rebelpeon.com

Category: computers

  • ISA 2006 Part 2

    I still haven’t found any decent solution to the compression, but I did find a solution to publishing NTLM websites.  Basically, ISA 2004 didn’t have any pre-authentication, where ISA 2006 does.  Why I wasn’t experiencing any of this on my websites was because the ISA machine is on the same domain.  In order to fix this, I had to use LDAP pre-authentication.  I used part of an article posted on isaserver.org.  It got me working to a certain extent, but then I had to play with it a little bit more.  No big deal, it’s all working now. 

    Now just to fix the compression part…

  • Vista and Photoshop

    I finally got around to ordering the hardware necissary to do what I want on my computer without having to wait and wait and wait. I finally bought 2 GB of RAM and a new video card. This will increase my system RAM 5 fold after I add it, and get me off the onboard video card with 8 MB of RAM.

    The reason I did this was for two reasons: Running Vista RC2 is painfully slow with only 512 MB of RAM and an onboard video card, and post processing images for aaron spruit (.com) is painful with the limited amount of RAM. Currently my Vista score is 1. This will hopefully bring me up to something that’s bearable. And all for ~$250, you can’t go wrong.

  • Leostream

    Leostream, who I’ve talked about before, has a few new demo’s up on their website.  Having used some of the demoed software before, these are pretty well done.  I would definitely take a look at them.  Oh, and it doesn’t seem to work in IE7 beta, and there are other people saying it doesn’t work in IE at all, so break out firefox or something else to check em out.

  • Office 2007 Beta 2

    Office 2007 Beta 2 has been out for awhile, and I must say, I’m impressed.  I really like the new layout in instead of the old file, edit, view, etc menu.  It took awhile to get used to, but I think I’ve found where everything is now.  I’m also digging the new, and probably temporary, default font, Calibri.  Granted, any one using Office 2003 and earlier can’t see the font.  The built in RSS feeds in Outlook and the To-Do bar is a nice addition too.  Oh, and don’t forget the preview on the fly for things like color, font, and style changes.  Very slick.

    However, there are a few things I don’t like.  I really don’t like how Outlook doesn’t use the same layout as word, excel, etc.  If they’re going to change it one place, they really need to change it everywhere.  It’s not like Outlook’s toolbars are that much radically different than Word’s either.  Also, while the RSS feeds in outlook are nice, there are some serious downsides.  The biggest of which is the inability to edit anything about the feeds, particularly the refresh time after you’ve added it.  Plus, by default, when you add a feed, the update limit is taken from the publisher’s recommendation.  Most sites, however, don’t publish this data so the feed will never update.  So, when you add a feed, be sure to click the advanced button and uncheck the ‘Update Limit’ checkbox unless the provider has actually set the limit.

    Speaking of which, I should probably look into how to do that with my RSS feed.

  • VMWare Infrastructure 3

    Today was the official announcement of VI3, VMWare’s next release of ESX and Virtual Center.  After watching the webcast this morning, I’m more than a little bit stoked.

    Some of the things I’m looking forward to are

    • NAS support
    • USB support
    • Drag and drop in virtual center
    • New, more performant VMFS 3
    • 4-way SMP and 16 GB of RAM support for virtual machines
    • DRS
    • High Availibility features
    • Support for Solaris
    • Ability to run non-VMWare machines
    • Removal of the web interface

    I can’t wait to get the final bits loaded on my machine.  I’ve actually been debating installing beta 2 on my home machine for awhile, but haven’t because of time constraints.  However, I’ll have to put a few things on hold to install the final version.

    There are also a few new whitepapers on VI3 already on VMWare’s website, so you can get a head start before it’s actually released.

  • Virtual Host Beast

    Last fall I priced out a machine to host virtual machines for a coworker of mine. Well, all the pieces finally arrived, and last night we put it together.

    Holy cow, talk about a beastly machine, so much so in fact, that it is called esx-beast. The case, with the hot swap SATA hard drive bays is quite a nice touch too. Watching all those LEDs blink in unison when configured in a RAID5 was quite a treat to watch.

    The megaRAID card functioned flawlessly too, which is a good thing. ESX found it without any problems, and he now has 500 GB of redundant usable space. If I had money, and didn’t have a functioning machine myself, I would definitely look at getting a similar box.

  • ESX Networking

    This is just a quick update with something that I finally fixed two nights ago.  If you happen to run VMWare ESX, *DO NOT* share a NIC between the console and Virtual Machines (VMs).  This was how I had been running my system because I only had one NIC at the time.  However, I had purchased a new dual port Intel gigabit NIC about a month ago, but I just hadn’t had the time to actually update the system to utilize it.  Well, two nights ago, I set the original NIC to only the console session, and then put ports on the dual port NIC on a virtual switch used by all the virtual machines.  Therefore, I theoretically get 200 Mbps to the virtual machines. 

    Holy crap, talk about an improvement.  Transfers between the VMs and my NAS used to be dog slow, but now they are where they should be.  I just need to get a gigabit switch with jumbo frames to use everything to fullest extent.

  • Apple New Announcements

    Last week they announced the Video iPod.  I personally have nothing against it.  However, today, Apple made some announcements about new PowerBooks and PowerMacs.  It’s today’s announcement that really bothers me, specifically the new “quad” processor PowerMac.  Normally, I’d be all about it, it sounds like a beast.  I’m not even going to talk about anything else from here on out.  I just want to show “the people” how overpriced Apple products truly are, but first, some background.

    I had mentioned my home setup at home to a coworkers before.  It’s nothing really that great hardware wise, but it’s more how I utilize it, and the price I got it when it was new.  Anyways, I’ve got VMWare ESX server installed on it which allows me to run multiple “virtual” machines on top of the one machine.  This way I can have a machine dedicated to specific tasks, instead of everything on one.  Obviously this helps for when something goes wrong.  Now, everything doesn’t go down if I accidentally mess something up. 

    Anyways, he realized how great of an idea this was, so he wanted to get a server machine up and running that could do the same thing.  Well, he’s a developer, so he didn’t really know what to look for, so I priced out a machine for him.  Basically I priced him out a beast of a machine for $2500.  The specs of it are listed below.

    Supermicro H8DAE ($356)
    One Dual Core Opteron 265 ($728)
    4GB PC-3200 Reg ECC RAM ($516)
    MegaRAID 150-4 SATA Card ($235)
    3 Seagate 200GB SATA Drives in RAID 5 for 400GB of redundant space ($327)
    Case with 645W PSU ($266)

    Now that, plus a plain CD-ROM drive and floppy comes to just under $2500.  Now, lets look at the Apple Store to see what you get with their “quad” machine for $3300. 

    Two dual-core G5 Processors
    512MB 533 DDR2 NON-ECC RAM
    250GB Harddrive (not redundant and not on dedicated hardware controller)
    Dual Layer 16x DVD Burner
    NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB Video Card

    Shall we compare the differences?  Yes, we shall.

    If I were to get my machine up to all the specs listed on the mac (without reducing any of the components), I’d have to add another processor (+$728), add a dual layer DVD burner (worst case +$100), and add a video card (+$110).  Let’s see, adding that all up gets us to $3404.  Shoot, just over what the PowerMac costs.

    But wait, let’s do a similar thing for the PowerMac.

    We’d have to add 4 1GB ECC Dimms (+$1500), and increase the harddrive space, oh wait, they don’t have a redundant solution, so we’ll just go with the 500GB option they offer, even though it’s insanely inferior (+$500).  After adding on those, we’re at $5099. 

    Wow, for a whole 1.5 grand less, you can have a superior machine.  That’s really all I wanted to show.

  • VLAN Trunking with Virtual Server 2005

    Getting VLAN trunking working on a Virtual Server 2005 host with Intel NICs can be problematic if done on host that already has Virtual Server installed.  The problem arises with the Virtual Machine Network Services that is installed on each NIC.  In order to get everything working, make sure you have the latest Intel Drivers and that you uncheck “Virtual Machine Network Services” under the NIC properties.  You can then add your VLANs that you want trunked to the card under the NIC’s properties.  The new VLANs will then appear as separate Network Connections, and each of the new Network Connections will have the Virtual Machine Network Services installed and checked.

    Now, if you don’t uncheck the “Virtual Machine Network Services”, after you add the VLANs to the NIC properties, nothing shows up.  Talk about wasting a lot of time.  Also, all of this should be done from the console session, otherwise you may or may not see the tab on the NIC properties to add VLANs.

    I hope this helps someone else out there, because there was a lot of time wasted on this here.

  • PIO Mode

    I bought a DVD burner recently, and that has been my primary burner in my new Dell machine.  However, just the other day, I realized it doesn’t have the ability to burn from cue files.  This, unfortunately, is a problem, since that’s how I backup all my CDs with flac.  Thankfully, my trusty old LiteOn 52x burner that I got for like $20 after rebate does. 

    So, I throw in the LiteOn in addition to the DVD burner, and start burning.  However, during the burn process my computer starts acting very slow.  Thankfully, I know that the problem is that the burner is in PIO Mode.  Usually, this is an easy fix; you just go into device manager, and then hit up the disk controller and change the pull down from PIO Mode Only to DMA Mode if Available under advanced settings.  I do this, restart, and STILL in PIO Mode.

    Now, I know that this LiteOn works in DMA mode, because that’s the way it used to be in my old machine.  So I check out google, and one of the first links I get to talks about enabling the drives in BIOS.  It also mentions seeing if there are events in the logs about it timing out in DMA mode.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, so BIOS here we come.

    Now, this seems a bit odd.  I mean, if it’s not enabled in BIOS, how the hell can Windows even see the drive at all?  Well, I figure it’s worth a shot.  I head into BIOS, and sure enough it’s disabled.  I enable it, boot back into Windows, and low and behold, works like a charm.  This may also explain why the DVD burner was having such a hard time while the CDROM drive the machine came with was plugged in too.

    I guess you do learn something new every day.