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  • How can I verify that my SSD is performing as it should?

    - by Jon Skeet
    EDIT: Okay, so I've no idea what caused the change, but after trying loads of different things to work out what was wrong, I've rerun the WEI (about the 4th time in total) and the score has jumped to a far more respectable 7.3. I'm going to leave well alone now :) I've got a brand new 256GB SSD (Crucial CT256M225) which should have stellar performance. However, on my (also brand new) Dell Studio 1557 with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, it's only giving a performance index of 5.9. I realise the performance index should be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt, but I wonder whether something's wrong. Given this paragraph from this MSDN article on Windows 7, I'd expect to see a high 6.X or possible a 7.X figure: In Windows 7, there are new random read, random write and flush assessments. Better SSDs can score above 6.5 all the way to 7.9. To be included in that range, an SSD has to have outstanding random read rates and be resilient to flush and random write workloads. In the Beta timeframe of Windows 7, there was a capping of scores at 1.9, 2.9 or the like if a disk (SSD or HDD) didn’t perform adequately when confronted with our random write and flush assessments. Feedback on this was pretty consistent, with most feeling the level of capping to be excessive. As a result, we now simply restrict SSDs with performance issues from joining the newly added 6.0+ and 7.0+ ranges. SSDs that are not solid performers across all assessments effectively get scored in a manner similar to what they would have been in Windows Vista, gaining no Win7 boost for great random read performance. How can I diagnose any performance issues with either the disk or how Windows 7 is handling it? Are there any particularly good tools you'd recommend? One note of curiosity: I couldn't install the firmware update (to 1916) until I changed my BIOS handling of the drive to ATA mode; after installing the firmware I tried to boot the Windows installation DVD - but that only worked after turning it back to AHCI mode (which I've left it in). Installing Windows 7 took longer than I expected - it sat at the "Windows is loading files" prompt for a very long time. Likewise it was on "Expanding files (0%)" for a long time. Since installation it's been fine though - but I don't know whether it's really providing quite as beefy performance as it should. EDIT: My netbook with the 64GB equivalent drive has a performance index of 6.6...

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  • Windows 8 ignores more specific route

    - by Lander
    OS: Windows 8 I have a cabled NIC (connected to router with ip 192.168.1.0) and a WIFI NIC (connected to a router with ip 192.168.1.1) . I want all traffic to go through the cabled NIC, except the 192.168.1.0/8 range should use the wifi-nic. This was working fine in Windows 7, without any manual configuration. In Windows 8 however, it's not. My routing table: =========================================================================== Interface List 14...f2 7b cb 13 e7 f0 ......Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct Virtual Adapter 13...b8 ac 6f 54 d2 5c ......Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller 12...f0 7b cb 13 e7 f0 ......Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card 1...........................Software Loopback Interface 1 15...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft ISATAP Adapter 16...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface =========================================================================== IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.198 30 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.233 20 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 192.168.0.233 276 192.168.0.233 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.233 276 192.168.0.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.233 276 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.198 31 192.168.1.198 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.1.198 286 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.0.233 276 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.1.198 286 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.0.233 276 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.1.198 286 =========================================================================== Persistent Routes: None I added the rule for 192.168.1.0. I would think Windows should use this rule for the IP 192.168.1.1 because it's more specific than the default-route. However it's not: C:\Windows\system32>tracert 192.168.1.1 Tracing route to 192.168.1.1 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 58 ms 4 ms 4 ms 192.168.0.1 2 68 ms 12 ms 11 ms ^C So... What do I do wrong? And how can I make Windows use the wireless NIC for 192.168.1.0/8

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  • No login prompt displayed after updating Ubuntu 10.04, broken gdm

    - by cliff
    So here's what happens: I updated my system the other day, was prompted for a reboot for the update to complete but was in the middle of working so I delayed it until after I was done. I reboot and it's broken :(. It appears to boot normally, with the following exceptions: The purple Ubuntu load screen no longer displays (though it did for the first couple of times I tried to get in). I hear the login prompt sound, but no login prompt appears. Nor is it simply "invisible" - pressing enter, typing my password, and pressing enter again do nothing. Normally my Bluetooth mouse is functional at this point, but it is not. GRUB displays recovery options for my current kernel, and for an older one (2.6.32-24). Trying to boot into .32-24 gives me an error saying "udevadm can't do something while udev is not configured". So I try solutions listed here: http://superuser.com/questions/195786/ubuntu-update-went-wrong-pc-doesnt-boot-how-can-i-repair-it Nothing I tried seemed to work, and after further Googling my hunch is that it's a problem with gdm. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know all that much about how Linux/Ubuntu systems work just yet. Things I'm able to do: Boot to a live CD Ctrl-Alt-F2 after that login sound plays brings me to a console login, which I can successfully do (it's how I tried the solutions above). This works only under the current kernel. A hack I'd be willing to explore is removing the login prompt from the console, but I'd prefer to "simply" fix what's wrong. Like that guy, I need to repair the system rather than reinstall. System: Dell Inspiron 1525 Core 2 Duo Proprietary Driver for Broadcom 43xx wireless Dual-boot with Windows 7 (which is how I'm posting this, unfortunately I only have this machine and any experimenting requires constant reboots into Windows/brokenbuntu) Last package installed was Moonlight, but it appeared to install properly. Kernel: 2.6.32-25 Edit: After working with Karl's suggestions, it seems that the problem is with gdm. Error exit status 245 when attempting to sudo apt-get install --reinstall gdm, also an error processing gdm when running sudo apt-get -f install. How do I reinstall or repair gdm so that I can get back into my machine?

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  • A dusty server room

    - by pauska
    Here's the story.. The owners of the building we lease office space from decided to do a renovation of the exterior. This involved in some pretty heavy work at the level where our server room is, including exchanging windows wich are fit inside a concrete wall. My red alert went off when I heard that they were going to do the same thing with our server room (yes, our server room has a window. We're a small shop with 3 racks. The window is secured with steel bars.) I explicity told the contractor that they need to put up a temporarily wall between our racks and the original wall - and to make sure that the temporary wall is 100 % air and water-tight. They promised to do so. The temporary wall has a small door in it, so that workers can go in/out through the day (through our server room, wich was the only option....). On several occasions I could find the small door half-way shut while working evenings/nights. I locked the door, and thought that they would hopefully get the point soon and keep the door shut. I even gave a electrician a mouthful when I saw that he didn't close the door properly. By this point - I bet that most of you get a picture of what happened. Yes, they probably left the door open while drilling in the concrete. I present you our 4 weeks old EMC VNX: I'll even put in a little bonus, here is the APC UPS one rack further away from the temporary wall. See the nice little landing strip from my finger? What should I do? The only thing that comes to mind is to either call all our suppliers (EMC, HP, Dell, Cisco) and get them to send technicians to check out all the gear in the server room, or get some kind of certified 3rd-party consulant to check all of it. Would you run production systems on this gear? How long? Edit: I should also note that our aircondition isn't exactly enterprise-grade, given the nature of our small room. It's just a single inverter, wich have failed one time before I started working here (failed inverters usually leads to water dripping out).

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  • DVD playback with Windows Media Player 11 works fine, but when copied to HDD and then played back, t

    - by stakx
    I have several DVDs with short documentaries on it. Since the notebook I'm using (a Dell Latitude E6400) has only one DVD drive, and I might play back those short movies very often, I thought of copying them to the HDD and playing them back from there. However, I've run into a problem, namely stuttering audio. Problem description: When I play back these movies directly from DVD (with Windows Media Player 11 under Windows Vista), everything works fine. Smooth video, no significant audio problems (only the occasional click). But as soon as I copy any of these DVDs to the HDD and try to play them back from there (e.g. using the wmpdvd://drive/title/chapter?contentdir=path protocol, I get stuttering audio — audio playback sounds like a machine gun for a third of a second or so, approx. every 8 seconds. I have tried converting the VOB files from the DVD to another format (ie. ripping), but that resulted in a noticeable downgrade of picture quality. Therefore I thought it best to keep the files in their original format, if possible. Still, I suspect that the stuttering audio is due to some (de-)muxing problem, and that changing the file format might help. (After all, video playback is fine; therefore I don't think that the hardware is too slow for playback.) Only thing is, I don't know how to convert the VOB files to another Windows Media Player-compatible format without quality loss. I hope someone can help me, or give me further pointers on things I could try out to get HDD playback to work without the problem described. Some things I've tried so far, without any success: VOB2MPG, in order to convert the .vob file to a .mpg file. But that changes only the A/V container, not the content. No re-encoding takes place at all. Re-encoding with MPlayer/MEncoder. Lots of quality loss there, and I frankly haven't got the time to test all possible settings combinations available. Disabling all plug-ins, equalizers, etc. in Windows Media Player. Disabling all hardware acceleration on the audio playback device. Further info on the VOB files I'm trying to playback: The video format is MPEG ES, PAL 720x576 pixels @ 24/25 frames per second. The sound stream is uncompressed PCM, 16-bit stereo @ 48kHz. (Might it help if I somehow re-encoded the sound stream at a lower resolution, or as an MP3? If so, how would I do this without changing the video stream?) P.S.: I am limited to using Windows Media Player (11). (I previously tried MPlayer btw., but the video playback quality was surprisingly bad.)

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  • Recover harddrive data

    - by gameshints
    I have a dell laptop that recently "died" (It would get the blue screen of death upon starting) and the hard drive would make a weird cyclic clicking noises. I wanted to see if I could use some tools on my linux machine to recover the data, so I plugged it into there. If I run "fdisk" I get: Disk /dev/sdb: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 19077 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes Disk identifier: 0x64651a0a Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Fine, the partition table is messed up. However if I run "testdisk" in attempt to fix the table, it freezes at this point, making the same cyclical clicking noises: Disk /dev/sdb - 20 GB / 18 GiB - CHS 19078 64 32 Analyse cylinder 158/19077: 00% I don't really care about the hard drive working again, and just the data, so I ran "gpart" to figure out where the partitions used to be. I got this: dev(/dev/sdb) mss(512) chs(19077/64/32)(LBA) #s(39069696) size(19077mb) * Warning: strange partition table magic 0x2A55. Primary partition(1) type: 222(0xDE)(UNKNOWN) size: 15mb #s(31429) s(63-31491) chs: (0/1/1)-(3/126/63)d (0/1/32)-(15/24/4)r hex: 00 01 01 00 DE 7E 3F 03 3F 00 00 00 C5 7A 00 00 Primary partition(2) type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX) (BOOT) size: 19021mb #s(38956987) s(31492-38988478) chs: (4/0/1)-(895/126/63)d (15/24/5)-(19037/21/31)r hex: 80 00 01 04 07 7E FF 7F 04 7B 00 00 BB 6F 52 02 So I tried to mount just to the old NTFS partition, but got an error: sudo mount -o loop,ro,offset=16123904 -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/usb NTFS signature is missing. Ugh. Okay. But then I tried to get a raw data dump by running dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/erik/brokenhd skip=31492 count=38956987 But the file got up to 59885568 bytes, and made the same cyclical clicking noises. Obviously there is a bad sector, but I don't know what to do about it! The data is still there... if I view that 57MB file in textpad... I can see raw data from files. How can I get my data back? Thanks for any suggestions, Solution: I was able to recover about 90% of my data: Froze harddrive in freezer Used Ddrescue to make a copy of the drive Since Ddrescue wasn't able to get enough of my drive to use testdisk to recover my partitions/file system, I ended up using photorec to recover most of my files

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  • XP shared folders not accessible after BIOS changed

    - by stijn
    Here's what worked for over a year: PC A runs Windows 7, PC B runs Windows XP. Both are on the same subnet behind a router. A uses user account X, but logs in to PC B using the Administrator account. PC B is a Dell Precision 470. A known problem with these is that sometimes when plugging in their power cable they somehow loses all BIOS settings. This happened yesterday. After this happens Windows won't boot, because the default BIOS setting is 'RAID ON' while there is no RAID configured. No problem though, changing the BIOS settings to 'RAID OFF' makes it boot without problems. Note that in the meantime, nothing config-related was changed on machine A. It wasn't even on. Indeed after doing this, everything is fine. Everything includes all normal operations, remote desktop from PC A to PC B, running Synergy between A and B, accessing shared folders from B to A. But accessing the shared folders on B from A does not work any more. I tried pretty much everything I found via Google (fiddling with policies/registry kes/...) but no avail. > ping -a 192.168.2.2 Pinging A [192.168.2.2] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.2.2: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 > net view \\192.168.2.2 System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied. > net use /persistent:no K: \\A\myshare /user:A\USERNAME PASSWORD > net use /persistent:no K: \\192.168.2.2\myshare /user:192.168.2.2\USERNAME PASSWORD > net use /persistent:no K: \\192.168.2.2\myshare /user:USERNAME PASSWORD System error 86 has occurred. The specified network password is not correct. A solution to this would be great: I haven't been able to do any work since yesterday ;] update after taking the hard drive out of B and putting it in another Precision 470 with almost exactly the same hardware (at first sight, only the video card differs) the shared folders work.. Putting the disk back into A, same problem remains. Why does this depend on hardware, and more important, on which hardware?

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  • Why many applications close after opening a document or doing a specific actions?

    - by Mohsen Farjami
    I have some encrypted pdf files that have no problem and in my last windows, I could open them easily with Adobe Reader 9.2 and other pdf readers. But now, I can only open non-encrypted pdf files and one encrypted file with Adobe Reader. every time I open almost any encrypted pdf, it closes itself. Also, when I try to search a folder for a keyword with Foxit Reader, once it closed. This is not related to Adobe Reader, because I have the same problem with Word 2007. When I open a document, sometimes it closes instantly and sometimes it closes after a few seconds and sometimes it is stable. My windows is Fresh. I have installed it a few days ago. I have ESET Smart Security 5.2 and I have updated it today. OS: XP Pro SP3, RAM: 3 GB, CPU: 2 GHZ, HDD: 320 GB My installed applications: Adobe AIR Adobe Flash Player 11 ActiveX Adobe Flash Player 11 Plugin Adobe Photoshop CS4 Adobe Reader 9.2 Atheros Wireless LAN Client Adapter Babylon Bluetooth Stack for Windows by Toshiba CCleaner Conexant HD Audio Dell Touchpad ESET Smart Security Farsi (101) Custom Foxit Reader Framing Studio 3.27 Google Chrome Hard Disk Sentinel PRO HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver IrfanView (remove only) Java(TM) 6 Update 18 K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.8.0 Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft Data Access Components KB870669 Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 Microsoft User-Mode Driver Framework Feature Pack 1.0.0 (Pre-Release 5348) Mozilla Firefox 7.0.1 (x86 en-US) Notepad++ Office Tab FreeEdition 8.50 ParsQuran PerfectDisk 12 Professional Registry First Aid RICOH R5C83x/84x Flash Media Controller Driver Ver.3.54.06 Sahar Money Manager 2.5 Stickies 7.1d The KMPlayer (remove only) TurboLaunch 5.1.2 Unlocker 1.9.1 USB Safely Remove 4.2 Virastyar Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime Winamp Windows Internet Explorer 8 Windows Media Player 11.0.5358.4826 Windows XP Service Pack 3 WinRAR 4.11 (32-bit) WorkPause 1.2 Z Dictionary My startup applications: WorkPause USB Safely Remove TurboLaunch SunJavaUpdateSched Stickies rfagent Persistence ParsQuran Daily Verse ITSecMng IgfxTray HotKeysCmds Hard Disk Sentinel egui disable shift+delete CTFMON.EXE Bluetooth Manager Babylon Client Apoint AdobeCS4ServiceManager Adobe Reader Speed Launcher Adobe ARM What should I do to solve it? If you recommend installing Windows again, what guarantees that it won't happen again?

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  • Dangers of Running Computers w/o Air Conditioning

    - by Daniel Bingham
    I recently moved in to an apartment with out air conditioning. This is fine most of the time as I am in upstate New York. It only ever gets above the high 70s during the hottest of the summer months. And when it does, I'm stubborn enough that I'll just deal with wearing minimal clothing around the house. However, I'm worried about my computers. I'm a software developer and gamer, so many of my machines are very high powered. And at least one of them is a server that must be left on 24/7 (not just a game server - also serves multiple websites). I've never before had to worry about the heat too much, as I always lived in buildings with central air. The in building temperature rarely got much above 70 F. All of the machines I built had good enough air cooling that I never saw a problem. Now the temperature in building is pushing 100F and I'm worried that the machines will not be able to keep themselves cool enough by simply blowing already hot air over themselves. The hottest of them I've turned off. However, the server I cannot. It's an old Dell (not custom build) that runs on a Pentium 4 (2.2GHz). It only has a single hard drive, integrated video. And it'd not running any processor intensive servers. Just basic LAMP. It used to run a MUD server, but that's off for now. So it should be idling most of the time. I haven't been able to find any sort of built in temperature sensors in the hardware... at least not any that the programs I've found in the Debian repository can read. And it's an inherited machine to which I do not have the full specs, so I don't know the tolerances anyway. How worried should I be about it melting down on me? How worried should I be about the hard drive melting or becoming corrupted? To generalize the question for other people, what are the safe temperature tolerances for most machines. How widely does it vary, and how does one go about determining when their machine is running too hot and needs to be shut down?

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  • Sony VGN-NR260E "External Device Boot"

    - by user72158
    [A LITTLE BACKGROUND] On all modern Dell computers pushing the F12 on bios boot will allow for a screen that lets you choose what boot option you need. For example if I want to boot off of a USB flash drive to boot into a live Linux distribution in order to clean virus's on netbooks that do not have CD drives to boot from I would push F12 and choose USB device from the list of options. If this does not show up then I can always go to the F2 bios setup and choose flash drive to be the first option. When I restart the computer it will boot into the flash device. I understand that I can purchase an external USB CD drive and then boot from that. I do not want to use that option. The reason for using a flash device instead of a CD is: A: This USB flash device has several different boot OS's on it that are used. B: The antivirus disks are updated often and burning cd's and throwing away others is wasteful compared to simply updating a flash drive. There is nothing wrong with the flash drive. It works perfect on many other PC's. [PROBLEM] Booting this flashdrive has been working for years on hundreds of computers... I just have this ONE computer that I cannot figure out how to get it to boot on... I have a Sony Vaio that will not boot to this device. I've tried pushing every key combo I can think of (F12, Esc, Del, F10...) and none of these key combinations will bring up the boot menu. I chose F2 and went into the bios and changed the first boot device to USB flash device. This did not work either. There is an astrix next to the device and the note states: "This Drive is available when External Device Boot is Enable." [WHAT I NEED] I need to know How to enable External Device Boot on the Sony Vaio VGN-NR260E laptop. OR How to bring up the Boot Menu to allow me to boot off a flash device. Thanks for anyone that can help!

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  • Why is the server performance so poor? What can be done to improve the speed of the server?

    - by fslsyed
    Very slow processing using Windows Server2008 R2 Standard with Service Pack One. Situation: Read a text file using the text data to populate a series of MS Sql tables. The converted data is used to generate monthly PDF invoice files; the PDF files are saved directly to the hard drive. The application is multi-threading with one thread used for the text conversion and three threads for PDF invoice generation. The text conversion is occurring concurrently with the invoice generation. Application Software: C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Crystal Report Writer 2011 with runtime 13_0_3 64 bit version. Targeted platform is x64; also tested as x86, and Any CPU with similar results. Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft Sql 2008 Issue: The software is running very slowly. The conversion of the text file is approximately six hundred fifty records per second and generation of the PDF files is approximately twelve invoices per minute. The text file to be converted is six hundred Meg with seven thousand invoices to be generated. The software was installed on three different machines from the same distribution files. The same text file was converted on each machine. The user executing the application was an administrator on each machine. The only variances were the machine and operating system. The configurations are as follows: Server: Operating System: Windows Server2008 R2 Standard 64-bit (6.1, Build7601) SP1 Service Pack: System Manufacturer: IBM System Model: System x3550 M3-[7944AC1]- BIOS: Default System BIOS Processor: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5620@ 2.4GHz (16 CPUs) Memory: 16384MB Notebook: Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium Standard 64-bit (6.1, Build7601) System Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard System Model: HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC BIOS: Default System BIOS Processor: AMD Phenom II N640 Dual-Core Processor 2.9GHz (2 CPUs) Memory: 6144MB Desktop: Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build7601) SP1 System Manufacturer: Dell Inc. System Model: OptiPlex 960 BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A11 Processor: Intel Core™2 Quad CPU Q9650 @3.00GHZ (4 CPUs) Memory: 16384MB Processing results per machine: The applications were executed seven times with the averages being displayed below. Machine Text Records Invoices Generated Converted Per Minute Per Minute Server (1) 650 12 Notebook 980 17 Desktop 2,100 45 (1) The server is dedicated to execution of this application; no additional applications are being executed. Question: Why is the server performance so poor? What can be done to improve the speed of the server?

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  • File/printer sharing issues on network with multiple OSes

    - by DanZ
    My workplace consists of computers running a variety of different operating systems, and I have been running into problems getting some of them to connect to a shared drive and printer over the network. Here is a brief description of the computers involved and the issues I have encountered: 1: Dell desktop, Windows Vista Business-- This is the computer I want the others to connect to. It has a USB printer and eSATA hard drive enclosure that I have set up for sharing, with different accounts for the various users. 2: Fujitsu laptop, Windows XP Tablet edition-- No problems. Can connect to both the shared printer and hard drive. 3: Lenovo laptop, Windows Vista Business 64 bit-- No problems. Can connect to both the shared printer and drive. 4: Apple MacBook, OS 10.4-- Can connect to the shared drive, but not to the shared printer. I am aware that the printer issue is due to a known incompatibility between Vista and OS 10.4 and earlier with regards to Samba. It is not a big problem, however, as this computer can access a network printer. 5: Sony laptop, Windows Vista Home Premium-- Can connect to the shared printer, but not the shared drive. It can see computer 1 and its shared drive on the network, and appears to successfully log in to user accounts. However, if you try to access the shared drive, it says you do not have permission. I have tried both standard and administrator accounts, and none can access the drive from this computer. 6: MacBook Pro, OS 10.5 (there are two of these)-- Can connect to the shared printer, but not the shared drive. They can't see computer 1 on the network. For that matter, they also can't see each other or the older Mac, but can see and access shared folders on the XP machine (computer 2) and can see other PCs in the building. I was able to add the shared printer manually by typing in its network location, but was unable to manually add the shared drive in the same way. So, what I am looking for is suggestions on how to get computers 5 and 6 to connect to the shared drive. Since they can already connect to the shared printer (which is on the same computer as the shared drive), it seems reasonable that they should be able to access the drive as well.

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  • Transient network dropout for Xen DomU's

    - by Stephen C
    We've got a CentOS server running a cluster of virtuals. Occasionally the cluster's internal network drops out for a minute or so ... and then comes back. The problem is somehow related to the actual network traffic, but it is not a simple load issue. (The system is generally lightly loaded, and the problem occurs irrespective of actual load.) The setup: CentOS 5.6 on Dom0, various CentOS on the DomU's Hardware - a Dell R710 with a BroadCom NextXpress 2 NIC (sigh) using the latest drivers for the NIC from BroadCom Xen configured to use network-bridge and vif-bridge Some iptable tweaks to route an unrelated port to one of the virtuals. The system has one externally visible IP address, and Dom0 runs an Apache httpd configured with a number of virtual hosts each of which reverse proxies to web servers running on the virtuals. (The virtuals have to be NAT'ed, primarily because we don't have enough allocated public IP addresses.) The symptoms: Works fine most of the time. When someone tries to UPLOAD a large file to one virtuals, the internal network drops out ... for all virtuals: The Dom0 httpd sees a network timeout talking to the backend server on the virtual and reports a 502. A previously established ssh connection from Dom0 to any of the DomU's freezes. Our monitoring shows ping failures for traffic between virtuals. The Xen consoles to the DomU's do not freeze. No log messages in any log files that I can see, on either Dom0 or the DomU's ... apart from the Dom0 httpd logs. After a minute or so, the problem clears by itself. This is 100% reproducible. What we've tried: Downloading, building and installing the latest BNX2 driver on Dom0 Turning off MSI on the NIC - adding "options bnx2 disable_msi=1" to /etc/modprobe.conf Turning off tcp segmentation offload - "ethtool -K eth0 tso off". Sacrificing a black rooster at midnight. I've exhausted all my options apart from switching to KVM ... or slaughtering more roosters. Any suggestions?

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  • Loss of wireless network connectivity when playing video via HDMI cable

    - by Jeff Fohl
    Hi Folks - New to Super User, so I hope this question fits in with the guidelines. Very strange problem I am having, and I am at a loss as to how to continue troubleshooting this one. The basic problem is that when I attempt to watch streamed video on a particular display device (an Optoma HD180 projector), my network connectivity drops like a stone to barely measurable levels. This is my setup: I have a Dell H2C 730x running Windows 7 64bit. This particular computer has two ATI Radeon HD 4800 video cards. I have two Samsung 22" monitors connected to one card, and an Optoma HD180 digital projector connected to the other card via an HDMI cable. My internet connection is normally a reliable 6Mbps. The problem I am having occurs when I stream video (or even just browse the web) on the Optoma Projector. When I do this, my internet connection drops to practically zero (just a few kilobits per second). When I move the browser away from the projector, and over to one of my Samsung monitors, the internet connection comes right back. Note that the Optoma projector is on and enabled as a third monitor all this time. I can move the mouse around on the projector without triggering the problem. I tried pinging my router when I was playing a movie on one of the monitors, and I get a 1 millisecond response. However, when I have the movie playing on the Optoma projecter, pinging the router gives me response times in the hundreds of milliseconds, or times out completely. So, it clearly is something local to my machine - and not some sort of throttling occurring down the line. I would think that it is possibly something to do with the HDMI driver conflicting somehow with my network driver (which is a USB-based wireless connection). This one has me really stumped. Anyone have any ideas? EDIT: I am now leaning towards the possibility that the HDMI cable is somehow interfering with the wireless network, when large amounts of data are being pushed through the cable. Is this possible?

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  • I want to virtualize my workstation (Tier 1), Looking for Bare Metal Hypervisor for consumer grade components

    - by Chase Florell
    I find myself in this similar bind at least once a year. The bind whereby I'm either upgrading a motherboard, or an OS hard drive. It drives me crazy to have to reinstall Windows, Visual Studio, all my addins, reconfigure my settings etc... every single time. I have a layout and I like and I want to stick with it. My question is... Is there a Bare Metal Hypervisor on the market that will enable me to virtualize my consumer grade workstation? I really want to avoid Host/Client virtualization. Bare Metal is definitely a better way to go for my needs. Is this a good approach, or am I going to suffer some other undesirable side effects by doing this? Clarification My machine has very limited purposes. My primary use is Visual Studio 2010 Professional where I develop ASP.NET MVC Web Applications. The second piece of software that I use (that's system intensive) is Photoshop CS3. Beyond that, my applications are limited to Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, LinqPad, and various other (small) apps. Beyond this, I'm considering working on a node.js project and might run ubuntu on the same hypervisor if possible. System Specs: Gigabyte Motherboard Intel i7 920 12 GB Ram basic 500GB 7200RPM HDD for OS 4 VelociRaptors in Raid 1/0 for build disk Dual GTS250 (512MB) Graphics cards (non SLI) for quad monitors On a side note I also wouldn't be opposed to an alternative suggestion if the limitations are too great. I could install the ESXi (or Zen Server) on my box, and build a separate "thin client" to RDP into the virtual machine. It appears as though RDP supports dual monitors. Edit (Dec 9, 2011) It's been nearly a year since I first asked this question. Since then, there have been a lot of great strides in Hypervisor technology... AND MokaFive is now released for corporate use. I'd love to dig into this question a little more and find out if there is a solid BareMetal Hypervisor for workstations running consumer grade components (IE: not Dell, HP, Lenovo, Etc).

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  • NIC is receiving, but not transmitting at all?

    - by Shtééf
    I'm trying to fix a very strange problem remotely on a machine at a customer site. The machine is a Dell PowerEdge, I believe a 1950 (haven't verified, but the lspci output matches specs I found.) The machine has two similar NICs, identified as Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12) by lspci, and using the bnx2 driver. (I suspect these are on-board and on the same controller, which is what I'm accustomed to for this type of machine.) The primary interface eth0 works perfectly, and is in fact how I am ssh'd in. However, the secondary interface eth1 is not transmitting. I can see this in ifconfig output, for example, where the TX field is always 0. However, it is receiving, and tcpdump shows ARP requests coming from the ISP's gateway on the other side. The interface is physically connected to a Siemens BSTU4 modem, configured by the ISP. The link is properly set to 10MBps and full duplex, without negotation, as the ISP requested. A small /30 subnet is configured. For the sake of anonimity, let's say the machine is 3.3.3.2/30, and the ISP's gateway .1. The machine has no firewall settings whatsoever. Even running something like arping -I eth1 3.3.3.1, and running tcpdump alongside, shows no traffic whatsoever being transmitted on the interface. (But the other side keeps steadily sending ARP requests, and that is all that can be seen.) What could be causing this? Here's some output, anonymized, which may hopefully help: $ ethtool eth1 Settings for eth1: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: 10Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: off Supports Wake-on: d Wake-on: d Link detected: yes $ ip link show eth1 3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:15:c5:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff $ ip -4 addr show eth1 3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 inet 3.3.3.2/30 brd 3.3.3.3 scope global eth1 $ ip -4 route show match 3.3.3.0/30 3.3.3.0/30 dev eth1 proto kernel scope link src 3.3.3.2 default via 10.0.0.5 dev eth0

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  • how to setup kismet.conf on Ubuntu

    - by Registered User
    I installed Kismet on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine as apt-get install kismet every thing seems to work fine. but when I launch it I see following error kismet Launching kismet_server: //usr/bin/kismet_server Suid priv-dropping disabled. This may not be secure. No specific sources given to be enabled, all will be enabled. Non-RFMon VAPs will be destroyed on multi-vap interfaces (ie, madwifi-ng) Enabling channel hopping. Enabling channel splitting. NOTICE: Disabling channel hopping, no enabled sources are able to change channel. Source 0 (addme): Opening none source interface none... FATAL: Please configure at least one packet source. Kismet will not function if no packet sources are defined in kismet.conf or on the command line. Please read the README for more information about configuring Kismet. Kismet exiting. Done. I followed this guide http://www.ubuntugeek.com/kismet-an-802-11-wireless-network-detector-sniffer-and-intrusion-detection-system.html#more-1776 how ever in kismet.conf I am not clear with following line source=none,none,addme as to what should I change this to. lspci -vnn shows 0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01) Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:000c] Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at f69fc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [58] Vendor Specific Information <?> Capabilities: [e8] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable- Capabilities: [d0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting <?> Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel <?> Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number Capabilities: [16c] Power Budgeting <?> Kernel driver in use: wl Kernel modules: wl, ssb and iwconfig shows lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. eth1 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"WIKUCD" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: <00:43:92:21:H5:09> Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power:24 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Managementmode:All packets received Link Quality=1/5 Signal level=-81 dBm Noise level=-90 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:169 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 So what should I be putting in place of source=none,none,addme with output I mentioned above ?

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  • Linux bonded Interfaces hanging periodically

    - by David
    I've several hosts that are showing problems with connectivity. When working from the command line, for example, typing is frozen for a second or so, then recovers - then it does it again. The most egregious example host would freeze (input) for 15-30 seconds, then recover and go out 5 seconds later. Switching cables didn't do anything - but removing one of the physical cables caused everything to clear up instantly (which why I think this is a network problem). Looking at the network I couldn't see any packets floating that would explain this. These ethernet interfaces (Gigabit Dell) were working normally previously, but since we moved the systems - and put them on a new set of switches - this has been a problem on multiple theoretically identically-configured hosts. The original switches were an HP Procurve 1810-24G and an HP Procurve 1800-24G connected with LLDP; the new switches are both Cisco SG 200-26, which I understand are rebranded Linksys switches. Is this caused by a problem with the switches? Is it the switch configurations? Are the Cisco switches incapable of handling this? I don't see where the configuration is located; I searched the usual /etc/sysconfig/network/devices but there's nothing in there about options (like mii polling) and nothing about the method of balancing the two. Searching scripts, I can't find anything in /etc/init.d/network either. The hosts are almost all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x systems (5.6, 5.7) but some are Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 Lucid Lynx. I need help with both if it comes to that. UPDATE: We're also seeing some problems with servers on the original switches. The HP switches and the Cisco switches are also interconnected (temporarily); there is a cable run from one switch to the next. Pings on any of these hosts show about one ICMP packet out of every 5-6 getting dropped (timed out). Could there be an interaction between the two switches? Oh, and the hosts are using bonding with Balance-RR as the method.

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  • How do you backup 40+ Centos5.5 servers?

    - by John Little
    We are embarrassed to ask this question. Apologies for our lack of UNIX expertise. We have inherited 40+ centos 5.5 servers, and don't know how to back them up. We need low level clone type images so that we could restore the servers from scratch if we had to replace the HDs etc. We have used the "dd" command, but we assume this only works if you want to back up one local disk to another, not 40 servers to one server with an external USB HD attached. All 40 servers have a pair of mirrored disks (dont know if its HW or SW raid). Most only have 100MB used. SErvers are running apache, zend, tomcat, mysql etc. Ideally we dont want to have to shut them down to backup (but could). We assume that standard unix commands like tar, cpio, rsync, scp etc. are of no use as they only copy files, not partitions, all attributes, groups etc. i.e. do not produce a result which can simply be re-imaged to a new HD to get the serer back from dead. We have a large SAN, a spare windows box and spare unix boxes, but these are only visible to one layer in the network. We have an unused Dell DL2000 monster tape unit, but no sw or documentation for it. WE have a copy of symantec backup exec, but we have no budget for unix client licenses. (The company has negative amounts of money). We need to be able to initiate the backup remotely, as we can only access the servers in person in an emergency (i.e. to restore) Googling returns some applications to do this, e.g. clonezilla - looks difficult to install and invasive. Mondo, only seems to support backup if you are local to the machine. Amanda might be an option, but looks like days/weeks of work to learn and setup? Is there anything built into Centos, or do we have to go the route of installing, learning and configuring a set of backup softwares? Any ideas? This must be a pretty standard problem which goggling doesnt give an obvious answer.

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  • IE9 Error: There was a pr?blem sending the command to the program

    - by HK1
    I'm working on a new/fresh Windows 7 32bit machine that now has IE9 installed. The user is using the Dell Stardock application as his primary "desktop" (all his links there). When we place an internet link there and click on it we get the following error message: There was a problem sending the command to the program. To me this indicates that IE9 is having trouble going to the website we want to go to, which should get passed as a parameter to the browser when it opens. I don't think this is a StarDock/ObjectDock problem because we also have some other problems with internet links. For example, we cannot move an internet link from the Desktop to the Quick Launch on the task bar. When we do try, it forces us to put the link with the IE icon as part of the IE menu instead of allowing us to have a shortcut there as it's own entry. I should mention however, that links on the desktop and in the taskbar do work as we expect them too (without showing the above error message). It appears that this problem started after installing Windows Updates. Since we installed a whole bunch of updates at once I have no idea which one caused the problem. I did have Google Chrome installed but I uninstalled it since the user wants to use IE. The problem started before I uninstalled Chrome. I also reset the browser settings on IE9. It didn't help. Next I uninstalled IE9 which took me back to IE8. This actually did resolve the problem but the problem came back as soon as I installed IE9 again. We have Verizon Internet Security installed. It's actually a McAfee product rebranded to look like Verizon. I'm not real crazy over this software but the customer has a subscription so we're not planning to change it. I have no reason to believe that this is causing the problem and yet I know that security software is often to blame for strange issues. I've looked at the registry settings for the following keys and everything appears to be ok for every single one of them: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.htm HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec\Application HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec\Application HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\htmlfile\shell\open\command HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Microsoft.Website\Shell\Open\Command Edit1: I've found two potential solutions but I won't be able to try them until tomorrow. One is to disable the "Windows Font Cache" service. Another is to clear IE cache and browsing history. I won't be able to try out either solution until tomorrow since this is a remote client's machine. I see there are lots of other suggestions online but if you take the time to read them through you'll see that the other suggestions didn't fix the problem.

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  • USB hard drive not recognized

    - by user318772
    Until recently I was using the portable USB hard drive in my win 7 laptop and ubuntu laptop. Suddenly now none of the laptops recognize it. This is the message i get by doing lsusb... Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1058:1010 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Elements External HDD Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0b97:7762 O2 Micro, Inc. Oz776 SmartCard Reader Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0b97:7761 O2 Micro, Inc. Oz776 1.1 Hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 413c:a005 Dell Computer Corp. Internal 2.0 Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub fdisk doesn't show the external hard drive Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0004a743 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 152111103 76054528 83 Linux /dev/sda2 152113150 156301311 2094081 5 Extended /dev/sda5 152113152 156301311 2094080 82 Linux swap / Solaris when i do testdisk TestDisk 6.14, Data Recovery Utility, July 2013 Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]> http://www.cgsecurity.org TestDisk is free software, and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Select a media (use Arrow keys, then press Enter): >Disk /dev/sda - 80 GB / 74 GiB - ST980825AS Disk /dev/sdb - 2199 GB / 2048 GiB testdisk-> Intel->analyse I get partition error Disk /dev/sdb - 2199 GB / 2048 GiB - CHS 2097152 64 32 Current partition structure: Partition Start End Size in sectors Partition: Read error Here is the output of dmesg [11948.549171] Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code [11948.549177] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: [11948.549181] Read(16): 88 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 00 [11948.550489] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Invalid command failure [11948.550495] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.550499] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [11948.550505] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.550508] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] [11948.550514] Info fld=0x0 [11948.550519] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.550525] Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code [11948.550531] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: [11948.550534] Read(16): 88 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 00 [11948.551870] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Invalid command failure [11948.551876] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.551880] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [11948.551885] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.551888] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] [11948.551895] Info fld=0x0 [11948.551900] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] [11948.551905] Add. Sense: Invalid command operation code [11948.551911] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: [11948.551914] Read(16): 88 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 00 If possible i want to retrive at least some data from this hard drive. If thats not possible I would like to format it and use it. Any help will be greatly appreciated Thanks

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  • SQL Express 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2 instance: tons of free memory, poor performance

    - by gravyface
    The old SQL Express 2005 was running on a low-end single Xeon CPU Dell server, RAID 5 7200 disks, 2 GB RAM (SBS 2003). I have not done any baseline measurements on the old physical server, but the Web app is used by half a dozen people (maybe 2 concurrently), so I figured "how bad can an Amazon EC2 instance be?". It's pretty horrible: a difference of 8 seconds of load time on one screen. First of all, I'm not a SQL guru, but here's what I've tried: Had a Small Instance, now running a c1.medium (High Cpu Medium) Windows 2008 32-bit R2 EBS-backed instance running IIS 7.5 and SQL Express 2008 R2. No noticeable improvement. Changed Page File from fixed 256 to Automatic. Setup a Striped Mirror from within Disk Management with two attached 1 GB EBS volumes. Moved database and transaction log, left everything else on the boot EBS volume. No noticeable change. Looked at memory, ~1000 MB of physical memory free (1.7 GB total). Changed SQL instance to use a minimum of 1024 RAM; restarted server, no change in memory usage. SQL still only using ~28MB of RAM(!). So I'm thinking: this database is tiny (28MB), why isn't the whole thing cached in RAM? Surely that would speed up performance. The transaction log is 241 MB. Seems kind of large in comparison -- has this not been committed? Is it a cause of performance degradation? I recall something about Recovery Models and log sizes somewhere in my travels, but not positive. Another thing: the old server was running SQL Express 2005. Not sure if that has any impact, but I tried changing the compatibility level from SQL 2000 to 2008, but that had no effect. Anyways, what else can I try here? Seems ridiculous to throw more virtual hardware at this thing. I know I/O is going to be rough on EBS volumes, but surely others are successfully running small .NET/SQL apps on reasonably priced instances?

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  • Wifi network stopped being visible (and usable) (Linksys wag320n)

    - by s427
    Basically, my wifi network simply stopped working for no apparent reason. It doesn't appear in the list of the available networks anymore. I can see all my neighbors' networks, but not mine. It's as if it doesn't exist anymore. The internet connection (non-wifi), which goes through the same modem/router, is fine though. I already had a similar problem about one year ago (see here: Wifi network SSID not visible ), just after buying this very modem. I finally got it to work after performing two factory resets and getting rid of the Cisco "Magic" software; but this time it's not working. I use a linksys router-modem (WAG320N) which is directly connected (via network cable) to my desktop computer (Windows 7). I have (mainly) two devices that use the wifi network: my phone (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) and an Asus tablet (TF201, aka Transformer Prime). I also resurrected an old laptop computer (Dell, running Windows XP) to test that, and it doesn't see anything either (apart from the 20 other wifi networks, of course ^^). This wifi network was working just fine and has been for about a year. I haven't touched the modem settings so I have no idea what's causing the problem. I tried: making my phone "forget" about my network, hoping it would see it again after that: no luck. re-entering the network informations (SSID/password) manually on my phone: still no luck (says it's not in range) exporting the modem configuration, resetting the modem (factory reset, via modem admin), restarting it, importing the configuration: nope. factory reset, turning it off for 15 minutes, restarting, re-factory reset, and entering the configuration manually: still nothing. Has anybody experienced something similar before? Have you any suggestion to fix that? Thanks in advance. PS: to clear things up, here are the settings of my modem regarding wifi: Basic wireless settings: Configuration: manual Radio Band: 2.4GHz Wireless Network Mode: B/G/N-Mixed SSID: s427 Channel Bandwidth: Wide - 40 MHz Channel Wide Channel: 9 - 2.452GHz Standard Channel: 11 - 2.462GHz SSID Broadcast: Enable Advanced Wireless Settings AP Isolation: Disable Authentication Type: Auto Basic Rate: Default Transmission Rate: Auto N Transmission Rate: Auto CTS Protection Mode: Disable Beacon Interval: 100 DTIM Interval: 1 Fragmentation Threshold: 2346 RTS Threshold: 2346

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  • What server setup for a small web development company? [closed]

    - by Giordano
    I co-own a company with a friend of mine and we have decided to buy a new server to support our business (our current server is an Asus EEE Box, working great but too limited :) ). I should mention that we are web developers but occasionally we do small-office sys admin. Thus, 99% of time we work on GNU/Linux (mainly Ubuntu) but from time to time we need to setup a Windows environment to assist some customers (e.g. setup a temporary SQL Server 2008). Our requirements: Low budget: we don't want the cheapest solution out there but we can't afford to spend too much. Budget could be ~1000-1500€ (before VAT) Robustness: we would like to setup a RAID array and maybe have an external disk where we can store backups Virtualization: we need to be able to setup few servers for development. The scenario is something like this (~8 appliances running in parallel): Redmine + GIT server Bacula server FTP server 3-4 virtual appliances that could be set up on demand to test our applications or support a customer. The appliances could be: LAMP, Tomcat+PostgreSQL, SQL Server Support: if something breaks down it shouldn't be too difficult to find a replacement. Now, given the main requirements, there are some doubts we need to clarify: Do you suggest to buy a prepackaged solution (for example a customized Dell PowerEdge T110 or T310) or to assemble the server by ourselves (buy the separate components)? What RAID configuration do you suggest? I was thinking of RAID1 (probably cheaper) or RAID5. should we buy a hardware RAID controller or is it ok to use a software RAID (mdadm)? In case, which controller do you suggest? What processor do you suggest (Intel Xeon, i3, i5, i7, AMD)? How much RAM? (I was thinking at least 8GB, ~1GB per appliance) What virtualization software do you recommend? VMWare seems to be the best choice, but what about XEN or KVM? We don't want to buy licenses at the moment so we would like to consider only free options. What OS do you recommend? We know Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo very well (we would like to use Ubuntu Server), however it seems a lot of people goes for CentOS. Thanks in advance if you can help us with this! It's our first "serious" server so many doubts popped up :) Please feel free to add further recommendations if you have some to share ;) Have a nice day

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  • Lightning talk: Coderetreat

    - by Michael Williamson
    In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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