NAT Woes Resolved

Having started with Hosting365 I had to offload my NAT woes to a professional acquantance. Bottom line: the IP settings provided by the ISP were incorrect and the ZyWall NAT settings were caused by some finger trouble. All sorted now.

All My Sons

My wife and I went to see All My Sons at The Gate Theatre last Tuesday. The performance was absolutely fanntastic. The set was impressive too. I first heard of this Arthur Miller play coming to The Gate Theatre back in February when we saw The Real Thing. At the time I figured it'd be one to see. How right I was.

The performances were the best I've ever seen on stage. Len Cariou's performance, his Gate debut, was particularly convincing. He wasn't acting: he was Joe Keller. Barbara Brennan's performance of, Kate, the distraught mother, is also first rate. And Garrett Lombard did a good Chris. In fact, at the risk of sounding like Father Ted, all the performances were very good.

To be fair, the material they have to work with is extraordinary. Miller delivers lines at just the right times, turning the audience's opinion of different characters from apathy to empathy as their inner conflicts are revealed.

This is without doubt a special production and is one to be seen if you have any chance. There were a couple of empty seats on Tuesday night, so if you have a free evening and a few Euro to spare, make a point to go see it. You won't be disappointed.

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Hyper-V R2

I attended a Windows User Group session on Hyper-V R2 this morning. New features include:

Live Migration / Clustered Shared Volumes
Hyper-V leverages MSCS which operates on a shared nothing basis. Clustered Shared Volumes have been introduced to facilitate Live Migrations (only). Dave did a live demo which worked well: he set up a ping -t to the VM for the duration of the Live Migrations, which proved that it worked.

Core Parking
More of a W2k8 feature than Hyper-V per se. Essentially W2k8 can park unneeded CPU cores to reduce power consumption, waking them when they're needed again.

Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT)
SLAT essentially improves VM memory access. It's hardware based. "On Intel-based processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD-based processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT)" Source: What's New in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Dave also touched on booting from VHDs which is pretty cool.

One thing I like about Hyper-V is that VMs are treated as cluster resources. Anyone familiar with MSCS will get their heads around VMs running as a cluster resource in no time.

One point I want to pick Dave up on is his statement that Microsoft "gives" you HA without an additional licence cost, whereas with VMware you have to pay for it. Well, that's not entirely true - HA requires Windows Server Enterprise Edition - which costs more than Standard Edition. In my book, that's not much different than VMware's licensing model i.e. you pay more for HA.

IMHO
The new features in Hyper-V are welcome and Hyper-V is certainly worth considering. However, VMware has the edge over Hyper-V e.g. you don't need a LUN per VM, and vSphere will provide fault tolerance as a feature. Microsoft are catching up on VMware, but they're not quite there yet.

B

The Parameter Is Incorrect

When SysAdmins are troubleshooting the last thing they need are unhelpful error messages. I had one of those situations today. I was copying a 13GB file to an external drive on a Windows Server 2003 machine. On starting the copy I got the following error message:

Cannot Copy [filename] The Parameter is Incorrect.

Marvellous. Thankfully I came across this one before and remembered that it occurs when you try to copy a file >4GB onto a volume formatted with FAT32 i.e. the maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is approximately 4GB.

For curiosity's sake, this evening I fired up a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine on VMware Workstation, created an 8GB FAT32 volume and tried to copy a 5GB file to it. Thankfully the error message in Windows Server 2008 is much more informative i.e. "The file [filename] is too large for the destination file system.":



As for the original problem, a quick convert f: /fs:ntfs solved the problem.

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New Job

I'm starting a new job with Hosting365 as a Professional Services Engineer working primarily with Microsoft server technologies on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. I'm joining a number of talented engineers with skills including but not limited to networks, Linux, storage and virtualisation. This enables us to design, build and manage open or closed source systems - anything from simple single server solutions to HA multi-tier systems with firewalls, load balancers, web servers, application servers, database servers, clustered servers and high performance storage according to customer requirements.

We're busy, and there's plenty of work for me to get stuck into right away. From a Microsoft perspective, the role is certainly more TechNet than MSDN (as Dave Northey might put it), but I'll certainly have occasion to delve into MSDN from time to time e.g. IIS Logging. In terms of MOF, I'll be working across all three phases i.e. Plan, Deliver and Operate. I also hope to improve my non-Microsoft skills over time e.g. Linux and Cisco.

I'm delighted to be joining the team.

B

PS I'd like to wish my predecessor, Mark Dunne, best of luck in his new job

RTÉ Player

RTÉ have launched their player service. Programmes are topped with a short ad, which I've no problem with. (I haven't watched a full programme yet, so I don't know if there are ads during the programme as well.) The really cool thing is that it's Flash based, so nothing to download (as long as you have the Flash player installed). Cool! Check it out here.

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Hell Boy aka Paul O'Connell

I'm a fan of Paul O'Connell's, and have always reckoned he's really Hell Boy. (That's a compliment Paul - please don't eat me for breakfast!) Ron Perlman will definitely play him when they film his life story.

I'm probably the last one in the world to have received this email, but it made me laugh out loud, so I'm reproducing it here...

Paul O'Connell can assemble the entire contents of an IKEA store without instructions or an allen key.

When Paul O'Connell was a child, he made his mother finish his vegetables.

Every mathematical inequality officially ends with < Paul O'Connell.

If you wake up in the morning, its because Paul O'Connell spared your life.

Paul O'Connell won the Tour de France on a unicycle to prove to Lance Armstrong it wasnt a big deal. He thinks yellow wristbands are gay.

What colour is Paul O'Connells blood? Trick question. Paul O'Connell does not bleed.

Paul O'Connell once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

When Paul stares into the sun, the sun flinches.

If it tastes like chicken, looks like chicken, and feels like chicken, butPaul O'Connell says its beef. Then its beef.

James Bond has a licence to kill. Paul O'Connell don't need no licence.

Paul O'Connell's calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd - no one fools Paul O'Connell.

1.6 billion Chinese are angry with Paul O'Connell. Sounds like a fair fight.

Paul O'Connell played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won.

Paul O'Connell once won a game of Connect 4 in 3 moves.

You can lead a horse to water. Paul O'Connell can make him drink.

Paul O'Connell once ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. They made him blink.

When you open a can of whoop-ass, Paul O'Connell jumps out.

Killing Paul O'Connell doesnt make him dead. It just makes him angry.

Paul O'Connell does the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle in ink.

When Google cant find something, it asks Paul O'Connell for help.

There is the right way, the wrong way, and the Paul O'Connell way. It's basically the right way, but faster and with deaths.

When Paul O'Connell watches a pot, it boils immediately.

Paul O'Connell once killed a group of Samurai Warriors with only a ball point pen. This lead to the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword".

Paul O'Connell has been to Mars. That's why there's no life on Mars.

Before the boogie man goes to sleep, he checks his closet for Paul O'Connell.

Classic!

B

Edit - Here's another couple:

Superman wears Paul O'Connell's pyjamas.

Paul O’Connell doesn’t do push-ups, he pushes the world down.

- Courtesy of Gerry Thornley's article in The Irish Times