Coding/Hacking

VMware and multi-monitor resume

Ricky Faulstich — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:23:00 GMT

Too bad it's been so long since my last blog post. Especially bad when I post the comment I'm about to.

I have a dual monitor setup (host and guest VM) in full screen mode. When I suspend the VM, everything looks fine. However when I resume, it forgets I was in fullscreen, much less that I was running in the toggled dual-monitor mode. The window layouts of the guest are preserved pretty well while state is being restored in the resume if the window isn't set to fullscreen.

When I flip to fullscreen mode, all windows get crammed on one monitor and dual-monitor toggle (VMware toolbar) is not enabled by default. This forces me to switch back to dual monitor mode from VMware toolbar, but this does nothing to relocate windows open on monitor 2 at (time of suspend) and I have to manually reposition on every resume.

Rebuild of Home Domain has Been Slow and Problematic

Ricky Faulstich — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:25:00 GMT

Sorry about this site (my blog) being down for a month or so. I decided to upgrade (i.e. rebuild from scratch) my home domain for the first time in over five years.

My previous home domain was based on Windows Server 2003 (started with Windows Server Standard 2003, moved to Windows Small Business Server 2003, then finally to Windows Server 2003 R2). Over that time it has hosted various versions of MS server products [Exchange (2003), IIS (5,6,7), SharePoint (WSS2, WSS3, MOSS 2007), SQL Server (Express/DevEd 2000,2005), etc.], and all exposed to the internet. I had crashed and burned my workstations countless times (admittedly thanks to my own tinkering/experimenting/ßeta testing), but the main home domain had been rock solid throughout - which was a surprise. When Windows XP was released (2001), I was skeptical. Windows XP looked like an evolutionary release of the revolutionary Windows 2000 release only a year earlier - the RTM looking like nothing more than window (no pun intended) dressing. It took another couple of years to release a new version of their server OS (i.e. Windows Server 2003) which is based off the XP code-base. It turns out that the XP/2003 releases of the MS OS are the best (i.e. most stable, efficient, secure) releases to this day.

Anyway, I had finally screwed up my “typical“ network services (e.g. DHCP, DNS, IIS/ASP, Exchange) beyond repair and it was time to get things cleaned up. In February of 2008, I purchased a Windows Home Server to help secure my data and to basically protect me from myself (i.e. the daily professional hacking of my environment that was clashing with my consumer use.) Don't get me started on WHS: there's such a fundamental bug with it that I feel like I've wasted $700+ on somethintg that was supposed to save me.

I forgot about all the hours of toil it took me to get everything running well on my hardware. I brought up my new PDC (Windows Server 2008) and the typical services rather quickly on a newer piece of hardware. I wanted to make my previous PDC, running on older hardware and Windows Server 2003 all these years so well, into a new member server. Turns out that I've had nothing but trouble trying to get Windows Server 2003 running again correctly on that legacy hardware. (I still can't format an extended partition on one of my ancient Highpoint RAID controllers without instant bluescreen/reboots (there's 200+ GB of unallocated space on one of my drives; I managed to do it somehow before, but can't figure out what driver version magic combination gets me there).

Windows Home Server

Ricky Faulstich — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:52:00 GMT

I haven't been this excited by an OS release since Windows 2000. (Sorry Apple folks, I really like and appreciate your OS... ever since I had my first Apple ][+, then IIe, then //c. But when I entered the working world and had to create a career by developing software, WinTel had all of the market-share. When I graduated college, net wealth was very low and WinTel development was the only way to survive.)

So what's changed?

Computers aren't just my career, they're one of my hobbies, too (it's nice when your career is a hobby!)
I've been managing my own full-blown Windows AD domain at home for years now. This includes a WinS PDC that also hosts my forward-facing Exchange Server, IIS6, and a VMWare WinS2K3 member server that hosts a full-blown MOSS 2007 Enterprise environment complete with search, etc. I do most of my interactive computing at home on a couple of workstations (each machine can quad-boot into 32 bit/64 bit versions of XP or Vista). I've been using my home network as an R&D test-bed for various projects - primarily to improve my skills and advance my career (and hobby being lagniappe). My career includes the 11+ year stint which I've been doing the 40hr/wk corporate developer/dev-architect for a Fortune500 (Health Care: Medical Facilities #6) company, my moonlighting consulting gig, and whatever personal development explorations I fancy. Setting up my own “enterprise-like“ internet-facing environment over my home ISP (e.g., hosting this blog) has been a great learning experience and extremely valuable and relevant to my career (i.e. a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer.) On the other hand, more and more of my home computing activities have been falling in line with “Joe Home-User's.” I.e., I use my computer more and more like “normal people“ (a typical non-IT end-user/consumer.) I waste countless hours taking and organizing digital pictures and my music library, answering non-work-related emails, shopping and banking online, and countless hours web-surfing various non-tech sites.

Here's the issue. The very same mockup/reference platform that I primarily used for career purposes now also is taxed with the double-duty of serving these non-career and consumer purposes. This single environment has moved from the role of being master of one (a career-oriented skill-building test-bed) to being a jack of all trades and master of none. It no longer serves as a best-of-breed for either scenario - the experimental, early-adopting, technology-testing R&D role it was designed and built for, nor the personal/consumer scenarios it has been increasingly taxed with. I need to break up my environment into the two separate roles it services, getting back to where each is best-of-breed for what it is intended to service. That’s the geek/engineering way.

That's why the OS release that has intrigued me since its announcement is fascinating. It’s actually geared to Joe Home-User (responding perfectly to the consumer-oriented role), while allowing my existing environment to serve the purpose it was designed for in the first place - hacking around and experimental, crash-and-burn career-oriented R&D. The OS that I am speaking of, that will help bring me back to serving a best-of-breed solution – for both roles, is Windows Home Server.

Being a manager of our developer (MSDN enterprise) Volume License Agreement, I essentially am granted license to just about every piece of software that Microsoft makes (other than games). This includes every M$ OS, and looked forward to getting WHS for “free.” It turns out this is the first (MS OS) exception. “Well, OK,” I say. “I’ll buy one if I have to (as an end-customer) and might as well get it along with the supported hardware.”

The first turn-key solutions (HP MediaSmart Server EX47x) have been delivered - and the consumer reviews have been outstanding. Could this thing really be all that I had hoped for? It sure looks like it. I was minutes away of laying down my cash and then I found some interesting info buried around the 'net.

First, there was the “supported operating systems” table buried deep in HP’s website. Various versions of Windows Vista and XP are supported (but not all editions of them!) But that’s it. What about the others, e.g. any version of Windows Server? What about Windows 2000? What about non-Windows nodes that follow industry standard protocols (SMB, TCP/IP, etc. E.g. Linux).

The answer is: I still don’t know the answer yet. Is this “supported operated systems” list only in regards to the agent? I’m guessing probably so. You can still access the “raw OS” console of the WHS via remote desktop when you need to get into the guts - it looks like any other Windows Server 2003 shell (Explorer) that you’ve seen before. So “how” required is this agent to include nodes in your WHS solution?

One thing that I haven’t been able to confirm is that the agent is required in order to take advantage of some of the WHS features. Certainly it shouldn’t be required for standard NTLM/SMB file-sharing. Specifically, I’m asking the question, “If I can’t install the agent on a machine because it’s “unsupported” (i.e. certain versions of XP or Vista or anything else), can you manually configure a machine to be included within a WHS feature’s workflow – providing it uses standard protocols?” I’d love to have my forward-facing web root of my Windows Server 2003 PDC to be included as part of the backup scheduling. Since installing the agent isn’t supported on that OS, is it possible to manually configure/slipstream it into the WHS backup schedule? I don’t know and I can’t find any information on it. I’m betting that you can, but if not I can still deal with working around the limitation by moving the critical services elsewhere. Therefore I am still very ready to buy… until I read the very last line:

NOTE: The HP MediaSmart Server does not support client computers running 64-bit operating systems.

OK, that’s a deal breaker for me. My $800 was in-hand and enthusiastically ready to turn over to HP/M$. Now none of my servers or primary workstation boots (which make up my entire home network) is supported. That’s pitiful, as my entire network is made up of the very latest releases - of the deluxe versions - of M$ OS’s (Vista Ultimate x64 and Windows Server 2003 R2) – yet neither is supported by WHS. If you see differently, please let me know. I know that there’s going to be an announcement on 64-bit support at the Jan CES, but the burning question remains: what if your node isn’t “supported.” Is it dead in the water as far as WHS is concerned, or can you manually configure it into the WHS services?

I was so close to dropping my $ considering the functionality that it offered and the rave reviews. Are all of these people running XP/Vista32 exclusively as the OS on their network? Probably so. But…

What about the rest of us? What about the early-adopters (me) that is running the latest and greatest deluxe editions of your official releases that are unsupported? What about the developers (developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS!) who hold licensing to the bits of every other M$ software – who would evangelize, extend the platform, and most importantly partner/sell it?

Where’s the love?

UPDATE: (2008-01)
As was rumored, Microsoft has announced an upgrade (“WHS Power Pack 1“) to the initial release of WHS with lots of features - most importantly, to me, those that will support my use! Now all I have to do is dig up some cash.

UPDATE (2008-02-19):
OK, I broke down and bought the EX475 (2x512GB=1GB) model, even though the “WHS Power Pack 1“ (referenced above) isn't due until mid-2008. I downloaded the trial of WHS and decided I can live with the features that are available for machines that don't have agents [i.e., “auto-setup“ of new good fault-tolerant hardware and NAS (via standard SMB)] until my 64 bit Vista client is released. I was bummed that you can't configure/setup the WHS via machines that don't have agents (which really seems a bit much as it's basically RPC/RDP configurations - you don't need to hook-up any non-agent machines to get the WHS configured). I cranked up a 32 bit XP VM and ran the setup CD. Since I'm already having my router forward port 80 & 443 to a different machine (my PDC) to do my web hosting, I did a backup of my router config, enabled uPnP, and let it go about doing its thing. After it was done, I registered the free (yet another) dynamic DNS and verified it was setup correctly. I then “unconfigured“ the router, set my 80 & 443 forwarding back to my Exchange/MOSS machine and disabled the forwarding to WHS in my router. It looks like everything is working good (i.e., as expected for agentless machines.)
I moved all of my pictures/music/personal/software fileshares from the various places on my network into the shares on WHS. It's taking forever to balance the storage (running duplication on all shares which contain around 130GB so far).

UPDATE (2008-02-29):
The product shows so much promise and I was really excited about using it - even with the wait until it supports my 64 bit clients. That pretty much leaves me with using the file sharing until the Power Pack is released, which is just fine with me. I bought the dual disk (2x500GB=1TB) version of my HP WHS and set all my shares for duplication (the shared storage is duplicated on the other disk in the background). This is the most fault tolerant setup possible. I started moving my media and personal documents over as stated in the previous update and renamed the original shares spread around my network - that way I wouldn't accidentally use the older shares and I had a backup still sitting there for awhile “just in case.“ And thank god I did.
There is a massive standing bug in WHS file system: When editing files directly from WHS shares, it will silently corrupt just about any file type using just about any application. And the ironic kicker - it only affects the “more fault tolerant versions of WHS“ (those with multiple drives)... like mine.
So that leaves me with basically no use of the functionality of the thing until the bug is fixed and my client machines are supported.
I feel sorry for the folks behind WHS because they are getting absolutely clobbered right now (as well as they should - file corruption for something sold as mainly a protector and sharer of data, i.e. file server - is inexcusable, especially considering all the applications that are affected (Microsoft's own Office and Vista components, for example!) How could such a thing be missed in testing? And if it was caught, how could it ever have been RTM'd?
I believe the WHS team has created a nice, focused product for a good target audience. There's obviously something wrong in the quality assurance area, however.
I can wait for the Power Pack for as long as I have to.
I can't trust (or use) the product until the corruption bug is fixed. What's ashame is that it was originally KB'd on Dec 21, 2007... and reports were coming in a month or two before that... and they still haven't fixed it yet. It must be quite an issue - one with major code changes and rewriting. I just hope they QA it a lot better than the RTM of 1.0.

UPDATE (2008-03-10):
Egads. Things get worse. Looks like the earliest the data corruption bug fix will be released is June 2008. Obviously a major amount of effort to fix things. I sure hope MS spends more time on the QA for this hotfix. As of right now I have a $700 paperweight that I don't trust.On the other hand, there's a cool (and very reasonably priced) new service offered by HP called UpLine for disaster recovery and other services. Interested on how it's going to tie into their WHS offerings.

UPDATE (2008-06-04):
Yup, still waiting on a fix for the big bad bug (no updates for over a few anxious months now). And I still don't trust it. Yet as I wait for a fix, guess what happened? A Linux version consisting of damn near the same product/feature set as WHS was released! Check out a review of HP's new Media Vault 2100 Home Server.

UPDATE (2008-06-07):
I was just accepted into the ßeta progam for WHS. Power Pack 1 (ßeta 1 build 1771) has just been released and installed. As a bonus, it includes the fix to the big bad bug. Time will tell.

UPDATE (2008-06-25):
I am gaining more and more confidence that the bug has been fixed and starting to edit files on my fileshares. Nothing has corrupted so far. For those of us that submitted bug reports on the ßeta 1 Build 1771 release, we got access to a newer Build 1776). After much use of the newer build, I am happy to say that my trust and use has been increasing and that there's been no sign of the big bad bug of the initial release.

UPDATE (2008-07-21):
Hooray! Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing and is available for download as of today (i.e. if you choose to do a manual install before it's shows up on auto-update - which is what you must do if you have ßeta/pre-releases installed. Read here for availability.) The big bad bug has hopefully been squashed forever. It'll be worth the wait if it has. Also, HP has released an update for it MediasSmart server. There are some enhancements that are only included if you have Power Pack 1 installed, so install PP1 first and then let the HP MediaSmart update come on in after.

Cyclic Activity

Ricky Faulstich — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:16:00 GMT

I just noticed... I have only made four blog posts in the last 6 months. That's pitiful. Most of the later ones aren't tech/programming related at all. I guess that's what happens when the machine the blog is running has hard drives giving their last gasp, working hard, and just using del.icio.us as historical archive (as this blog was originally intended to serve).

Sometimes I forget this thing is even here - and the surprising number of visitors and comments that it has generated.

I'll be back soon, I promise. If Telligent grants my license request for CommunityServer 2007, then you should start probably looking for a series of posts concerning CS development. You see, I am an experienced (I like to think I am) Microsoft/.NET developer, yet a beginner when it comes to CS development. It was written as an ASP.NET app in C# (primarily under CLR 1.1 then upgraded to CLR 2.) The architecture was very well designed to coding and extensibility best practices since the beginnings, but trying to inline my own custom subsites into the CS root site using Visual Studio has been hit-and-miss.

TOD - Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Protocol) utility

Ricky Faulstich — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:06:00 GMT

Nifty little command-line tool to let you see the active Terminal Services sessions on Win32 boxes:

qwinsta /?

TOD - Generate Random Text in Microsoft Word

Ricky Faulstich — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:00:00 GMT

I can never seem to remember how to do this so this is yet another post for my own benefit (and maybe yours).

To generate random text in Microsoft Word, type:

=rand() or =rand(x,y) (where x=words per paragraph and y=paragraphs)


del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft, Word, generate, text, random, Office, write, author

Excel formulas

Ricky Faulstich — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:38:00 GMT

I write internal financial applications by day for a large healthcare company. My end users, therefore, use Excel - for everything (an email that has an Excel attachment - that contains nothing more than a screen shot pasting - is not uncommon).

I've tried to deliver output/results/reports in different formats, but ultimately I always have to implement Excel in the end. It's a very useful tool, for sure.

Here's some of the most commonly used Excel formulas (as posted on Microsoft's web site).

RickyFaulstich.net is Back on the Air

Ricky Faulstich — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:22:00 GMT

After a rather abrupt (start to finish within a few weeks over the holidays) and physically rough (including for my computer equipment) change of residence, I'm happy to say that I have most things back up and running again, at least as far as the services provided via RickyFaulstich.net goes (including this blog). Almost all services that I (and some of you) have come to know and love are back up and limping along in their new home (downtown Louisville, Kentucky, as if you really care). The nerd talk follows the important content of this post, which is:

Geaux Saints! Who d'at! Bless you boys! No Mora excuses! Faith, hope, and Bum! I believe!

Some of the interesting details of the death and resurrection this time (6 months ago I had a lightening strike blow out half my hardware):

I lost the main app installation drive on my main workstation. The SATA connector broke off in the cable and eventually I was able to thread the needle of the contacts into the broken femaile end, which is hangs precariously in its current state: just waiting for gravity or one of my cats to brush by and fry it.
I could boot and hook up to the internet, if I was lucky. It was two visits from my cable provider to get the line hot upstairs (albeit to the wrong room, as it currently remains.) Then my MAC address lost registration due to a billing/account issue from the address change and I was in limbo again. After re-registration, I noticed I was getting the basic package performance (I pay for the high performance package). A couple of calls to tech support and they refreshed me until I was able to get some tests to return my expected numbers. Of course I had to reconfig the LAN because I still was missing my major domain controller, which brings me to...
...my PDC. I lost the 60GB IDE boot drive in my primary domain controller during the move (looks like mechanical). Thankfully it was not the system drive (from which the OS boots). That, unfortunately, left a hodge podge of devices remaining: the DVD on the MoBo's primary IDE; a big PATA on the MoBo's onboard RAID, and a big PATA and big SATA connected to a PCI SATA/PATA150 combo controller. And, of course, none of the HDs were set to boot nor were any SOS boot utils happy with the monster drives or their "non-standard" controllers. Using a USB floppy, bootable original OS DVD, and an unreproducible combination of driver load floppies, FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, and boot.ini hacks it's back up, minus a couple of websites and some other things that I haven't noticed gone yet.

TOD - Validate Values can be Converted to Specific Types on ASP.NET Web Forms

Ricky Faulstich — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:46:00 GMT

I admit, it's been awhile since I didn't any serious development work in ASP.NET web forms. I learned something today that I wish I would have known about years ago. I've always been a big fan of the System.Web.UI.WebControls.validators for awhile now, but it became obvious today that I didn't go deep enough into TFM.

To validate date or money input, I usually ended up using the RegularExpressionValidator. I usually don't require a specific date entry format, simply that it's a valid date or money - i.e. it can be coerced into it's corresponding strong type. Something like an IsDate() or DateTime.TryParse() would be great, but it's easy to drop in a RegularExpressionValidator onto a form without going into a CustomValidator and doing anything else - other than coming up with the regex. Turns out that there's an easy way already built-in to the CompareValidator if you simply want to check if the value can be converted into a few set types: String, Integer, Double, Date, and Currency. Date is the handiest, as you no longer have to worry about having leap years covered by your regex, etc: dates will fail if it can't figure a way to parse out a "real" date from the input; similarly with currency (you're OK having thousands separators in the input, e.g. commas; $ OK too.) So the next time you're trying to validate an IsDate or IsNumeric or IsCurrency, turn to the ComparisonValidator and check out the Operator property. I sure wish I had years ago.

Also, read the overview of the BaseCompareValidator Class in MSDN reference. There are useful static helper methods that I was surprised to find (and some even type-specific, like getting the full year from data entry, etc.)

TestDriven.NET by Jamie Cansdale : Google Code Search

Ricky Faulstich — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:42:00 GMT

The biggest name in search throws in its hat for specially-scoped search: for software developers. What sites do you start from when beginning a search for source code?

Link to TestDriven.NET by Jamie Cansdale : Google Code Search