that for Home Drive mapping back in Windows 2000!

Aspect Ratio
I suspect this is more to do with the huge range of aspect ratios and how they are recorded onto DVD, but after owning a wide-screen TV, it really is a dogs breakfast and all over the place. I frequently find myself trying different screen formats to see what fits best. Immature industry this wide-screen HDTV.

Summary

Well the driver support is poor. The hardware is poor. The Microsoft components are not well integrated. The codecs are non-existent. The setup is a nightmare. And they expect this to replace my mothers VCR one day?

Lets get this straight. The ONLY thing Vista MCE does that a chipped XBox running XBox Media Centre can’t is record TV. The old cheap simple reliable modded XBox does more than Media Centre, with less hassle. And you can buy HDD recorders for recording TV.

I would think twice and then think again before I set my heart on this rubbish. I’ll persist and get it working, but this is definitely v0.02.

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.

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.

Now, MS pushed Dynamic disks and the partitions associated as the “best way” to do things. Then they don’t support it fully with their next OS through the install.

That’s just silly (and slack) Microsoft

I used to love the APC Smart UPS range. Fully line interactive, they’ll work of nearly any input power and give perfect output power. They don’t cut to batteries unless there is basically no input whatsoever, so brownouts or out of frequency gensets don’t bother them in the least, or even flatten the batteries. Just what you need living on a minesite, or somewhere the power is often dodgy. I still like them for server rooms, very flexible solution, but not for home.

I recently bought a power meter and the results were not good…..

 
264W – UPS running 2 PC’s, a laptop and a few other bits.

 
126W – Same equipment, same conditions, no SmartUPS

126W – Same equipment, same conditions, Offline Powerware UPS

The UPS was fully charged, all equipment was at idle and 30+ minutes after a clean boot. The APC was less than 50% efficient.

It’s gone now. I’m trying to be somewhat green and using DOUBLE the power to run my computers is not a good tradeoff. I’m sure APC could have done better if they had tried.

The digital power meters are available from Jaycar

When you move a mailbox Outlook will (generally) get redirected without issue. It will do this by connecting to the original server, whop will then issue an instruction as to the new mailbox location based on what information is stored in AD. Some (5% or less) will not automatically redirect due to dodgy profiles.

If you have to do a server shuffle due to hardware limitations, that is, move everyone to another server, rebuild the first one, then move them back, you may have problems. As soon as you turn off the original server, any users not yet redirected will not be able to open outlook. Anyone that has already been redirected will be fine. For sites were staff are on rosters this can leave a large number or “orphaned” copies of outlook. Luckily the solution turns out to be simple.

Outlook merely looks at the server name to find the Exchange Server. It’s not based on the computer account or GUID. This means that if you delete the original server and rebuild a temporary one with the same name, it will handle all the redirections for you. It doesn’t matter the mailbox is no longer there, all the data is stored in AD. You could even throw it onto a VM, it doesn’t do any work, and needs very little disk space. 

This makes a migration where you want to keep everything smooth for your users even simpler.  I just finished using it as I had to to totally reconfigure the RAID packs on a server, meaning the mailboxes just had to move.

Active Directory uses the _msdcs.domain.local sub-domain to host SRV records. Depending on your domain structure and upgrade path, you may find this domain delegated rather than held as part of your “domain.local” zone. The conditions are in this KB article.

Now lets get tricky. Let’s say your _msdcs is delegated as in the picture above. Let’s also say over the years you replace and upgrade servers as your network grows. Sooner or later you’ll most likely replace your original domain controllers.

Well – the delegation details don’t get automatically updated with the IP of every server that hosts the zone. Nup, they are static. This means that although you may have 10 replicas scattered across your network, only the original DNS servers will be the ones listed as Authoritative. When they are replaced – presto – broken DNS and all sorts of cool errors. I recommend DCDiag /test:dns to look for things like this.

So if you are adding or removing DC’s, add _msdcs delegation to your checklist.

Now why wouldn’t MS simply have any replica automatically be listed?

One of the errors is below – Event ID 2087

Active Directory could not resolve the following DNS host name of the source domain controller to an IP address. This error prevents additions, deletions and changes in Active Directory from replicating between one or more domain controllers in the forest. Security groups, group policy, users and computers and their passwords will be inconsistent between domain controllers until this error is resolved, potentially affecting logon authentication and access to network resources.

Source domain controller:

 abcdc03

Failing DNS host name:

 568a7f0d-ef3a-4fad-b7bc-5d5d8ce17ba2._msdcs.abc.com.id

NOTE: By default, only up to 10 DNS failures are shown for any given 12 hour period, even if more than 10 failures occur.  To log all individual failure events, set the following diagnostics registry value to 1:

Registry Path:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Diagnostics\22 DS RPC Client

User Action:

 1) If the source domain controller is no longer functioning or its operating system has been reinstalled with a different computer name or NTDSDSA object GUID, remove the source domain controller’s metadata with ntdsutil.exe, using the steps outlined in MSKB article 216498.

 2) Confirm that the source domain controller is running Active directory and is accessible on the network by typing “net view \\<source DC name>” or “ping <source DC name>”.

 3) Verify that the source domain controller is using a valid DNS server for DNS services, and that the source domain controller’s host record and CNAME record are correctly registered, using the DNS Enhanced version of DCDIAG.EXE available on http://www.microsoft.com/dns

  dcdiag /test:dns

 4) Verify that that this destination domain controller is using a valid DNS server for DNS services, by running the DNS Enhanced version of DCDIAG.EXE command on the console of the destination domain controller, as follows:

  dcdiag /test:dns

 5) For further analysis of DNS error failures see KB 824449:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=824449

Additional Data

Error value:

 11004 The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I once got called out on a job to give MS PSS support a hand onsite. Unusual I thought at the time, normally I ring PSS, not they ring me. Anyway, they had a rough time getting a client up and running and needed someone on the ground that could help sort through it.

When I got there the Windows 2000 Domain Controller and Exchange 2000 Server  were both very unhappy. The Exchange database was offline, corrupted, and the Domain had more errors in the event log than I had seen before.

After a bit of digging I found the problem. The Domain Controller had two network interfaces, a fairly common thing with server hardware. One of these interfaces had given itself a Private IP address, despite not being plugged in. Most of the Domain SRV records had been redirected to this private (and unusable) IP, making the Domain controller intermittently un-contactable. This had gone on for a significant period of time, before the other Domain Controller had lost sync and gone offline corrupted. The Exchange server hadn’t taken long after that to do similar.

Disabling the unused interface resulted in just one DNS registration, and presto, a happy AD DC again.

Recovering the Exchange Server was not so much fun. It turned out the “backups” were file level, not Information Store backups, so useless. The Information Store failed recovery with ESEUtil and ISInteg. I left PSS to sort that mess out.

I had seen similar behavior before with ISA boxes registering the incorrect interface. Now I am very careful to disable any unused interfaces, thus solving much DNS weirdness.

In theory the interface detection solves this, and I haven’t seen the problem in Server 2003, so maybe it was solved. I’ll keep being cautious.

I ran a DCDIAG /test:dns today and received an error

DNS server: 128.9.0.107 (b.root-servers.net.)
1 test failure on this DNS server
This is not a valid DNS server.
PTR record query for the 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa. failed on the DNS server 128.9.0.107

Well it would appear that way back in 2004 the B Root Server had a change of IP Address as advised here. The old address was valid for some time but has since been de-commissioned, although I don’t know when exactly.

It’s no biggie, the other servers respond, everything runs as normal. It probably results in a touch more Internet traffic, but with all the Paris Hilton upskirt bandwidth I doubt it matters that much.

My question is, surely, this, of all the Critical Updates MS pushes out with WSUS, would be worthy of a Microsoft Update? Three years, but not as urgent as the “Critical” Windows Genuine Advantage. I guess it’s not critical for their bottom line.

In the meantime I think I’ll update some Root Server lists.

And you rebuild it for some reason. It’s a clean rebuild. As part of this rebuild you delete the Computer Account from AD. When you add the computer to the domain again, a new computer account is created.

BUT – if you have “Only Secure Updates” enabled in DNS, the new computer account doesn’t have permission to modify or overwrite the existing DNS entries. You’ll get an Event ID 11166 on boot up of the new server from DnsApi in it’s System Event Log. It’s only a Warning, not an Error, but the consequences could be significant. In my case Exchange Auth kept failing, despite logging no other errors in the event log. Don’t forget this applies to the PTR or Reverse lookup as well.

The simple solution is to delete the DNS records manually, then run IPCONFIG /refreshdns – and presto, all will be good.

The Event Log will say something like 

The system failed to register host (A) resource records (RRs) for network adapter
with settings:

   Adapter Name : {A7648FC7-7952-4AB5-9670-20E84EE3D8A8}
   Host Name : ***srv012
   Primary Domain Suffix : somewhere.com
   DNS server list :
         10.1.2.2, 10.1.1.2
   Sent update to server : 10.1.2.2
   IP Address(es) :
     10.1.2.10

 The reason the system could not register these RRs was because of a security related problem. The cause of this could be (a) your computer does not have permissions to register and update the specific DNS domain name set for this adapter, or (b) there might have been a problem negotiating valid credentials with the DNS server during the processing of the update request.

 You can manually retry DNS registration of the network adapter and its settings by typing “ipconfig /registerdns” at the command prompt. If problems still persist, contact your DNS server or network systems administrator. For specific error code, see the record data displayed below.

Well I hear a rumor that now it’s moved to books. If you for example were stuck on a remote island with no access to external print media, then it wouldn’t be surprising that you found this floating round.

Reading books on a PC or handheld device just isn’t relaxing. Luckily Adobe has a “print in booklet” function, allowing a novel to be broken into manageable booklets.

It even appeared within a few days of publication, meaning someone put a lot of work into OCR. The formatting and all is correct, although the OCR errors in spelling increase toward the end, I guess they were in a hurry.

Not at I would ever participate or support such an immoral act. It’s just entertaining what you find in a 3rd world country that can’t afford to make a rich person richer.

Of course I did what any good law abiding person would do and immediately burnt the books.

WOW – a real file server? yep, it’s that astounding. Somehow I have trouble getting all excited here. File servers have been round for a while now. NAS boxes come with an OS installed, and the discs on some type of RAID. I’m still not excited. 

I just can’t fathom the value proposition here.  Discs cost you the same amount weather you buy them in a NAS box or a File Server. The base hardware costs about the same, or if you save money it’s cheap junk. The OS costs you the same OEM or in the File Server.

If you get a Linux based one you have no NTFS permissions and it runs SAMBA. You may as well not bother with Domain at all – hey, there’s some less costs if you don’t need domain controllers.

Either way, Linux or Windows, they didn’t intend you to screw with the OS too much, so running AV, Backup agents and Updates can be interesting from a support perspective.

“But you can install your Exchange Databases on it” – well, yes you can. Same as you can install them on any file server. And get crap performance. 1GBit Ethernet is 3.5 times slower than 320MByte SCSI channels. I’ll stick with local SCSI thanks, at least I know the discs are dedicated.

So it’s a box on the network running SMB. That’ll definitely revolutionize the world.  I think I’ll just stick to throwing more discs at my current file servers. 

I had a few theories ranging from

• Metalised Paint
• Metalised Gel-coat
• Metal Fibre reinforced glass
• Metal Impregnated resin
• Foil Layers
• Wire Mesh

I had the opportunity to drill a water drain hole in one today and the answer became obvious (at least for the Prodelin brand dishes)

There is a fine wire mesh similar to fly-screen under the gel-coat.  It is very fine aperture to cope with the GHz frequencies involved. Hopefully it’s stainless, it looks fairly silver, so it wont rust from the edges in.

So when you are cleaning your fiberglass dish of the mould they seem to accumulate – you don’t have to overly worry about abrading the gelcoat. The mesh layer is reasonably well protected.

Another question answered. 

There is no “backup” tool for share configurations when performing DR on a file server. Ideally for my DR I want to be able to restore the files and that’s it, not worry about the server configuration. My File Servers don’t run any app’s, they do SMB and that’s it. All other functions are run on an application server. Print Serving runs on a VM.

The large number of shares generally equates to a large and complex login script that decides what to map to where. This makes file references different across the company, confusing users. It also makes logins slow (and often involve KIX – yech)

Try this for an idea

Run a single Domain DFS Root.
Have links for:

1. Users Home Drives (one link per server/site)
2. Software Deployment (one link - it’s replicated)
3. Company Data (may be per site depending on structure)

Map the Home drives and the Company Data shares. Presto, quick simple login for all. The structure is kept in AD, so it replicated and safe. DFS-R get’s copies of data where it needs to be efficiently. You file server only needs three or four shares to keep everything happy.

If you link the mappings to intermdiate links, as opposed to end targets, then the cleint PC’s never connect to all the remote file servers. Your roaming uses connect to the closest root and mobile users don’t get bogged down.

It gets a little more complex as you manage replicated vs non replicated data between sites, but DFS is perfect for this. The single root approach is far closer to the Internet that people are familiar with, as opposed to knowing which servers and shares things are on. Servers change, data structures should last longer than that.

There is a touch more complexity in planning, but operationally from a user and server management perspective – it’s far simpler. You login speeds are dramitally improved and roaming users are not impacted. All you need to do is organise.

Err – NO

You see whilst Adaptec and others do genuinely mirror their disks, IBM implements some type of Mirrored Striping. I don’t know and haven’t researched all the details, but the short story is that if you want to read the Mirrored disk – you need an IBM RAID Controller. I did speak to an IBM tech and was told it was for performance reasons.

Now using an IBM ServeRAID controller to read the data isn’t the end of the world – just throw it in another box (assuming you have one). At least IBM RAID is compatible across their controller model ranges.

This is where your world will now get “interesting”. You see IBM has this interesting concept where they store a copy of the RAID controller configuration on the disks. If you install RAID Pack 1 from Server1 into Server2 that already has a RAID pack (Raid Pack 2) operating, the RAID Controller (assuming there is only one for that backplane) will see two different configurations. Pack 1 knows only about itself and Pack 2 is the same.

Fair enough you say – we’ll just teach them about each other. Well – you can’t. IBM does not allow “merging” of RAID pack configurations onto the controller. This means that if you try, it’ll delete one of the packs. Fun Fun Fun. Great design effort boys.

 I haven’t seen this much brains used since Intel decided to make a RAID controller with no recovery console except for the one installed in the OS – THAT YOU CAN’T BOOT to because that’s why you need the recovery console. (I use these for doorstops)

OK, so you can’t merge, so you can’t easily swap packs between machines for quick recovery. Good marketing move, it does give a reason to keep a spare IBM box in the corner.

It also makes one of my safety tricks useless. I have on more than one occasion seen an administrator delete the wrong pack or disk on a machine with several arrays. I haven’t had it happen, but it’s entertaining to watch. It’s not that hard to do. Often the logical labeling is not the same as the physical labeling, or is inconsistent in some other way. My solution to this (assuming things are offline) is to drop the healthy pack out whilst working on the failed one. It’s very hard to make a mistake and delete something that isn’t plugged in.

BUT – if you try this with an IBM ServeRAID controller, the pack you are working on will likely lose knowledge of the offline pack. When you go to plug it back in – presto – pick one, but not both. You then start all over with the healthy pack online, and waste another two hours. Wonderful during a DR situation.

So – if you are used to other RAID manufacturers kit and get dumped with an IBM system, things are a little different.

I actually like the IBM ServeRAID kit, I just get frustrated by companies that insist on being different and make my life harder in the process.

Hey, Mozilla- Quotes Are Not Legal in a URL

So why oh why do we still have share permissions in W2K3 and Longhorn? All they do is confuse Administrators and allow for weird security configurations and the problems that come with them. I frequently see mismatched configurations, confusion over remote and local access or confusion over other sharing methods such as HTTP.

There is a small supportive argument or them that goes along the lines of “but what if the NTFS permissions are wrong”. Well, lets look at the failure mechanisms.

1. Attacker has User Account and Password – Share permissions do nothing that NTFS wouldn’t – “All your base are belong to us”

2. NTFS vulnerability found – After this many years, I trust the NTFS ACL’s far more than I trust the Share Permission controls.

3. Mis-configuration of NTFS Permissions - This is generally due to an inadequate design for management of the user groups and permissions. If your change control is inadequate, Share Permissions are not going to save you. I’m working on a paper at the moment to smooth this problem out.

Microsoft, please get rid of them, they are a legacy solution that confuses many administrators.

In the meantime – Share Permission – EVERYONE FULL CONTROL

You’ll need an old PC. This is a great way to reuse your desktop when you upgrade. Any old piece of junk will do, but ideally it will have the following:

1. Tower Case
2. 300W Power Supply (250W may do at a pinch)
3. 4 x SATA Ports
4. 2 x IDE (PATA) Ports
5. Any CPU – doesn’t matter
6. 512MB RAM
7. On Board Video preferred

The intent is to run 5 x Hard Drives and a CDROM. You can do this with all IDE (PATA) but it gets difficult to find IDE adapter cards, and their performance can be poor. You can run two drives per PATA cable vs 1 per SATA.

You want 4 drives the same size. 500GB is about the most cost effective per GB at the moment (mid 2007), but do the numbers on whatever gives you the best deal at the time. You could use 5 – 10 old smaller drives, however finding a controller to plug them all into is next to impossible. 4 x medium size drives tend to be the most cost effective way of getting bulk space. The fifth HDD can be any old piece of junk. It’s only to run the OS, and can be replaced if it dies. It doesn’t hold any data.

The case doesn’t need to have mounts for all these drives, and it doesn’t have to be anything special. If the drives are all 7200RPM, they tend to get a little warm. They should have some space between them and ventilation. If they are 5400RPM’s you can stack them together on the base of the PC, they won’t care.

As it is a server you can shove it anywhere in the house, making super silent a lower priority. If you want to build it silent see my “building a quiet PC article“. I prefer to shove it under the stairs where noise isn’t a problem. I manage it through Remote Desktop, so it doesn’t even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse.

Install Windows Server if you have it (licensed and legitimate of course) or XP onto the single small HDD. Nothing special here. If you are running XP you’ll have to do some hacks that are covered in this article on Tomshardware. I haven’t found a hack to get Vista to support RAID 5 yet. Windows Home Server should be an interesting one to evaluate when I comes out, as it has some new takes on RAID. In the meantime however, I’ll stick with Server 2K3.

The objective is to protect the data through the use of RAID. I see plenty of people with data on a single machine at home they use as a server, but most don’t run RAID. I always run Software RAID, that way if a HDD dies, I lose nothing. I prefer software RAID in windows to any of the Hardware RAID adapters for home use. The reason is simple. If you Hardware RAID adapter fails, you have to get one the same or compatible to get to your data. Being cheap equipment, this has a fair likelihood of occurring, and then not being available. Using Software RAID on the other hand means any Windows Server can read the disks, and recover the data. We are doing this for data safety, not performance. I have always found software RAID performance to be acceptable, even when I was running an old Pentium MMX 166 box.  In a business environment it’s a very different story and cost.

Once Windows is installed I recommend you configure RAID 5 across the other 4 data disks. There are instructions here.  The disks need to be the same size to participate in the RAID pack. They can actually be different sizes, but you’ll waste space on the larger disks. Now most RAID solutions support two different types of RAID to protect your data - RAID 1 and RAID 5, which I’ll outline.

Raid 1 is a Mirror. It makes a copy of one disk onto another, and shows them as a single disk. If one dies, you have the data on the other disk, and the failure is transparent. The problem is you lose 50% of your space. Your 2 x 500GB disks (1TB total) give you 500GB useable space. Not particularly efficient. To make it practical for a home server you have to buy larger more expensive disks. This is supposed to be a cheapish exercise.

RAID 5 is referred to as a Stripe with Parity. The redundant data is spread equally across all of the disks. You need a minimum of 3 Hard Drives to run RAID 5. The way the algorithm works you lose the effective space of ONE disk to the data protection. If you think about it, the more disks you add, the more efficient it is. The data being spread over multiple disks tends to make the system faster as well, disks being the most common bottleneck. Our 4 x 500GB (2TB) gives us about 1.5TB useable. It’s actually a little less due to HDD manufacturers counting differently to the rest of the IT industry, but hey, that’s marketing for you.

With your RAID 5 setup on your old PC and some cheap Hard Drives, you’ll have one of the cheapest large data stores around. You also get the benefit of knowing if one of those drives dies, your data is safe. The gotcha is you actually have to check the RAID occasionally to be sure it is healthy. You can do this by checking the system event log. There is a risk that as it all just keeps working in the event of a failure, it will continue unnoticed, until a second disk fails, resulting in the loss of everything. I am still looking for a freeware utility to alert in the event of a software raid pack error.

It should be noted that RAID only protects against one type of disaster – loss of a single Hard Disk Drive. If you lose multiple drives, accidentally delete files, get a virus etc etc, your data will be lost. As I tend to store non critical data, and use this space to backup my other PC’s, loss of this type is not a significant problem for me. This risk should be kept in mind and managed where possible. There is no cheap large scale backup for home use that I have found on the market. The ideal would be some type of 100 disk DVD Loader, however all the library’s out there don’t have integrated burners. If anyone finds a large cheap loader with a burner, I would love to know about it (another market opportunity for some Taiwanese company).

Now this machine is going to be on 24/7 and you should think a little green. Most CPU’s aren’t too bad for power when idling, even if they aren’t the latest models. The biggest energy chewer will be the HDD’s. If you go into Power under Control Panel and set the machine to shut down the Hard Drives after 15minutes of inactivity, you’ll save a heap of power, and extend the life of your drives significantly. Consumer drivers aren’t really designed to spin 24/7. Stopping them spinning also reduces noise. Overall it will probably chew about 30-50W at idle and up to 250W under load, depending on the CPU you are running. It’s not practical to enable Standby, as there is no remote wake up command.

Have you ever noticed your Jasjam is incorrectly aligned when you answer the phone or an SMS message, and it takes a few seconds to sort it self out?

Well - it turns out the way the rotation is sensed is via a magnetic pickup. iMate in their wisdom supplies a case that has its lid closed by some very strong magnets. Presto – they just broke their own orientation sensing mechanism, causing the poor thing to heave  heart attack when it’s removed from it pouch, and it’s owner to wonder “why is this thing always trying to sort out it’s screen”.

Time to find a leather non magnetic case I think.

It’s probably a geek thing, but the ”why bother” for me is that I run a home server to keep my stuff on and a noisy PC is just plain irritating. Ditto for the media centre PC, or even the desktop. Because my machines are on all the time, keeping them quiet, and power saving matters.

Interestingly enough the Corporate (not the home user crap) Dell’s and IBM’s I see through work are relatively quiet, not super silent, but not bad for an off the shelf machine.

The key is ventilation design. Move the most air you can, where it is needed, as quietly as possible.

The method to do this is quite simple. Unfortunately most PC cases and motherboards out there do nothing to help this, they just make it worse.

Lets try some basic rules

1. Big fans move more air for less noise than small ones (listen to a 1RU rack mount server to see the ultimate of this – like a jet engine, noise is astounding)
2. Moving air round and round inside the case is inefficient and makes noise (most servers don’t run CPU fan’s, they put decent heatsinks in the system airflow).
3. Pumping the air in AND out is unnecessary – more noise (in 99% of cases two fans blowing out will move more air than one blowing in and the other out)

So what we want is a case that uses one big fan to pump air out (or in) and flows it past all internal components such that small fans on heatsinks are not required. It’s called ATX and was designed to solve the deficiencies of the AT design, especially those relating to cooling. Unfortunately the cases we get today aren’t really the original design.

If we look at components.

Case:
Tower cases are easier to do this with due to their natural tendency to flow air up. Hot air rises (heat does not rise, that’s a myth) You want a case that lets as much air in as possible at key points – down low toward the front. Some flowing in past the hard drives is also ideal. It should NOT have vents up high, or at the rear or  near the CPU. If it does, seal them up, as they’ll let air bypass the other components. Cases with 60mm rear fans are particularly noisy. Look for something that will take a 120mm rear fan, or if you are running a Core Duo CPU – no rear fan is needed – seal it up. Holes over the CPU are a waste – seal them up too. If your case is well designed, you don’t want fans in the front of the case.
Desktop cases are more difficult. You’ll have to plan it a little more.
Make sure either case has provision for mounting the HDD’s in rubber.

Power Supply:
This is the most important component, the thing in the original ATX specification designed to cool the system. Look for a power supply with a SINGLE 120mm or 140mm fan. Big = more air for less noise. It will be mounted in the base of the PS over the CPU – ideal. It will also leave the entire rear of the power supply as a large mesh grid – ideal for moving more air. Finally, the fan is inside the box behind the power supply electronics, this will further muffle any noise. You don’t want a second 80mm fan in the rear. This is a restriction, makes noise, and fans in series are un-needed.

CPU:
The coolest running you can buy. A Core Duo is ideal here. Also the smaller the die size, the cooler they tend to run, so if given the choice pick the CPU with the smallest nanometer size. The late P4′s are awful and need huge heatsiks to compensate.

CPU Heatsink / Fan:
This is where it gets tricky. My base assumption is that I want the airflow from the power supply to do most of the cooling. Therefore it has to have fins that face into the power supply and cool from air running ACROSS it, not down into it as most stock and many aftermarket coolers do. This one is good. This one is not. It has to be oriented the right way. The factory heatsinks that force air down onto the CPU rather than across are simply recycling hot air round and round. They rely on the other system fans to keep the system cool. Seems like a waste to me, more noise for no reason. Reviews on the internet are not always useful for this, as they test the heatsink in open air, not in a sealed forced airflow like a well designed case should be. My CPU fans often never even run.

Fans:
Buy quiet one’s, but don’t spend too much money. Centrifugal fans tend to flow more air for less noise, but are rarely available in useful sizes or configurations. Fan grills should be the thin wire style. Grilles in cases that are punched gaps in the press steel, or worse, lots of small perforated holes, should be cut out and replaced with a wire grill. Remember – larger = more air for less noise. The quiet fans simply tend to spin at lower speeds. I tend to run mine at 7V to achieve a reasonable result. 7V comes from between the 5V and the 12V rail.

HDD’s:
Just follow the recommended drive on www.silentpcreview.com. I tried a “similar” drive, and the seek noise was irritating during movies. I learnt to follow their recommendation exactly. Mount them on rubber.

DVD Drive:
I can’t find a quiet one – any one that knows please help me.

Next time you go to buy a “quiet” component, ask yourself, is this simply covering an existing problem, it this just another “quiet” noisemaker. The quietest fan is the one that isn’t there, and with careful design you’ll need far fewer.

There it is – simple. Pick the case with the holes in the right spot, put in a power supply with the big fan in the base, and pick a CPU and Cooler combination that will let you run your heatsink passive most of the time, and damn quiet the rest. Don’t install more fans than you need and make sure each is actually doing something useful. Finally add some quiet drives and presto – a quiet PC without too much hassle.

 
80mm fans – OK
120mm PS Fan – Good
60mm CPU Fan – Bad (luckily the Core Duo makes very little heat, so it spins very slowly)

60mm fans – Bad
80mm PS Fan – Bad
90mm CPU Fan recirculating – OK as nearly turned off.
High Efficiency Heatsink – OK – needs very little airflow.

High efficiency Heatsink – OK, but airflow is wrong – recirculates.

Clear exit from P/S – Good   Entire rear of PS is available for airflow.

120mm Exhaust Fan – Good, but ideal would be not at all.
140mm PS Fan – Excellent – this does most of the work.
Huge CPU heatsink – Excellent – Aligned with P/S airflow and convective currents. The CPU fan is off 99% of the time, it’s not needed.

Grilles removed behind fans improves airflow.

Package – Excellent
Price – Good
Features – Excellent
Auto Install Scripts – Excellent
Upgrades for Hosted Products – Yes – Scripted
Multiple Domains / Shared with mates – Yes
Heaps of space – Yes
eMail Limits – Good
WebMail Interface – Bad – only on weird port (But you can install and run Roundcube, and that is a good webmail client)
Help / FAQ – Excellent
eMail responses for Help – Excellent

Overall, I’m rapt.

So why oh why then does this MS product NOT support any of the normal UI’s for authentication.

MS Project 2003 Professional connecting to a MS Project Server 2003.

It gives the option of connecting with your domain account, or using a “Project Server Account”. Here comes the crunch. NEITHER of these options works on a PC that is not a domain member. There is no popup UI to ask for a password.

Now, many many projects I know of are managed by external consultants, working for other companies, with laptops managed by IT teams that are DEFINATELY NOT on our domain.

Glad to see the thinking caps went on for this one boys.

I must admit, I prefer this level of honesty to PR lies attempting to save face.

Can anyone confirm 3 questions regarding the refresh behavior of Mobile
Internet Explorer. The device is an iMate JASJAM. Windows Mobile 5. 

1) Does a page with content (ads or similar) that expire continue to refresh
and consume downloads when in the foreground?
2) Does this still occur when IE is in the background?
3) Does this still occur when the device is in standby? 

I am concerned about both battery life and MB consumption and can't find any
documentation on refresh behavior. 

Thanx
Paul

 

 >>
1) Does a page with content (ads or similar) that expire continue to
refresh and consume downloads when in the foreground?
2) Does this still occur when IE is in the background?
3) Does this still occur when the device is in standby?
<< 

1 - yes 

2 - yes 

3 - no 

Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]

 

So the implication is that unless you go into Control Panel – memory – running applications and shut down IE, it will keep chewing download capacity and battery life? Thanx Paul

>> it will keep chewing download capacity and battery life? << More importantly, if you pay for your cellular data by the data amount, things could get very expensive. The cache situation is primarily a user one… it’s good to get into the habit of hitting tools/options/memory and clearing the cache on a regular basis depending on how you use explorer. Since PIE only has a single window, it doesn’t impact any other speed issues and your wireless is not going to be much, if any, different than   with PIE shut down. I have a local html file which I set as my home page when I’m on a cellular $/byte connection which is a single tap away… and, one of the first third party app’s every serious user should install is a task manager to control app’s… I use and recommend vBar. Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]

The problem is that no one wants to dedicate hardware to just printing. or heaven forbid, coexisting with a domain controller Another issue with print servers is DR. Lets assume that last driver you installed for the MD’s “all in one piece of junk” sends the print server into a spin and wipes out all the other Canon printers at the same time. There is no easy rollback. MS does provide a printer backup tool, but it is rarely used and doesn’t always sort out the DLL mess that comes from a conflicting driver.So you resort to DR – but hey, you can’t “just restore” the config to another server easily.  You have to restore the whole box. this means having the same hardware on hand, and a lengthy restore time. You could try your luck and sort out the RAID and MB driver mess to get it working on something else, but personally I hate the pain and excessive wasted time.If you do rebuild to a different server, there is a fair chance you’ll also be re-configuring all the desktops onsite. Getting all the configuration details and drivers right is not much fun. Until Longhorn gets here there if little in the way of centralized printer management that works well. Personally, I prefer to let users add their own printers. The downside is that a change on the server will generally be noticed with a huge influx of helpdesk calls. I still prefer that to the “install 10,000 printers on each machine” solutionAll of this makes you start thinking that a VM might be to your advantage.The two key points are this

1. VM’s are hardware independent – Move them to whatever and wherever you will.
2. VM systems are easy to snapshot – and that’s your backup solution solved.

Print servers fit in the category of things that don’t hold data and don’t change much. This makes traditional tape backup rather unwieldy and snapshots a perfect solution.Configuration Rollback – Snapshot the VM before making the change, takes no time compared to backup. If you have a problem – presto – instant rollback.Hardware Failure – Take weekly base OS snapshots of the paused image and back them up. If you need to restore, simply grab the latest and drop it on anything handy.Print servers are not really user interactive. It’s not uncommon to have to wait for a print job, so dropping them onto a box that has marginal performance is going to have little to no impact on user perceptions. This means you can use any old box as you printer server, and if it dies, move it straight to the next one with minimal outage.Advantages

• Reduced backup time / space.
• Simplified Backup
• Simplified Restore
• Significantly reduced DR time
• Rollback is trivial
• Slow hardware is fine – it is not user interactive
• Older hardware is fine – DR is so simple
• Shared VM hardware is fine
• Never rebuild your print server again – just move it
• Never DR your print server again – snapshot it
• Never reconfigure all your desktops again
• Stability means you can ditch all the printer install scripts

With the budget was maxed out I have run a VM print server with 140+ printers including large format and high speed lasers on an old DL360 PIII 500 w/ 1GB RAM and Mirrored 18GB 10K SCSI disks. It sat on 80% + utilization most of the time, and often flatlined on 100%, but I had NO user issues. I didn’t reboot the base OS ever for performance or stability reasons. When the new budget cam through it rolled onto a decent DL380 in a matter of minutes. I was also surprised to find the spooler seemed to be much more reliable when not running on a file server, so possibly there is conflict for resources after all.The portability and DR side meant I could pretty well forget about the box, it would just work, and if it didn’t, there was no stress and almost no downtime.In comparison to a few clustered Print servers I had worked with I found the VM solution to be far more reliable and caused less stress.

Instead you do the following:

• Create a Serial port (or edit the default one) in the “Bluetooth Configuration” in Control Panel
• Set to AUTO START – this is why it doesn’t “just work”
• Point ActiveSync on the PC to the new COM port
• Setup your Bluetooth partnership
• Fire up Activesync on the KJAM and click “Sync with Bluetooth”
• It may prompt to tick the “Activesync” service of the Bluetooth partnership with the PC

Hey, this is PNG, nothing surprises me anymore.

I challenge you to beat that for an uncontrolled outage.

http://www.aspecto-software.com/

DON’T install Ministumbler, it’s a bugger to remove, the uninstaller doesn’t work.

Thats a reduction of 618Gig for FIRST TIME ONE WAY replication. It can only get better from here with partial change replication.

(Although I do have questions about .pst files – testing required here)

These numbers are from the DFSR utilities, I’ll have to assume it’s telling the truth. You do have to run Enterprise Edition on your file servers to get the full benefit (more details another day).

Reminds me of Schneier’s pizza’s at the NSA

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Intelligent-Message-Filter-version-2-IMF-v2.html

http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/archive/2006/04/20/425824.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

MS even let me present on this exact topic and make the same statements.

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.

You need to have local administrative rights to make these changes. You may be this already, many laptop users are due to deficiencies in XP. Vista users are less likely to be local admin, as the newer design doesn’t require admin rights as frequently. To test if you are a local admin, try the below steps, if it denies you access, you need to escalate your privileges. Your friendly IT staff member may do this by adding your user account the the local pc administrators group, or alternately you can look at escalation of privilege attacks on the system. It is preferable not to be an administrator all the time, as the computer is MUCH more vulnerable to being attacked if you log on with Administrative access.

There is another way to gain administrative access. Every computer has a default Administrator account. Normally it’s named “Administrator”, but many companies to rename it. If you can get he password for this account, you can logon with it, and do what you want.
If you can’t get the password a nice utility from Peter Nordahl called NT Password Reset Disk will reset the password for the Administrator account, renamed or not. There is some risk with using this tool, but it still worked on NT/2K/XP/Vista including SP1 when I use it. You break your PC, you get to explain to IT  what happened.

Once you have admin access you need to open a Registry Editor

Check the account you are logged on with is a member of the group “Administrators”This is found under My Computer (Right Click) ManageAlso check if the account “Administrator” has been renamed.
Start | Run | Regedt32
Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software \Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Right click “system” in the LHS pane and select “Permissions”
Click the “Advanced” Button
Untick “Include Inheritable Permissions from the Objects Parent”And select “Copy” existing permissions when prompted
Add “Full Control” to your user accountRemove “Full Control” from “System” and “Administrators” – leave “Read”.
You can now set the wallpaper path in the registry to whatever wallpaper you prefer. The key “Wallpaper” contains the path. If you delete the 2 “wallpaper” keys, then you will have access to set your wallpaper in windows as normal.
WallpaperStyle settings are as follows	0 Centered 1 Tiled 2 Stretchedas per MS

Presto – you now own your wallpaper again. You still can’t set it from the usual “Right Click” – select, but changing the path above isn’t too difficult.

The other options you have as workarounds against wallpaper policies depend on where the wallpaper file comes from.

If the file is stored locally on your PC, you can simply replace the file with something else with the same name, and change the permissions to stop it being over-written.

If it’s on the network, if you boot up disconnected, you won’t get the wallpaper.

Happy playing.
And remember, don’t trust anything you read on the Internet, we are all evil hackers out to get you. Now can I have your c/c details please?

Been using the Linux version for ages. Now for win32 – even easier. VOIP + Analogue + digital tie lines = bye bye small business PABX.

I’ll review handsets later. Polycom and Zultsys are both great.

127.0.0.1      config.messenger.msn.com

Blocks the SOAP config download for advertising.

www.postcourier.com.pg/20060215/wehome.htm
www.thenational.com.pg/021606/nation19.htm

Not much to say in the way of “Good Taste”. 120KG mother of 8 is the star…..

Answer is here: http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2004/03/exchange_in_mai.html

No need to stress

“Event ID 6402″
The DFS Replication service failed to initialize replicated folder D:\Deployments\Install because the service detected that one of its private folders overlaps with an existing File Replication service (FRS) replica set. This is an unsupported configuration.

or
Event ID 6002
The DFS Replication service detected invalid msDFSR-Subscriber object data while polling for configuration information.

Then you need to make friends with ADSI Edit.
Mine was due to a badly removed FRS structure after I broke the root upgrading to Enterprise Edition (really wanted the extra savings on replication)

Under the Server Container for your server you’ll find the records for the old FRS replication that is conflicting – delete the references for all members (yeah – even DC’s, the DC records are housed elsewhere) and Bob’s your uncle. They are GUID looking thingies here.

www.postcourier.com.pg/20060215/wehome.htm
www.thenational.com.pg/021606/nation19.htm

Not much to say in the way of “Good Taste”.

Network Server Monitor 7 – great product, doesn’t crash like 6.0. Price – you have to be kidding me – $1500 / 50 machines, no unlimted licences. That’s $1500 for 50 ping checks!!!!! Now I’ll pay $1500 for T/S logon checks, disk space, exchange services, HTTP file access, SQL queries etc etc etc. But for pinging my 120 switches – no way. For the $7000 bill total I’ll buy HP Openview. Sheesh.

BTW: 6.0 – Ping checks were FREE, and they had an “unlimited” licence.