Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

ev98.net and jakebillo.com have moved to a new, local hosting provider. Among the advantages of increased reliability and speed, we also now can directly call or email the people responsible for managing the server if there are any issues. Dave has also moved his personal site and you should all roundly harass him to write something.

Most large, hosted files will now be kept on files.ev98.net, which still uses Dreamhost since response time isn’t too critical, and disk space is more plentiful in that direction.

Please let me know if you see any oddities in the feed or in posts from this point forward.

I experience this issue every time I go to seek a pre-Windows Vista driver for an Asus motherboard: their download servers always peter out at about 100KB/s, regardless of which mirror I choose. I have half a mind to set up mirrors of the most popular drivers - even if a LAN or audio driver isn’t necessarily the latest version, it’ll still help people get up and running sooner rather than later.

nVidia and ATI have persistently fast download speeds, even for the size of their respective driver suites. It’s just the motherboard and chipset manufacturers that have this problem. I recall waiting for a 4KB/s download from an audio chip manufacturer because nobody else had the right drivers.

Build it in to the cost of your high-end products if needed. I’m sure the people buying “gamer edition” motherboards, who are the ones updating their BIOS weekly and wasting time asking technical support about how to overclock their RAM and set unsupported timings, should be shouldering the cost. I just like to have drivers available and at fast download speeds when I need them.

It’s been about 20 days since I was last able to crank out a post for the site - I’ve started a few entries but haven’t been able to finish anything of substance.

Work has primarily been what’s on my mind. I’ve finished - or at least stabilized - a large custom application for my job, which has new heights of reliability and performance compared to something like SharePoint Server and Project Server 2007.

For reference, and for any of you tasked with implementing a Windows 2003 Server / IIS / SharePoint / Project Server installation should read the available documents and get some good books first. Then, plan to install it at least five times before you get the hang of it. Here are just a few things that could, or did, go wrong during my test implementation:

• If a computer is not associated with a domain - just a workgroup - you’ll have to have some way of synchronizing usernames and passwords. This is acceptable if there are less than fifteen users, but if there’s a required password change every X number of days, then you’re looking at a serious problem.
• Implementing anonymous surveys, regardless of all the articles indicating that this is indeed possible, means that you will suffer ongoing pain. Drawbacks include absolutely lousy support for anonymous users in SharePoint in general; Firefox will call up a domain login prompt regardless of your IIS anonymous access settings, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Want to replicate the worst problem on your own setup? Create a survey with a page break in between the questions. Not only is it a UI nightmare (”Next” versus “Save”), but I can guarantee you a few sparring rounds with the Permissions Page of Death - even in Internet Explorer.
• Don’t migrate from a workgroup to a domain. Just start with a domain installation, even if it takes you through a maze of red tape to get a box connected. I was able to save a complete SharePoint content database, but Project Web Access is unforgiving if you decide to do such a migration. I couldn’t even log in once the process was complete.
• You will need a beefy box to get started with this sort of thing. Plan for at least a two server deployment, with a dedicated SQL Server database box and a dedicated web frontend. In my experience, performance on a standalone system was unacceptable with even two simultaneous users. MediaWiki does a much better job running on lower-specced hardware.

Don’t get me wrong - SharePoint, when installed and running properly, is a really neat collaboration tool that supports wikis, discussion boards, and all other manner of accountable content. When adding the Project Web Access component, though, strap yourself in and prepare for a wild adventure of babysitting installation processes.

In personal news, I’m still running the RC1 build of Windows Home Server, which is actually a remarkably long time for me to run any particular OS. I’ve heard rumblings of possible releases, and I would like to move to the RTM version, but so far none of my sources have been forthcoming. One thing I’d like the ability to do is dedicate a larger partition size to my System drive, which was locked at 20GB when I installed the operating system. After a few installations, my Program Files directory looks like it needs to be relocated.

For the record, don’t attempt to install Steam to your D:\shares storage pool. You’ll get miscellaneous errors and it’s just not worth the hassle.

Hardware news? I recently bumped up to a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB RAM for my main box, and added a Tuniq Tower 120 for cooling. The heatsink, besides being comparable with the “fins of death” passively cooling a Compaq Celeron 333 I once owned, is quite the nice addition and is currently allowing a 3GHz overclock with no issues. I still might need to tweak things a bit, but this guide at Anandtech was quite helpful getting the initial settings configured. As it stands, WinRAR absolutely flies when cranking out archives.

I think the biggest problem in my setup right now is the speed of disk access; Windows Home Server runs a drive rebalancing service in the background and often it seems like it’s kicking in at the least convenient moment. There’s an appreciable difference going from a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda drive to a 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor. I’d like to see what running two Raptors in a RAID-0 configuration adds, but the drives are expensive enough that it’s not an idle experiment worth performing.

Edit: fixed some poor grammar.

I’ve moaned and whined about the half-baked operating system Microsoft imbued upon the world earlier this year, and how its only real significant plus, for me, is the upgraded edition of Media Center. For the record, MCE has always seemed like beta software to me, and there’s no exception with Vista’s edition. About once a day on the media center box, Data Execution Prevention kicks in and restarts the Media Center shell. It takes about five seconds to do, but it’s distinctively pre-release candidate material.

I was about to do my usual round of reinstallations when I noticed that Windows Home Server had gone into RC1 stage (effectively, a usable beta from Microsoft.) It’s heavily based on Windows Server 2003, which I use as my primary OS at work. I read some details about WHS on Something Awful’s SH/SC forum, and decided to give it a go.

Drive spanning? Works.
Automatic backup of other PC’s? Works.
Seems to work with all my stuff? Yep.

I guess I’ll see how it performs under load in the next few days, then…