Hello, a quick post / announcement that the Adaptec 3805 SAS Raid controller has compatibility issues with Western Digital Caviar Black drives. I don’t know if its an issue with all capacities of the Black series, but the ones i had were the 1TB ones, model number WDC-WD1001FALS-0.

After doing some research, it appears that the WD Blacks are NOT on the HCL for the Adaptec 3805 controller, but it took me some time to find this. I hope this post helps anyone who was going to go down this route.

Since i’d already gotten the WD Blacks, I ended up using Samsung Spinpoint F3′s from some of my servers. The WD Blacks work fine on Intel ICH Raid. I think next time, I’ll stick with these Samsungs. Cheap, good warranty, and FAST.

Now in general, why can’t Western Digital make standards compliant drives? I could easily blame Adaptec as well, but in this case, i think it has to be WD’s fault. They are known to make ATA drives that don’t work the same way as everyone else. How hard can it be? Even Samsung got it right.

Update, see my second post on this

My friend pointed out to me that Googles, gone Gooooooooall!

Search for world cup, and look at the bottom! Less than 24hrs to go!

A quick post on how to enable xp_cmdshell on Sql 2005/2008/2008R2

EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
EXEC sp_configure ‘xp_cmdshell’, 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
EXEC sp_configure ‘show advanced options’, 0
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO

Done.

*Yawn*. Its good to stretch once in a while, get some blood to some relaxed muscles.

Waking up at 5.30am on a Saturday is normal behavior for me now. Get up, brush my teeth, and wonder downstairs and turn on the telly. You know its early when the cats ignore you, while you stumble across the dark floor to the sofa and fumble around for the remote.

Regardless, turned on the telly. Its June 5th, 5 days before WC2010 starts, 5.30am. I press the two power buttons, one for the TV, one for the dish network receiver. After about 5 seconds of eye rubbings, i hear a familiar voice. A very soothing, familiar voice. Martin Tyler.

At first, i make sure its not a rerun of a EPL game on Fox Soccer Channel. Then slowly, i realize that his color commentator, is John Harkes. Instantly I’m satisfied with something. I feel that ESPN got it right.

It was 5.30am on June 5th, and Australia were playing a pre world cup warm up against the USA, and it was being shown live from a tiny stadium in South Africa with less than 7,000 people in the crowd – on a pitch that looked like an empty field in the middle of the African jungle.

ESPN got it right. The commentary pairing of MT and JH was good, it wasn’t boring – even during the boring parts of the game. They weren’t even talking down to me as a viewer, they were just commentating. That was sweet.

Well done ESPN.

But wait! There’s more! After the game, ESPN showed a nice little piece on the Robben Island soccer league in South Africa. A very nice 30 minute segment about how the comings of a new government were practiced in the form of a full on “professional” football league within a prison.

Well done ESPN.

But wait! THERES MORE! E-60 had another segment on “saacker”. 3 short documentaries. The first was about Clint Dempsey, the 2nd was a great emotional piece about the U17 girls national team from Haiti after the quake, and finally a 3min segment on the craziest par 3 19th hole in South Africa, where the Tee is at the top of a mountain, and the green is a thousand feet below.

Well done ESPN.

With the World cup only 15 days away, i thought its time to put out my views before the tournament starts. Thoughts on the coverage of this magnificent tournament in the United States of America. The worlds largest, most loved event.

Football has been a hated sport in this country for all 16 years I’ve been here. But there is change coming. I can feel it. Something has happened over at ESPN that’s making me think this. All of a sudden, we’re getting High Definition broadcasts of games, real commentators commentating on games, and a heck of a lot of advertising for the world cup on ESPN.

During the 98, 02 and 06 world cup’s, you’d not have known it was coming on ESPN as they hardly mentioned it. For 2010, they’ve had a campaign going since 2008 to tell people that the world cup is coming, and you can see it on ESPN/ABC. That’s a 2 year long campaign. That’s a change to what I’ve seen in the past. That’s a good change.

I should have noticed this change in 2008 when ESPN showed every game live in High Definition of the European Championship. You know, something that the USA doesn’t, and can’t participate in. To have the final shown on network TV was even more of a blessing. 4 years prior to that, the entire tournament was PPV only.

Not only did ESPN show Euro 2008 in High Def, they threw out all of the rubbish American commentators and used real class commentating. It was a great tournament to watch. I took it for granted. I thought i was back in England for those 3 weeks.

So what have i noticed for 2010?

1. Colorful advertising. Very stylish/artistic graphics for the logo – taken by the theme of Africa.
2. Announcements all the time, that the world cup is coming.
3. Live draw, with *full* coverage – although Bob Ley was getting a bit annoying talking over the hosts of the world cup draw.
4. The ESPN logo in the corner of the bottom line flashing over to the WC2010 logo periodically.
5. A sudden and shocking announcement that they will be showing live EPL games in 2009 *in HD*. It happened literally two days before the first game of the season.
6. A sudden and shocking announcement that Martin Tyler will be commentating for ESPN for the world cup. *Drool*
7. A Live roster selection segment on Sportscenter.
8. ESPN3D to cover some of the games from the world cup, allegedly the first 3d broadcast in the US.

ESPN will be boasting a British only commentary personnel line up for all 64 games, that’s incredible given that it was all American (except Derek Rae and Adrian Healey for some of the games) just 4 years ago.

Martin Tyler and Andy Gray for USA v England ? *yum*

They’ve added my buddy Klinsmann to the panel of personalities to review the post games.T

hey will all be on site in South Africa (apparently) to cover the games.

So, this all sounds good for the football fan in America, so why do i say its “almost” there?

Simple. I think there will be a tendency for someone like Bob Ley or Anthony Hopkins to try and teach the audience the game. I hate that. I think that needs to go away *now*.

ESPN has to know by now that you cant teach an old dog new tricks. You cant make a left hander, a right hander. So why bother? The only audience watching these games, will be the open minded person who cares about the world and wants to watch it. Or has an interest in it. Everyone should completely ignore the ignorant Americans who *hate* the sport. I really don’t give a toss about the Americans who hate the game. They don’t even know *why* they hate the game, its just something they were brought up with. You know, like the English hating the Germans. We don’t know why we hate them today, we just do! Ok sure, there might be something about WWII in there someplace, but that was 80 years ago. Who cares now right?

If ESPN can get through this world cup without Bob Ley telling me that England vs Germany is like the Dodgers vs the Yankees, that’ll be a huge step for mankind. I swear I’ll slit my wrists if i hear some crap like that – Ok maybe not.

But really, its time for ESPN to let go of trying to convince “America” that “soccer” is a good game. There is just no need for it. Come to think of it, if John Motson tried to tell me that Yankees vs Dodgers was like Germany vs England, I’d switch channels – immediately.

My thought process here is, show the game as its meant to be shown. If there is a brain cell in any NFL loving American, he’ll be interested and may enjoy the next 2hrs. If not, it doesn’t matter. There are 6billion football lovers around the world. we don’t need anymore.

It probably turns the American audience off when they hear comparisons between the peoples game, and their game.

Football is a different game, built on different principles. Its a game designed by people, for people. Its not a game designed by advertisers for people. It has a different flow, a different feel, a different language.

Done.

Quick Reminder to myself on how to fix this time speedup issue with Centos 5.4 and HyperV

nano /boot/grub/grub.conf

append

divider=10 clocksource=acpi_pm

to the end of the current kernel (or all of them actually)

Hello,

Quick post to remind myself of how to fix volume shadow copy having no writers. Turns out this is a common problem when using the newsid utility on templated servers/computers. The fix is relatively simple.

1. Stop the Microsoft Shadow Copy Provider & Volume Shadow Copy Service
2. Export the contents of the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem key to a .reg file (as a backup).
3. Delete the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions key. (Just delete the Subscriptions subkey; leave the EventClasses key.)
4. Restart the server.
5. Run the “VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS” command.

Thanks to Rhys Winter on his post in technet.

This past weekend, i went out to look for a Firewire enclosure for my Mac Mini so that i can expand on my storage a bit for all the photo’s I take. I like to keep at least 2 if not 3 copies of all of my pictures.

At my local Frys, I picked up an Acomdata 3.5″ enclosure which sported USB2.0 and Firewire interfaces, for only $39.99. A bit steep, but i wanted something to test with. After getting home, and plugging in a 500gb Seagate ST3500630AS drive (got one back from Seagate after a previous one failed), i did some quick testing.

On Windows, using MTIReadWrite, i was able to see about 20mbytes sustained read/write over a 2gb file. I found that to be dreadful. So i went up to the Mac Mini, and tried something similar. Using the command

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=16k count=64k

I averaged 28mbytes/sec over a few runs. A bit better, but still dreadful. USB can match that easily (although i didn’t actually test USB on this device, but form past experience, 30mbytes/sec is the max i’ve ever gotten from a USB interface to a disk). Doing some math, Firewire is 400mbits/sec which is equal to 47.68mbytes a sec raw throughput at 400mbits. So, expecting anything more than 47mbytes/sec is madness. I didn’t try a Firewire 800 device since the Mac Mini only has Firewire400m, and so does my PC.

So, Firewire is slow in today’s market. It was a heck of a lot a faster than a DNS-321 from DLINK that i tried in the same weekend, that thing was REALLY slow, only 18mbytes/sec throughput – on gige with jumbo frames. Useless.

The only cool thing about Firewire, is that you can daisy chain them. Although, i daisy chained two together on my Mac Mini, and it  dropped read and write speeds down to 17mbytes/sec each – when simultaneously reading or writing from both Firewire drives.

If you’re looking for fast external storage, i think eSata is the only way to go at this point. Pity we can’t daisy chain them together.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 packs a lot of power, performance and stability – for the vast majority of us. Unfortunately, one glitch left me tearing my hair out from this virtually perfect operating system. It appears that in a particular environment, Windows 7 Ultimate x64 will crash and burn all the time for no apparent reason. Luckily, David Weisz has found the problem, and given a reason and a solution to the problem.

Let me explain the scenario where this occurs. I have a Asus M50V laptop, a stellar laptop for business and gaming use. It has 4gb’s of RAM, and it’s my daily workstation for practically everything. Since I’m an IT professional, i run and operate my own Windows Domain within my enterprise, along with Exchange and all the other goodies – mainly as a showpiece of what a good network deployment can do for a customer. Hence, my laptop is joined to a Windows 2003 AD, just like all my other previous laptops and workstations and operating systems.

After installing Windows 7, it appeared that there may have been a glitch with the firmware on the motherboard and Power management, as 7/10 times, when i’d resume my laptop from a sleep state, and after logging in – i’d get the LSASS crash and the usual “Critical error, system will reboot in one minute” message, making me scramble to clsoe all my documents.

However, it appears that it is a small environmental issue with the types of Domain controllers i have, and authentication of such. Hence David Weisz’s solution works. The fix is a simple registry change so that the LSA service authenticates to Windows Servers, pretending to be of Windows Server compatibility. That change is

Key:   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\Kerberos\Parameters
Type:   REG_DWORD
Name:   DefaultEncryptionType
Data:    23 (decimal) or 0×17 (hexadecimal)

And bingo, no more crashed, and now i can resume my dance of saying Windows 7 is pretty much perfect in every way.

To put it simply, it is my opinion that everyone should eventually be using Windows 7 as it is a remarkable operating system with little issues. I’ve been using Windows 7 since January 2009, and have had very few issues, if any at all during that time. I should also add that I have been using Windows Vista since late 2006, and am coming from using Windows Vista for a long time on a laptop that was designed for Windows XP.

Here is a simple guide that you can follow that should tell you in a nutshell what you should do

IF

You are running Windows Vista now – Windows 7 is recommended to you.

You are running Windows XP or Windows 2000 – Windows 7 can be considered after a consultation.

You are looking to buy a new computer – Make sure it comes preloaded with Windows 7. If you are a business customer, and have a server, make sure the computer comes with Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate

How to install

In all cases, I do not recommend a Windows 7 upgrade. It is always in my interest to keep customers and the public in a safe environment, and because of my belief in this – I only recommend a clean install of windows 7, and not an upgrade.

To install Windows 7, backup all of your data to an external device – and then install windows7 by formatting the computer (select a custom install and delete partitions and install to the un partitioned area)

Once installed, reinstall your office applications and other applications and restore your data back to you’re my documents / favorites.

How to buy Windows 7

Windows 7 comes in a variety of editions. Since you already own Windows, you should look for the upgrade packages only. You do not need to buy the full version to do a clean install of windows. If you are unsure which edition to get, please contact me.

I’m on Windows XP, what do I do?

If you are on Windows XP, then there is no rush to move to Windows7. We should make sure that all of your existing applications can run in Windows 7, before making the plunge into Windows 7. Like Vista, windows7 runs in a different way to Windows XP leaving a lot of applications and devices unusable on Windows7 without updates or upgrades. Some devices such as old scanners will not work in Windows7 at all.

If you are running on a relatively new computer (newer than 2005) and have atleast 1gb of RAM, then running Windows7 should be fine – but perform a clean install as described above.

If you have one of the newer Netbooks (the ultra portable computers with 10inch screens) then running Windows7 should not be a problem, as long as you have enough disk space to install Windows 7 and 1gb of RAM.

If you are unsure, do not install Windows 7, and contact me instead.