Category: Technology

Microsoft to Announce Longhorn Name: Windows Vista

Vista: Noun
1 – A view, especially a splendid view from a high position.
2 – A possible future action or event that you can imagine.

My interpretation: Looking down from the top of their totem pole Microsoft wants you to imagine that one day they’ll introduce a secure operating system that’s actually innovative.

ABC News: U.S. Won’t Cede Control of Net Computers

This is a good thing. ICANN in the hands of the U.N. International Telecommunication Union? We’ve all seen how well the UN provides security. They’d be cracked in under a week.

Using Ipchains

I’m really digging getting back into using ipchains. I really like the off server logging I was able to set up a while ago. I like working on my box much more than the PIX 515 at work.

I’m going to write more about this after I determine how to discuss it without revealing my configuration specifics.

Microsoft suggests not using single label DNS names. In my recent experience, this should be more than just a suggestion.

I had to open a call to Microsoft this week because some brilliant systems integrator from Alphanumeric decided to leave off the domain suffix from the name of first Windows 2000 domain controller at Dillon Supply. It was dscdc1 instead of the required dscdc1.dillonsupply.com. This server is also one of two DNS servers for the domain. What this means is that the domain controller was unable to update it’s own entry in DNS because Microsoft Active Directory integrated DNS does not allow for single label DNS names by default.

So my options were thin. I tried the registry hack in this Microsoft Knowledgebase Article but it didn’t do much to help (in fact I couldn’t see that it did anything). When I ran netdiag -v I still received a fatal error that the domain controller was not registered with any DNS servers. Some websites suggest demoting the domain controller (dcpromo), changing the machine name to include the domain suffix, and then promoting it again. This is a risky venture because you gotta pray the replication takes place without error to another DC and since your DNS is hosed you will need the luck of the gods. Here’s an alternative: don’t do it.

My call to Microsoft payed off in the form of a .vbs file that will append the domain suffix to any machine name and correctly register the machine in DNS. I have only used it on a Windows 2000 server running SP4. I don’t know how it will work on any other OS version. If you download it run it at your own risk – I’m not responsible for what you do to your systems. All I can say is that it worked flawlessly for me. After running it netdiag showed successful DNS entries for the DC on all AD DNS servers.

BT Unveils Mobile Phone-Landline Handset

I’ve been talking about this for over three years. Someone has finally done it. Of course it wasn’t in the US since we’ve decided not to be the front runners in telecom innovation. Don’t worry BT; I don’t see a mobile phone that can turn into an IP based land line as much of a gamble. It’s definately the future. For all countries except ours that is. Our Ma Bell’s will stiffle the technology for as long as they can.

You hear that Bell South? Eventualy you won’t be needed anymore. May you perish in bankruptcy court.

IBM! For five weeks I’ve been drilling through performance specifications for eight way x86 servers to replace Dillon Supply’s HP DL580 four way Win2K SQL server. Through this I’ve learned the TPC-C rankings for almost every four processor AMD Opteron dual core (aka – Opteron 875) system available as well as every eight processor single core Pentium Xeon MP solution in the marketspace.

As of yesterday it looked like we would be going with the SUN V40z four chip Opteron 875. SUN has not submitted this server to the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) for published performance results and therefore I had to rely on the results benchmarked by the HP DL585 4 processor Opteron 875 which also had a strong quote in the running. The DL585 server delivered unmatched performance with a record-breaking TPC-C benchmark of 187,296 tpmC configured with 64Gb of RAM and 8Mb of L3 cache. Unfortunately the SUN V40z cannot address more than 32Gb of RAM. But like I said, as of this morning the SUN was still in the lead primarily because of a non-hardware factor: Veritas Storage Foundation 4.2.

Within the last two weeks I became convinced that Storage Foundation (formerly Veritas Volume Manager) was a good fit for some of the off-site LUN duplication we’re trying to achieve and the SUN vendor had superior knowledge and experience with this product. All things being equal, including pricing, we were ready to make the call for the V40z.

But in the 11th hour the Mayor of Creedmoor NC, Darryl Moss, who is also our IBM sales rep for Champion Solutions Group, through us a curve ball that only the big blue powerhouse could. They discounted their SAN solution including an IBM xSeries 460 eight processor 64-bit Xeon MP by an astonishing $50k+, meaning their offer was not only the lowest in price but also the fastest in performance. This server holds the world record for 8-way systems clocking 250,975 tpmC. That’s the same system we’re buying (minus 96Gb of RAM). Previously we hadn’t given this server much consideration because of cost but with a discount of that magnitude our minds were literally changed in a matter of minutes. Thank you Mayor Moss.

Right now I’m doing research in uncharted territory at work. We have an SQL application performance problem we’ve decided to attack with hardware following months of performance analysis. I have reached a point where benchmarks are unavailable. This is because the server options we have on the table vary in platform architecture, therfore few performance comparisons. In the ring are:

The IBM xSeries 445 8-processor, Intel, single core server with dual fiber channel host bus adapters for redundant connections to SAN controllers and…
Servers from Sun and HP (v40z and HP585 respectively) that are 4-processor dual core solutions with dual FC HBA’s

So the question is: Can the new AMD Opteron dual core systems out perform the 8-processor dual bus system from IBM?

I’ve heard “yes” and “no” but no one has put these 8-way solutions up against each other in any performance comparisons that I can find. I’d really like to see it done by TPC.org since my solution needs to be transaction based. Therefore I’m tempted to go with the dual core solution because that is the trend of the industry with Intel currently having 15 dual core projects in the works. I will be spending the rest of this week and the first part of next week on the phone with IBM, HP and Sun engineers looking into specifics surrounding the architectures.

At present I have deduced that the AMD dual core Opterons do out perform the Intel Smithfield based dual core solution. This is because the Intel platform cannot distinguish ownership of cache data between the two cores. The AMD Opteron can actually pass memory data between the cores. But because the AMD chipset can only recognize DDR memory (not DDR2) AMD is having to go back to the drawing board for the base architecture in order to stay ahead of Intel in the future. For now, AMD has once again smoked Intel just like they did with the Athlon 64 vs. the Itanium.

During my research I contacted a relatively unknown server manufacturer who will be bringing an 8-processor AMD 875 solution to market within the next few weeks. Verari uses iWill motherboards and is trying to stablize the cooling issues now before the product launch. They don’t have the brand name but they may soon offer the best of both worlds with 16 total cores in 8 sockets.

This week I learned all about installing Microsoft SQL CE Tools version 2.0 the hard way. I hope this entry makes it easier for someone browsing the Internet for information on this topic since there is very little out there. SQL CE Tools allow for web based communication from a PDA to a Microsoft SQL 2000 database.

My main problem was deducing the prerequisites for the Operating system and IIS.

First, the SQL CE Tools must be loaded on a server (or workstation) running Internet Information Server (IIS). Then you’ll need to know what version of the Tools to install. Here are the rules:

I ran into an unusual, undocumented problem during my installation attempts. The installation would get to a point of copying files and then the dialog box would display “rolling back action” and provide a message stating “Installation Incomplete”.

After a lot of research I determined that because of the MDAC level upgrade that is performed during the install and some of the .net tools that are packaged you cannot load the SQL CE Tools or CE Developer Tools over an RDP Terminal Server connection. You must be in “user /install mode” while logged on to the server locally. This has to do with the TMP and TEMP environment variables when connected with a remote or roaming profile.

I hope this helps anyone looking for information on installing SQL CE Tools. I’m currently using the SQL CE Developer Tools to implement a pretty cool bar code scanning solution using a HP iPAQ hx4700 and a Socket 464 SD card into Prophet 21 Commerce Center. Soon I’ll know more than I ever wanted to about connecting PDA’s to SQL via a C++ application.