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How to solve this

There are many ways to solve this issue. This is just the one I used based on my experience and expertise. I didn’t use this complex solution initially, it was only after all other solutions attempted failed, badly. My Windows Vista and Win7 computers were losing 2 minutes a day. After the first attempt to correct it with daily time sync, is was still losing about a minute, which was impacting some scheduled events. 1 minute off matters when someone else sets the start and end schedule.

I saw a headline about stolen laptops here and thought I’d mention my methods before reading the other article.

Before Stolen Laptop

The most important stuff happens before your laptop is stolen, but you need to do it. It isn’t automatic.

Just because you are a home Windows user doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have good password management practices. Core to achieving that are:

1. Changing passwords regularly
2. Having long enough passwords
3. Having complex enough passwords
4. Not reusing passwords
5. Locking accounts for incorrect password attempts

In most companies, password policies are set by the IT guys through an Active Directory Domain Controller. If you have an AD controller at home, you aren’t reading this story anyway.

Windows7 is an improvement over other versions in many ways, except they decided to waste too much screen with pretty and thick boarders by default. Additionally, the window title bar seems to be 2x larger than under XP. No thanks.

It has bothered me for a few months, but not enough to search and try a few things until today. Even with the changes, the window borders and title bar are still too think for my tastes, but at least it is a little better.

The settings can be found in the Window Color and Appearance settings of Windows7. The Items to change are:

1. Active Title Bar – size 17 is the smallest it will accept
2. Border Padding – size 0 is the smallest setting
3. Active Window Border – size 1 is the smallest

You can also make scroll bars thinner, if you like. Initially, I went too thin and had to make them a little larger so usability wasn’t completely lost. Here’s the resulting border. Sadly, there is still way too much wasted space in my opinion.

I have no use for the part of the window with the Organize or Include in Library stuff. That entire menu is worthless to me. Let me know if you know how to remove that section. Please.

If you miss X-Mouse from Tweak-UI in the PowerToys, here’s a solution to have the focus follow the mouse. I like option 3 and have pulled the regedit file down. Unix people will appreciate this. It is nice to have the active window not necessarily pulled to the foreground just because it is active.

I attended the Atlanta area OpenSolaris Meetup last night even though we were getting some major rain in the area which made the 30 minute drive challenging. Why would I bother? Swag? Scott D presenting? Being around other nerds that like Solaris? No, although those are all valid reasons too.

Even with the nasty weather, the room was packed and we had to bring in some more chairs so everyone could sit. About 20 people attended.

New stuff in ZFS

Yep, the entire meeting was about fairly new features added to ZFS on OpenSolaris. Things like data deduplication and how well it works in normal and extreme situations. The main things I took away from the talk were:

1. ZFS is stable
2. Data Deduplication, dedup for short, should only be used on backup areas, not on live production data, until you become comfortable with it and the performance in your environment
3. Dedup happens at the block level of a zpool, anything above that level still works as designed
4. Only use builds after 129 of OpenSolaris if you plan to use dedup. Earlier versions had data loss issues with the code.
5. Solaris doesn’t have the dedup code yet. It is not currently scheduled for any specific release either.
6. DeDup is only available in real-time now, there is no dedup thread that can be scheduled to run later. This could have unknown performance impacts (good or bad).
7. ZFS supports both read and write cache devices. This means we can specify cheap and expensive SSD memory be used for caching either cache and deploy cheaper, larger SATA disks for the actual disk storage. Some cost/performance examples were shown with 10,000rpm SAS drives compared to SSD cache with 4200 SATA drives. The price was about the same, 4x more storage was available and performance was 2x better for read and about the same for write. Nice.
8. ZFS has added a way to check for disk size changes – suppose your storage is external to the server and really just a logical allocation. On the storage server, you can expand the LUN that the server sees. ZFS can be configured to manually or automatically refresh disk device sizes.
9. Device removal – currently there is no direct method to remove the disk from a ZFS pool. There are work arounds, however. Anyway, they are planning to release the method this year in OpenSolaris ZFS to remove a disk from a zpool.

To really get the demo, you need to accept the other great things about ZFS as a basis, then add the new capabilities on top. One of the demonstrations was how IT shops can charge back for data storage to multiple users since they are using the data, even when 20 other departments are also using the same data blocks. Basically, dedup gives you more disk storage without buying more disk.

ACLs are managed at the file system level, not the disk block level, so the dedup’ed data still can only be accessed appropriately.

Why OpenSolaris ?

Is an open source version of Sun Microsystems Solaris operating systems that runs on lots of hardware you may already own. It also runs inside most virtual machines as a client or guest. Since it looks and feels like Solaris, you can become familiar with it for zero cost on your PC at home for just the cost of disk storage – about 20GB. Sun also uses OpenSolaris to trial new features prior to placing them into the real Solaris releases. I run OpenSolaris in a virtual machine under Widnows7 using the free version of Sun’s VirtualBox hypervisor. I know others who run it directly on hardware, under Xen and under VMware hypervisors too. Just give it enough virtual disk storage and go. I think 10GB is enough to load it, but a little more, say 20GB, will let you play with it and applications more.

If you are in the market for NetApp storage, you really need to take a look at Sun’s storage servers running ZFS. The entry price is significantly less and you get all the flexibility of Solaris without giving up CIFS, iSCSI, NFS, and, in the future, fibre channel storage. Good sales job Sun.

Swag

No meetup is a success without some swag. Water bottles, t-shirts, hats, and books, were all available. We were encouraged to take some after the iPod Nano raffle was won (not by me). Pizza and sodas were also provided by the sponsors.

Last week, I setup and configured a special desktop for the accounting system for the company. Basically, it is a Windows7 Pro desktop running under ESXi 4 that the folks responsible for accounting remote (RDP) into after connecting via VPN to the special network for it. We’re small and only a few people even need access – never more than 1 at a time.

It was fairly painless to setup, install Accounting, load Payroll CD, then validate remote VPN access (which is never trivial), then setup daily backup jobs. Of course, AV, automatic patchs and nasty IE settings were configured too. Each daily backup set is about 250MB, which isn’t too bad, but more than I would have thought given the machine is idle most of the time and won’t be used more than 3 days a month. These backups are Microsoft VHD files using the built-in backup, which could be useful, but I’d rather have a complete VDMK, VDI, or Xen img file to restore.

Of course, it isn’t possible to connect to this VM without going through our VPN.

Next I need to perform a test restore to another machine under some virtualization tool that we use. Yeah, I know with the VHD, I can perform a restore someplace else, but with the VM-image file, I just point a hypervisor at it and go. Now that VirtualBox supports VMware, vdmk, files, this test really should be trivial. If it goes well, I’ll take my WinXP (MS-Office, Visio and other WinXP-only tools VM) and put it under a server-based VM too. It will be better to not travel with that stuff on my laptop anyway.

VMware’s Client, which is used to manage VMware Servers, doesn’t like Windows7 … yet. A friend dropped me this link with instructions to get around the prob. He said it was a 64-bit Win7 issue.

• http://serverfault.com/questions/44946/how-do-you-get-the-vmware-vsphere-client-to-work-on-windows-7-rc

I haven’t tried this, but I did try to use Microsoft’s built-in compatibility mode settings. No joy.

Host VMware ESXi 4.x – 64-bit
Client Win7 Pro 64-bit

On another front, here’s a link to instructions to upgrade ESXi 3.5 to 4.0 without migrating to a new machine. Ballsy, we all know, but sometimes, in a lab, the chance of failure doesn’t matter.

I can confirm these instructions worked for me.

Enjoy.

Every once in a while, I need to create instructions that someone else can follow. A few screen shots would be very helpful. Windows7 includes a program called psr that captures the entire desktop and describes which mouse clicks were entered as they happen. Every mouse click captures another screen shot. Very handy for creating a step-by-step instruction document or to help recreate steps to cause a problem. When you stop recording, it packages the file(s) into a ZIP ready to share.

This can also be used to report bugs, since it captures widget clicks too and adds the description of them into a web page along with the screen captures.

I can also report that it captures virtual machine screen shots and clicks too, but not for internal to the processes. It just knows that you clicked on something inside the VM.

To run this tool,

Start —> Run —> psr

It may work in Vista and there may be a download for older systems like WinXP, but I can’t confirm that.

The other downside to this tool is that it creates MHTML (mht) files, which don’t display without coaxing except with IE. Opera Browser will display the resulting files, but Firefox 3.5.x refused to open it.

Today, I’ll try to explain why you probably want the 64-bit version of Windows7 regardless of your current needs.

Which processor?

To get us started, you want a 64-bit processor with “VT support.” There’s no downside to getting a 64-bit processor. You can run them with 32-bit software and they aren’t expensive any more. The upside in capabilities that 64-bit CPUs provide far outweighs the slightly higher cost. This is a no-brainer folks.

Why 64-Bit OS?

There are 2 reasons you want a 64-bit OS. Accessing more RAM and moving data around faster. Access to more RAM may not be an issue for 90% of the users out there today, but in 3 years, it is likely you’ll want to access more RAM than what the 32-bit OS can. The RAM cutoff for 32-bit happens at 3.5GB-4GB of RAM.

If you do virtual machines, you want a 64-bit OS. There are exceptions, but if you are already using VMs, you wouldn’t be reading this anyway.

Why Not 64-bit OS?

Software incompatibilities and drivers. Out of these, access to drivers is the more important since Win7 allows you to run programs in Compatibility Mode. There are 11 choices from Win95, Win98, ME, NT, XP, Vista and all the different service paks for each of these. If you can’t get a program to run in those modes, there’s always a WinXP virtual machine – free download from Microsoft. Basically, software compatibility shouldn’t be a showstopper for anyone this time around. The difficulty to configure a particular program is minor, but I don’t think I could explain it to everyone. 90% of you will figure this out easily.

Drivers are a different issue. For me, all my equipment had Win7 drivers, including a Hauppauge TV tuner. Microsoft has a tool you can run that will tell you whether all your equipment has drivers or not. For me, there were a few drivers that it could only say post-install upgrade needed.

Your CPU isn’t 64-bit, then obviously you don’t want a 64-bit OS. What were you thinking? Chances are, your computer is 4 years old or more. Time for an upgrade?

Why 32-bit OS?

1. You only run 1 program at a time and it isn’t a game, anything from Adobe, or you need some old driver that doesn’t have a new version known to be compatible with Win7. Many Vista drivers are compatible, but don’t expect WinXP drivers to work.
2. You know that you will never need more than 4GB of RAM for the entire OS and all programs.

Why Not 32-bit OS?

1. Gamer? The hottest, new games are designed for 64-bit and lots of RAM (6GB+)
2. You want to be ready for the next 8 years worth of programs.

Win7 is an OS like WinXP was. You’ll use it for many, many years and mostly be happy.

Did I forget something important for why you would want 64-bit or 32-bit?

In the beginning, people didn’t really like WinXP, if you recall. Windows7 has been reviewed very favorably and it is nice enough for a Linux guy like me to write a number of favorable articles about it. There are enough good things in Win7 that I’m a convert from both Vista and WinXP. OTOH, I didn’t pay for it and wouldn’t.

If you are happy with WinXP, I can’t recommend you upgrade at this point unless it is free or there’s a feature that you need/want. Win7 media center is nice.

Fantastic is the only word I can use. Windows7 x86 memory use is FANTASTIC (meaning low). I’ve done a little optimization using Vista System Optimizer after installing Win7 on my laptop – here are the results:

Win7 = Host OS

Ubuntu = Client VM – 1224MB allocated

The total system memory used with VirtualBox, Ubuntu and Windows Media Player playing a TV show is 1.75GB. 1.2GB of that is allocated to the client VM.

Under Vista-64, this same config would use 2.5GB.

Running another VM, WinXP, with 1GB of use, will bring the total memory used to 2.75GB.

Win7 = Host OS

Ubuntu = Client VM – 1224MB allocated

WinXP = Client VM – 1024MB allocated.

This would use almost 4GB in Vista-64.

Even with the 32-bit limitation of 3.5GB of RAM, on my system, I actually gain more usable RAM with 32-bit Win7 over 64-bit Vista and isn’t giving more RAM to client VMs the goal?