Aaron's blog

Vista seems to have an annoying habit of creating several "Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* ##" entries in my ipconfig results, which means I have to scroll up to see the actual entries I want to.  That is a pain to do on a laptop with a touch pad, but also I think it was contributing to connectivity problems when switching between wireless and wired connections.

If you want to remove them, there is a method that seems to be harmless:

• Right-click My Computer, go to Manage.
• Go to Device Manager
• Click View on the top of the window, and check Show hidden devices.
• Now expand the Network adapters tree, and you should see several entries that start with isatap.(something).
• Disable (right-click, Disable) several of them, and verify that all your networking things still work.
• If that didn't cause any problems, you should be able to safely delete them (right-click, Uninstall).

Now your ipconfig readout should be a little more sane.  This problems seems to be caused by IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling of some sort, which you can read about here.

As I had feared would happen for a long time, my kick pedal (well actually my cousin's kick pedal) broke.  So I made a new pedal out of 1/2" plywood.

First step was disassemble the broken unit, trace the foot part, and cut it out:

<lost>

Then I drilled holes for the hinges (which were essentially the only deviation from the design of the original), holes for the orange piece, and a hole for the magnet.  It was accurate enough to just eye-ball all the locations from various angles instead of measuring things. Which got me to this stage:

<lost>

And the final assembled product (which works just as well as the original):

Last night we upped the RAM count to 6GB (from 2GB).  I'm pretty sure that was completely unnecessary, but it is still sweet.  There are some weird things you notice when you get that much RAM: the pagefile is reported by Task Manager to be over 12GB, and the hibernate file takes up over 6GB.  Hopefully it doesn't actually think it's going to be using that hiberfile anytime soon--it would be tough to check my e-mail.  :)

It's also now running a Radeon HD 3850 512MB graphics card, but the purpose of that is to test how good of an output we can get on a TV through component outputs, and it will soon be replaced with a lower end Radeon HD 3450 that is passively cooled.  Then our poor little server will have yet another job: HTPC.

The idea is to create a new site with no real documents to look at, that is purely for re-directing one URL.  It took me a few tries to get this working, so I thought I would document the steps.  In the example we'll be redirecting a.axvius.com to https://b.axvius.com

1. Create a new site in IIS7.  Pick a name, point the Physical Path to the folder you just created, and a.axvius.com in the Host name box.
2. Double-click on HTTP Redirect (in the lower half of the pane when you have the site you just created selected).  Check the first box, and put https://b.axvius.com in the box.  Check the box that reads "Redirect all requests to exact destination."  Change the drop-down to permanent.  Click apply.
3. Notice that it created a web.config file in the folder you created.
4. May need to restart the site.
5. Create a folder for the site.
6. Give the Network Service and IUSR users read access to the folder.  Note that your mileage may vary; I have historically had a difficult time with IIS file permissions.

Not too difficult really.  I tried to do it without a folder first, and was thwarted by file permissions after that.

I have about 4000 messages in my Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2007 (connected to Exchange 2007).  Unfortunately two unread message snuck in there, and it is quite hard to find them.  And it is annoying to see the (2) next to the folder.  I could right-click on the folder and mark them as all read, but I want to see if maybe they are important.

Trying to sort by read status is proving to be difficult.  First I tried using the existing columns, but none of them provide read status.  Then I added a read status column, but someone decided it would be funny to not let users sort by that column.

I'm currently waiting to see whether my latest scheme will work.  I created a new folder, Unread, and am moving all the messages into that folder.  Then they should show up in the Unread Messages virtual folder that Outlook provides, I'll be able to read them, I can move everything back, and I can get on with my life.  It is taking quite a while to move them though.

Sometimes things happen to me that are so stupid I feel compelled to share them so others can get, at the most, a good laugh, or at the least, a headshake.

You may recall the post I wrote last night, about my devious attempts to find out which two messages in my Deleted Items were unread.  I went to bed feeling pretty smart, knowing that by morning my computer would be done moving things and I would be able to see what I wanted to see.

I did not feel so smart after I woke up.  I looked at my computer and there was a new message ready to be composed, with 4000 messages attached as files.  I sleepily muttered some obscenities, clicked Close, and clicked No, Don't Save the Draft.

All was well until I got to work at 11:00 and needed to see an old message from my boss.  The Deleted Items folder was empty!

So I spent the next 5 minutes restoring my messages from the "permanently" deleted messages archive via Outlook Web Access, 50 messages at a time.  Apparently it decided I wanted to move all my messages into a new message, and moved them there permanently.  Of course then I didn't save the draft, so they were gone.

On the up side, it showed the two unread messages right at the top of the OWA display of the 4000 messages.  So I actually did work out a valid way of finding those unread messages.

And no, they were not important messages.

Well I wouldn't say we are experts, but we definitely did have a near disaster.

It started 3 days ago when I installed an NVIDIA driver and program to monitor the RAID 5 running on our server's M2N-E motherboard.  It reported to me that the array was in a degraded state, but did not allow for repairing it from within Windows, requiring some BIOS-level maintenance.  So I planned to go investigate the situation the next day.

When I got to the server and hooked up a monitor and keyboard the video output was garbled.  We could tell it was going into BIOS but it was unreadable.  That's what we get for using a 10 year old PCI video card I guess.  So I planned to come back in a day or two with a different video card.

Of course it then decided to drop another drive from the array.  This took down our website because it was stored on the array.  By website, I mean Default Website, which has the misfortune of being linked to Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2007.  Which means the web.config no longer existed.  OWA would no longer run, and reportedly the only way to fix that is to do a complete re-install of IIS and Exchange 2007.

Needless to say, we really wanted to get that RAID going again.  We rebooted between the RAID BIOS and Windows many times trying to rebuild it, but it would never show up in Windows.  After 10 fruitless repetitions of this we about ready to call it a loss and get ready to wipe the array and start over.

But then I thought of how the monitoring driver and utility I installed had been a relatively new version, and maybe it had incompatibilities with the older BIOS.  Updating the BIOS was worth a shot.

We downloaded the 1305 BIOS from the Asus website, which is still as horrible as it has ever been.  It wouldn't even load from the server, so we had to use another computer, network the downloaded files onto the server, and from there put them on the floppy.

After flashing the board from within BIOS we were greeted with a lockup immediately after the splash screen.  I spent 1/2 an hour unplugging things one-by-one trying to root out the problem, but it didn't help.  I tried unplugging all the cables and plugging them all back in (it sounds weird, but I have seen it fix many problems).  Visions of RMAing the board and going server-less for 2 weeks were running through my head, and I wasn't happy.  Finally I tried removing the battery for a minute, which somehow un-froze the BIOS.

From there it was a quick boot into Windows and then some big smiles as we saw that the array was back, and rebuilding.  No big re-installs this time.

But we weren't without issues.  Immediate attempts to copy files off of the drives were met by network timeouts--it seemed someone had forgotten to plug the network cable back in. :)

And this morning I saw that all the e-mails I received overnight reported being delivered on January 1st, 2008.  The clock needed to be set.  Also, OWA was still not running.  Some Google-ing of the error messages revealed that a few stopped services were probably the cause.  Starting them did get OWA running.  But outbound e-mails were not sending.  I figured this was due to the time issue still, and all the Exchange processes would need to be restarted, so I just rebooted the server.

20 minutes later the server was still not responding (I was at a remote location).  I quickly realized that it was probably halted at the BIOS screen because no keyboard was connected and the default of the new BIOS would be to halt on all errors.  Consider that lesson learned.

And now the happy ending.  Everything is running as it used to, no data was lost, e-mail is working, and I don't have to (get to?) spend my weekend re-doing a server!

Ever wondered what service is running inside of each instance of svchost.exe that you see in Task Manager?  You can tell by right-clicking on the instance and selecting "Go to Service(s)".  This will take you to the Services tab and select the appropriate service(s).  You might want to sort by PID so that they are all grouped together.

Yet another productive thing I tried to do tonight: get my old Mexico blog online.  As one might guess given that IIS7 is quite different from IIS6, Dasblog has some serious problems with Server 2008.  Those are resolvable, per Mr. Hanselman's instructions.

Unfortunately there are further problems.  This time with Registry changes.  According to Mr. Starr's analysis, Dasblog seems to think it's cool to pull time zone information from the Registry.  Seeing registry accesses in a web application does not make me happy:

 

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
   newtelligence.DasBlog.Util.WindowsTimeZone.LoadTimeZonesFromRegistry() +283
   newtelligence.DasBlog.Util.WindowsTimeZone..cctor() +76

[TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 'newtelligence.DasBlog.Util.WindowsTimeZone' threw an exception.]
   newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.SiteConfig.set_DisplayTimeZoneIndex(Int32 value) +23
   Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.XmlSerializationReaderSiteConfig.Read7_SiteConfig(Boolean isNullable, Boolean checkType) +4743
   Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.XmlSerializationReaderSiteConfig.Read8_SiteConfig() +76

This evening I thought I'd spend an hour and see if I couldn't make a lame Silverlight project just for the sake of doing it.  Plus it would be more productive than playing a game.

So I fired up Visual Studio 2008 and went to create a Silverlight project, but there was none to be found.  I went and downloaded the Silverlight 1.0 SDK, but still nothing.  It seems that version is for working with VS 2005.  I was trying to avoid installing any beta Silverlight stuff, but I ended up grabbing the Silverlight 2 Tools Alpha.  This did allow me to create a Silverlight project.

Seeing some XAML, I went towards the end, after all the declarations and such, and typed"Hello".  Just as a test.  Went to compile...error.  So I erased that, found <TextBox> using Intellisense, and put "Hello" between the tags.  Still no loving.  So I found the Text attribute, and put "Hello" as the value of the Text attribute.  Then I got different compile errors.  Specifically, 17 of them, mostly "The type or namespace name 'Windows' does not exist in the namespace 'System' (are you missing an assembly reference?)" type errors.

 I think I've seen this before, and seem to remember fixing it by adding a reference to something, but I couldn't find anything on Google this time.  So I'm still stuck there, and will be until I either find a solution or convince myself it's not just due to alpha version tools.  Maybe I'll just go play a game instead...