July 6th, 2012 
etdot 
While updating a clients website recently I discovered that they had created a Guestbook where users could leave comments on the site. This is pretty simple using WordPress, all you need to do is create a page and enable comments on that page. However this client had create a post instead of a page. Read more »
Hyper-V Dropping Outgoing Packets
For weeks I have been fighting with a Windows Server 2008 R2 server running Hyper-V. I noticed that on a couple of virtual machines they would suffer from significant packet loss. I first noticed it with the Windows 8 Release Preview VM and immediately blamed it on Windows 8 not being supported yet, not being released yet, etc. But, then I noticed the same thing on a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM. After some trial and error I was able to determine that the serious packet loss was in outgoing packets, say for example, copying a large (1 GB) file from the VM to network share (hosted on another physical computer). The really troublesome thing was that the packet loss was not just in the VM, but the host server would drop packets too! This was significant packet loss – so significant that I could not maintain a Remote Desktop RDP session to the Hyper-V server. Running a ping would show that packet loss would go on for minutes before a response was returned. And when it was returned, I was lucky to get more than one before long periods of loss again. I scoured the internet and found lots of people with the same or similar problem – and many with solutions – none of which worked for me.
I tried updating the host network drivers, making sure to install/update the manufacturers drives (as opposed to Windows drivers). I tried updating the host BIOS. I tried installing various hotfixes (including 2263829 & 974909). I tried this list of recommended hotfixes for Hyper-V. I tried deleting and recreating the network connections, both on guest AND on host. I tried using a different hardware switch. I tried different hardware NIC. I tried moving the VMs to a different physical disk. Nothing worked. Until…
CHKDSK: Problems or not?
I ran into this interesting conundrum today running CHKDSK on Windows 7 x64.
C:\>CHKDSK X: ...snip... Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these. C:\>CHKDSK X: /F ...snip... Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
So… there ARE or ARE NOT problems with the file system?
Install Adobe Reader in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
I attempted to open a reference manual in PDF format today on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precie Pangolin) and was sorely disappointed to find that the default application, Evince Document Viewer, had no search or find feature. Unforgivable. Here is how you can install Adobe Reader and make it your default PDF viewer – just enter the following commands into your command line shell:
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Make Notepad++ editor for AstroGrep
For anyone still using AstroGrep, a great GUI GREP Utility for Windows, here is how you set Notepad++ as the default editor. If you are still using AstroGrep you may be too lazy to look up the command line switches for Notepad++, so here you are: copy and paste: Read more »