Category: Tech

Windows Home Server Install, Part 2

~ rbonini

Now to say things are upside down is a bit of an understatement to make. The install went like clockwork and had most things set up autmatically, except for the device driver for the ethernet port (preversely preventing me activating and updating to get the driver).  The only small problem was that the harddrive was not pugged into the machine I was intending to use as a server, but rather my faster 3.06 Ghz machine so I could use the DVD drive to install. After switching harddrives, the thing simply will not boot. I’ve no idea why. I suppose that it could be lack of memory ( I have 384MB DDR RAM installed on it – minimum is 256Mb), orlack of processor power ( Pentium 3 700Mhz – minimum 1 GHz).

I even tried plugging the DVD drive directly into the Pc and booting from the install disk – and it still fails to boot.

The first  problem is easily solved, As is the third ( albiet from more costly). But the second is impossible.

These are not problems with the software, its the hardware I chose to run it on. I could use WHS using the only PC I have that boots from that harddrive, but that Pc happens to be my main PC.

So I now have th4e following options to consider:

  1. Buy that new Dell Poweredge Server
  2. Install Linux
  3. Install Solaris
  4. Do nothing

The Poweredge server may just have to wait a few weeks, but I’m seriously considering it.

Installing Solaris is nearly out as I couldn’t make head or tail of it a few times I used it. Suse Linux recognises NTFS partitions and might be a possiblity.

Or I could do nothing and restore the Windows XP Home Install and use it very little (I suppose that I could simply share the entire harddrive over the LAN).

So until I figuire it out, WHS is not going be running.

I might try do some tests between my laptop and the WHS Harddrive to see how it performs, but it’ll have to be in the dead of the night when theres no actual work to get done.

Windows Home Server Install, Part 1

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

I actually havent started the install. But my rage is now building up. The reasons are

  1. that the 300Gb hardrive I wanted to use and that caome preinstalled with my PC physically can’t come out – I can’t reach the screws since only one side of the case opens.
  2. i can’t use the Xp recovery console as its password protected my the manufacturer ( I was trying to fix the MBR for when Vista Beta 2  expires, so no luck there)

So my plan for a 380 GB Home server stopped before it started.  I’ll have to settle for 2x 80Gb drives. Given the fact that i have at least 30GB worth of downloads and 10GB of music (all legal), It only gives me 180 GB to back up 2 PC’s. Not ideal. Then you have to factor in room for growth.

if worst somes to worst, I have my eye on a nice Dell Poweredge server that will do nicely. But I’d rather use the hardware collecting round my feet before it gets too ancient.

Now if Microsoft could just make a handly MBR restorer…..

And the name of the infernal manufacturer that built my PC with the 300Gb harddrive? You’d never guess: Pc World.

Windows Home Server (Updated)

~ rbonini

Well, I recieved my invitation to the beta prgram yesterday. I only got round the downloading the iso’s now. Somwhere between one and two hours to go ( depending on speed – I had 300kbps a second ago).  I was planning on installing it on my old PC that simply has nothing else todo. But, as luck would have it, it has no DVD drive. Grrr….

I’ll ahve to scavenge one from else where. Or buy a new server, which is just what I’ve been looking at. Dell is hard to beat for value.

I’m rather excited about this. WHS is just what I’ve been praying for. I think that I have a long wwekend of long nights setting things up.

I’d better get to work. 🙂

Update:

Since WHS does NOT use wireless from some strange reason ( Cue a “damn if I know” shrug). I just ordered an ethernet port for my aging PC. Its far cheaper than ordring a new server (its 1/25th  the cost of Dell’s cheapest).

Security vs Peformance

~ rbonini

Jeff Atwood just wrote a long post on the effect Anti Virus Software has on system performance.

Percent slower
Boot
Time		 CPU
Bench		 Disk
Bench
Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender 5% 8% 54%
Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%

The worst offenders are the anti-virus suites with real-time protection. According to these results, the latest Norton Internet Security makes your computer boot nearly 50 percent slower. And no, that isn’t a typo in the disk column. It also makes all disk access sixteen times slower! Even the better performers in this table would have a profoundly negative impact on your PC’s performance. Windows Defender, for example, “only” makes hard drive access 54 percent slower.

True, but the trade-off is worth it, in my view. In fact. I’ve experianced an increase in boot time with Nortons 2007 over Nortons 2006. I’ve never had any serious performance issues with Nortons.

If you want a snappy system for a short while, do a clean boot. Turn off all uneesential services and your computer will feel like an F1 car on steroids. But do disconnect from the Internet first.

Adobe Apollo (Updated)

~ rbonini

Jim Turner, via Scobe, holds this interesting opinion of Adobe in the aftermath of the launch:

I can tell you what they are not doing, they are not having a conversation with the influential people in their industry.  Sure they are presenting some cool things and people like Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble, and others are all madly discussing the new apps and talking about it, but from the Adobe side I get nothing but crickets chirping.  Where is the Adobe blogger?  If they are truly in competition with Microsoft, how about competing?  Put a company evangelist on a blog and let the blogger talk to all of the people now linking to the rest of the discussion.  Adobe may be getting excellent marks for their new and latest in technology but I give them an F in showing that they are truly in the market of discussing their products.

I tend to agree here. Microsoft has changed its public image completely simply becuase of the 3000+ Microsoft bloggers out there. Every single start-up, I’ve noticed, has a blog or two on their site. Seems everyone is jumping into the blogging trend with two feet. Well, nearly everyone. Amazon stands out as the big tech company that dosent have a corprate blogging strategy/guidelines/policy/site going.  Traditional customer relations tools simply don’t have the oopmh they used to. Blogging turns faceless corprate giants into somthing a little more human. 

Mea Cupla:

Scoble corrects the record:

Jim Turner says about Adobe: “I can tell you what they are not doing, they are not having a conversation with the influential people in their industry.” and “Where is the Adobe blogger?”

I guess Jim missed that Adobe has tons of blogs.

And, I would expect that Adobe will increase the discussion over the next few months. I am telling them not to invite me next time, but to get a bunch of .NET developers in a room like Scott Hanselman. Those are the influentials that Adobe really needs to have a conversation with.

I’m heading over right now to blogs.adobe.com to see what interesting stuff I can find.

AJAX

~ rbonini

I’ve not that hard a look at AJAX, but this post shared by Roberto Scoble caught my eye. The crux of the post is looking at a new AJAX bases platform, a company called Morfik. From what I read it does push the boundaries as to what can be don within the browser sandbox:

the crux of it is that Morfik uses 100% Ajax and renders in the native browser. Whereas all the other platforms use non-native browser plug-ins (like Flash) or render outside the browser. Adobe’s Apollo and Laszlo both largely output in Flash (a browser plug-in) and Microsoft’s WPF renders outside the browser.

Also, while Google is Java  heavy   (no offense intended) for their UI’s, Morfik:

allows developers to use high-level programming languages (which give the developer more power – e.g. BASIC, C#, Pascal) to create web apps. It does this by converting apps from high level language INTO Ajax code.

This is great news. As a VB /C# Developer, it might just make ASP.Net 2.0 fade into the background as far as UI is concerned.

I’ll be watching.

Google Reader – Again

~ rbonini

After 3 weeks of using Google Reader, I can honestly say that I’m not looking back.

The App is just so damn inteligent. The other day I read a shared Doc Searls post via Robert Scoble’s link blog. Not only was the post in the Link blog marked as read. But the same post in my seperate Doc Searls feed was marked read as well. Amazing. Its these small, hardly noticable, under publicised but highly valuble features that earn an app a loyal userbase. 

We’ll put up with a little less readability in order to share items with other people, in order to see the information on multiple computers and platforms, and the ability to mash up the content with content from other services ala BlogLines, NewsGator, or Google Reader or other RSS aggregators.

–Scoble

There is seriously very little to evern begin complaining about GoogleReader.

Perhaps integrated blogging with your own blog (they don’t even do Blogger!) in the form of a “Blog This” button.  Google should seriously think about this. If they want to become the worlds [Personalised] Homepage, they can do alot more.

The only sour note, if you can call it that, are people who use partial text feeds ( forgive the mixed tenses – I’m worked up about this 🙂 ). It drives me insane. Perhaps I should just unsubscribe?

The good thing about the whole Google experiance is that the page updates as if its a thick client application running localy – emails and all. I’d love to see the framework that makes it possible.

Yet another “The Network is the Computer” post

~ rbonini ~ 1 Comment

Johnathan Schwatrz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just posted something interesting and something I’ve never thought about.

Nowdays, server-side hardware is tending to focus on unilisation rather than sheer clock speed. I guess the point is to make more use of each single clock pulse. if you have 8 cores with 32 threads executing 32 instructions per clock pulse, it beats the hell out of a single core with a single thread exectuting one instruction per clock pulse. This is known as server virtualization . Essentially because you can assign a different OS ( never mind application) to each core, effectivly getting 8 servers ( in the case of the Niagra chip) for the price one one physical server. Not that you’d find 8 server OS’s, which is beside the point. But all this fancy stuff is usually dedicated to servers ( Intel Core Duos and Quads to the contrary). And servers need to be networked. And you only have one physical network to use. Or do you:

That’s why we just introduced Project Neptune – a silicon project that marries the parallelism of the microprocessor (for Intel, AMD and SPARC systems), with the parallelism of the underlying operating system (Solaris, Linux or Windows), with parallelism in the network itself. Which in concert with some software magic (which goes by the name of the Crossbow project) allows enterprises to collapse cabling, ports, cards and spending – by bringing parallelism to basic network infrastructure (for geeks, you can take multiple TCP streams and allocate them to different processor threads, spreading out load and freeing up CPU’s/ports). Ports become a physical convenience, just like a server – what’s happening inside depends upon rules or policies set by the user/administrator to automate such decisions. Like I said, the network is the computer, and the computer’s virtualized, so why not the network?

Its simply too obvious to notice till its pointed out. For each physical port attached to your machine, you can have one physical connection. Here Sun engineers have turned that inside out, giving network engineers more bang for their buck ( or is that more connections for their ports?).

It really is an elegant solution.