Not long now till I tie the knot and if you are in the same boat, you may not have realised how many geek wedding accessories are out there.

With a little help for Leon we have found a few things to make that special day that bit more geeky!

 

 

Last week I was configuring a lab server with Hyper-V RC0 when I came across this error after creating a Virtual Switch with VLAN ID enabled:

Switch set up failed, name='3742d220-e73d-4ae5-bf0c-429ca168dc41', external port='d02dcb9e-76d4-496a-9c17-ea808e5ce125', internal port='375e5f91-b1fb-415d-8717-cd3ea36c9753', NIC='{165929BF-5BA2-4887-BC54-1D52C1A6BE61}', internal name='07b53c30-5d56-4a2d-a542-146773d39299', internal friendly name='Virtual Network Connection (VLAN Trunk)', error=2147749896, mof code=0.

Located in the Hyper-V application log this error resulted in a failed switch configuration and without a supported way to remove Virtual Switches (doesn’t seem right does it?) prevents you from creating any other network using that interface.

Turns out that this error occurs if you are creating a new network (with VLAN ID enabled) on a physical interface that doesn’t have a default VLAN ID specified, see example image below.

Hyper-V Networking
Hyper-V provides many networking improvements and the Virtual PC Guy’s has put together a great blog post explaining the changes, worth while reading for those making the move from Virtual Server.
Understanding Networking with Hyper-V

I love my media center and for some time now it has been playing/pausing/recording all my media without major issue (especially after moving too Vista Ultimate). Now I did say major issue! Since day dot I have had one problem; 1+ second delay on key presses with my Terratec remote control.

The explanation is simple; the Terratec remote has programmed keys, and it requires that you install a hardware application to capture the incoming signal, and then process them as actions in whatever application you happen to be using, making it one of the most versatile remotes available. It’s just unfortunate that the user experience and general design are so crap, just look at it, what were they thinking?

Until recently there haven’t been many other options just a lot of promises (and more promises) that there will be a new remote available for Vista MCE although nothing ever appeared on the Microsoft Hardware site. :(

Well here they are... turns out that Microsoft has left it to hardware manufactures to take up the fight and conform to the new IR RC6 and Windows Logo Program.

    

Now all that is left is deciding which one to buy :)

 

Today Microsoft announced the release of Windows Server 2008 to the public, and for the sake of blogging and adding another new tag to my collection I decided to tell you all!

For those with TechNet or MSDN subscriptions the 64-bit edition is now available for download, the 32-bit edition and WAIK will be available in the next few days.

Happy downloading

Jeffrey Snover has posted a fantastic PowerShell Scripting presentation he did late last year on the PowerShell Team Blog.

The session is aimed at people who have had experience with PowerShell and is pitched as a deep dive - includes lots of examples and chewy detail. Topics covered include:

Forms and styles of scripting
Scriptblocks
Switch
V2 Script Cmdlets
V2 PSJobs

This is presentation definatly makes installing the Silverlight plugin worth while.

Thanks Jeffrey :)

It has been announced that there is only one last lone Windows 2003 Server at Microsoft.com and in celebration (if you call it that) MS have created a skit which is definatly worth watching.

Check out this Technet Australia Blog.

Last week I had the "pleasure" of configuring a Dell PowerConnect switch. Not a bad piece of kit, just not a Cisco, the PC6224 is a Layer 3 switch with 24 x GB Ethernet (GBe) ports and 4 x GB Interface (GBIC) ports.

Once racked and powered the real fun started – CONFIG....

> en
> sh run
Oops apparently I meant
> show running-config
> conf t
Again, oops I apparently meant
> configure
....
> wr mem
Doh - I mean
> write memory
No, humm
> save
Where is that !@#$ing command line reference manual!@!@!

The commands are fairly similar to those on a Cisco and with tab complete and in-line help it doesn’t take much to work out the differences. But beware there are a few gottya’s that I found and decided to share:

• Trying to wr mem maybe you should try copy running-config startup-config. What are we five! At least let me save my changes easily.
• The PowerConnect IOS doesn’t use alias, anywhere. Be sure to use that TAB button to complete your command before you execute it.
• No VTP, instead PowerConnect switches use GRVP (same thing just a different standard), so if you have to trunk between a Cisco and PowerConnect you have to enable GRVP on the Cisco first.
• It is only a 24 port switch. By purchasing the optional SFPs and installing them in the any of the GBIC ports you lose one of the GBe ports.
• No way to manually set the time and date on the switch. Clock is only configurable via an NPT server.
• Unable to set management IP on a routable VLAN. If you try and set the management interface to a routable VLAN you receive and error; luckily I managed to find this article which details the work-around.

When I started blogging there was one thing I didn't want to happen; write two or three posts then let the site lay dormant whilst the hosting plan expired then rack up more traffic on WebArchive than the original site.

And after nearly two months since my last post, all excuses aside, I figured it was time to get back into the swing of things. In case you have been under a rock during this time, some highlights include:

• Windows Server 2008 RC1 - Hyper-V is here in time for Christmas.
• Microsoft Deployment - the program formally known as BDD.
• Powershell 2.0 CTP.
• Updated CommandBreak layout with RSS now provided by FeedBurner.

I’m in the market for a new workstation and with the latest release of the 3 series chipsets from Intel the market has been flooded with a magnitude of new and exciting options, but be careful, as I found not all seems as it appears.

After checking several manufacture website and reviews I found this little beauty, ABIT IP35 Pro. The IP35 Pro is ABIT’s top line motherboard built around the Intel P35 chipset, which supports today’s latest processors and has the ability to address 8 GB of memory (about time really, Windows x64 here I come), sure to keep any enthusiast happy… Well that’s what I thought until reading this review.
"...a few corners cut, for example while the board does offer dual Gigabit LAN controllers both use the PCI bus."

First off, PCI should be taken out the back and shot! The devices I am interested in are all available on PCI Express interfaces. I consider PCI to be an obsolete architecture and, short of the backwards compatibility argument, the only reason we keep it around is because the devices are cheap.

So why is PCI (in particular PCI revision 2.3 – 32bit, 33MHz, as found on the Intel ICH9) dead to me? Bandwidth - with HD DVD/TV, Dolby 7.1, DirectX 10 Graphics cards and Gigabit demanded for the media rich experience on computers these days device interconnectors limited to 133MB/s just seems daft!  The math is simple – there just isn’t enough room to move all that data around, look at the diagram below?

You could argue that bottlenecks on other interfaces would be reached, disk transfer speeds, before you see limits on PCI devices, however with the ability to address 8 GB of RAM and high-performance SATA RAID controllers coming down in price the limiting factor in system performance is already PCI devices.

What are your options if you ‘must’ keep that SLI Voodoo2 setup in your system? PCI-X. PCI-X is an enhanced version of PCI, it has a 64bit bus and supports speeds of 133MHz giving it a total bandwidth of 1064MB/s. PCI-X has backwards compatibility for most 3.3Volt PCI cards but don’t think you will get any higher frame rates due to the 64bit bus or increase speed of the bus, you will still be limited by the PCI card. Currently the only 3 series Intel chipset available with PCI-X is the Supermicro C2SBX which is built around the Intel X38 chipset and only supports DDR3 memory.

The ABIT board I have attacked in this post is not alone. Really the issue here is with the chip ABIT and other manufacturers use to provide on-board controller network, the Realtek RTL8110SC. This chip is designed to only connect to a PCI bus which means that, not only does the existing P35 offering from ABIT suffer from this problem, but the new ABIT IX38-Max, ‘workstation’ class motherboard, the will have the same problem, along with other manufactures such as ASUS, Gigabyte and Foxconn.

For the moment I am still undecided which motherboard I will finally purchase for my new rig, hopefully I will find one with no PCI interfaces at all, somewhat of a pipe dream I feel.