I spent most of the day today trying to get all the new hardware in the new workstations for the student sites working with my antiquated OEM style Windows 2000 setup. This is almost always something between visiting the dentist and trying to buy a new car: it either all works very quickly or you spend hours googling for tidbits of knowledge. But this year, I had a bit of an advantage: we ordered our Dells with Windows 2000 preinstalled, so I knew we’d have working drivers there.
But, I went racing off towards ‘cutting edge’ drivers from all the vendors, blindly erasing the Dell install on my test machine and stuffing on ours, assuming it would all just work. Ha, was I wrong, just like putting the case back on before you boot up your freshly built computer. Using the most recent NVidia Unified Drivers (56.something), GUI-mode setup locks up at the end of the Detecting Devices progress bar. Something isn’t right there. So, after a few more tweaks and adjustments of what I had downloaded, I gave up and went to dig through a Dell that hadn’t been formatted. I found a much older version of the drivers, from December 2003. Once I copied that set of drivers over to my $OEM$ directory structure, all was much better. Now I get to move full steam ahead into updating applications and other fun.
Category Archives: Work
aacraid+aic7xxx+megaraid == Hang?
Reply
Apparently either the aic7xxx or the megaraid driver conflicts with the aacraid driver starting somewhere around gentoo-sources 2.4.25-r2. Pulling those two out of the kernel lets the machine boot. Had my heart skip a beat or two when our backup MX wouldn’t boot on a newer kernel because of this.
Pictures from San Diego
Well, the pictures are up. And, for your info, don’t ever put unprocessed film in checked bags. That’s what gives the pictures that nice, grainy look. And, as promised, the view from my hotel room.
Nifty
One of the freebies (well, they do have my contact info) from TechEd was a full copy of VMWare Workstation. I’ve been messing around with it a bit, but my laptop doesn’t have anywhere near the RAM it needs to run it well. This screenshot should be enough to scare most people.
I’m back
Well, I’m back from TechEd 2004, actually got back around 7, just haven’t done much other than unpack the swag and dirty laundry. Hopefully the race will run tommorrow: rain rain go away.
TechEd 2004 summary
So, I’ve been to 7 TechEds in a row and this was, by far, the best one for technical content for a ‘jack of all trades, expert of none’ type person like myself. While some of the free stuff wasn’t quite as good as previous years, attendees are getting the post conference DVDs for free. It’s a worthy trade.
Thank you for a wonderful conference. Now if I could just get that free license for VMWare?
There are lots of things that I’ve taken away from here that I should be able to apply in the real world.
Commnet is closing up shortly, so unless I pay the fee for internet access in the hotel (which I’ve heard is not worth it, thought the geek percentage is probably much lower tonight) this will be the last entry from San Diego. Hopefully the pictures will come out well.
Now to go buy some trinkets/gifts for friends and family.
Best Practices for migrating Exchange 5.5 to 2003
This was a really good session, the slides are packed with tips and tricks the presenter has learned in real world consulting doing exactly this. I’m actually beginning to wonder if, maybe, we’ll be able to migrate someday. The attendence in the session was fairly low, but being in a gigantic room on the last afternoon of the conference might have amplified that effect. A couple of people walking by commented that maybe it was because ‘Exchange 5.5 is finally dying’.
I’m probably going to go chat with the presenter, there isn’t much in the way of interesting topics in the last session.
And, just so I don’t forget this: TechEd CommNet
File Server performance
While I don’t run anything that needs to worry about file server performance (~300 users on one decent size box is not hard work), I still went to this session because there wasn’t much else. The presenter had a real cute start:
“Fileserver performance tuning is all automatic in Windows 2003. Thank you.”
He then went on to explain that while that was not true, any changes you do choose to make had better be well tested before you do them in production. He also had a very entertaining display of acting like data going to/from the client by running back and forth across the front of the room, breaking his wireless mic in the process.
Lots of interesting things, one of which is that you DO NOT need an Active Directory to start using Volume Shadow Copy (but you do need Windows XP at the client if you want users to directly retrieve files). Something to think about I guess.
And, disappointingly so, the Redhat shirt has generated a grand total of 1 comment. From a guy at ASU who says they are all Linux except for Exchange. What is the world coming too?
Wow, so much swag/Random rants
This guy is really the King of Swag. I couldn’t stand the Exhibit Hall for anywhere near that amount of time. Something about talking to vendors that much just gives me the heeby-jeebys.
And, the obligatory rant about cellphones and pagers.
And a random photoblog from TechEd2004
Practical Hardening
Well, this session was definitly worthwhile, and gave some great previews of what’s coming in Windows Server 2003 SP1. The presenter also made a strong push towards eliminating the LANMAN hashes from your organization, if at all possible. This means having a passphrase of at least 15 characters or turning off storing LANMAN hashes, but both of these can break downlevel clients.
So, not useful for us right now, but it does give one heck of an incentive to forge ahead, if possible at all.