Gigabit networks with low quality cables

I have 2 computers attached to a Gigabit switch and both these computers have NICs that support 1 GBPS speed. However, I noticed that transferring files between them was slow so when I inspected the speeds I saw that one of them was operating at 100MBPS and the other at 1GBPS.

At first I went into the driver config setup and fiddled around with half and full duplex to see if that would make a difference. After a bit more research I found a comment that a network cable might be the culprit and that some network cables (e.g. Cat 5) do not support speeds over 100MBPS. I didn't believe that could possibly be the problem but it was easy to test so I switch the cables and the slow speed moved with the cable. So replacing the cable did the trick. Apparently Cat 5e and Cat 6 are what you need to get the higher speeds.

I'm now transferring data at 10 times the original speed.

Mouse without Borders

Do you have 2 or more PC's on your desk that each have their own keyboard and mouse? Do you want to control it all from one keyboard and mouse without using a KVM and have the mouse float from one monitor to the next and allow copy and paste between them? Then Mouse without Borders is for you:

http://aka.ms/MouseWithOutBorders

I've been using it for a few days now to link my two desktops together and it's working very well. The only hiccough is that I need to sign in to my primary computer first and then the secondary computer second (with its keyboard) if I want them to work together. After that it's all controlled from the primary keyboard and mouse. If I sign in in the other order then I have to use their own keyboards and mice to control them.

Windows Home Server - the good and bad

About ten months ago I bought and setup a Windows Home Server on my home network. Since that date I've used it twice for recoveries.

I follow the three rules of "backup reality", i.e. if these 3 criteria aren't met then I don't consider it a real backup:

1. If must be automated.
2. It must be redundant.
3. It must be duplicated off-site

This is a must for any business (even though many don't do this) but it's a pretty tall order for a home network. I find that Windows Home Server with Amazon S3 syncing gives me all this.

They say that an untested restore of a backup is no backup at all.

The first time I got to try out the restore feature of the server was when I upgraded the hard disk on a Server 2003 server from 250GB to 2TB. This was the perfect opportunity to try out the WHS restore feature. I let the nightly backup complete and in the morning I swapped out the drives, put in the restore disk and rebooted the machine. WHS recognized the machine and picked the correct backup and target and a few hours later the server was back up and running on a new hard disk. I was a bit surprised at how long the restore took, I remember it being several hours. I know that it also had to format the hard disk but still thought that it was longer than I would have expected.

The second time I got to try the restore was when I was unable to sign on to a Windows 7 Ultimate machine. Win7 just told me that my password was invalid. I could boot in safe mode and sign in but not in regular mode. I signed in using safe mode and moved the most recent data set to a USB drive and tried a number of troubleshooting recovery steps. Searches showed that this type of problem was being experienced by many Windows 7 users but no fix has come from Microsoft yet and none of the suggested workarounds had worked for me. So I attempted to do a restore from WHS. On booting with the recovery CD it wasn't able to correctly mach up the disk. That machine has 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) as the boot drive and a 2TB drive as the secondary drive. The restore automatically picked to restore the boot drive to the 2TB drive which was the wrong one. That was easily changed using the restore UI but after the restore had been running for a couple of hours and completed about 80% of the restore it failed with a networking error. That networking error was also found all over the net with plenty of people experiencing the same type of error almost at the end of their restore. None of their workarounds worked for me. So my next and final recovery step was to re-install the OS. I did this and it still had problems booting.

Now the one thing that I didn't tell you about this machine was that when I put it together I had inadvertently wired the SSD boot drive as drive 1 and the 2TB data drive as drive 0. After putting the case back together and starting the machine I saw the problem and when into the bios and changed the boot drive to be the non-default 1 (from the default 0). This I believe was the source of most of my problems. My theory is that deep in the bowels of Windows 7 and many other pieces of device software written by many companies the boot drive is frequently assume to be 0 and this is often hard coded. Because the boot drive is rarely anything else this type of bug is hardly ever seen.

I opened up the case and switched the wires around and made the boot drive 0 and the data drive 1 and that was the first time in days that the machine had operated in a normal manner and this time it finally booted with my re-installed OS. Since then it has been running way smoother and I attribute this to the non-standard drive wiring that I had done. Even though it's supposed to be able to work the other way I just don't think that it's worth the risk to do that again. Drive 0 will always be my boot drive in the future if I have any choice.

 

Vertical Wireless Router

While I was researching the buying of a new wireless router I read a customer review comment on a router that said something about a particular router/model that would overheat if left in the horizontal position which would cause connections to be dropped. This intrigued me because my router/modem/wireless access point has always lived in the horizontal position and is prone to rebooting when a wireless device connects to it. So my theory is that more of this device is in use when a wireless device is connected to it so it might get hotter.
Could this be the problem with the flaky wireless that I have?
Well after reading that I tried standing the router vertically and have been aggressivley using the wireless and so far (a couple of days) we have had no disconnects. The evidence points to the overheating in the horizontal position, so far. The jury is still out on this one though because I know as well as anyone else that this could be a fluke and we may return to flakiness in the near future. I'll update this post in a couple of months with more info.

Belkin N+ Wireless Router

The ASUS Netbook that I mentioned in this post arrived yesterday and I've started playing with it. So far it's good and a bit faster than I was expecting. The only two changes that I was going to make to it before buying it were to replace the 250GB drive with a 128GB SSD (Solid State Drive) and upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. However, it's a lot nippier than expected so will not worry about that yet. It arrived with Windows 7 Starter. I stuck in a thumb drive and immediately installed Windows 7 Ultimate. It was really tricky getting it to boot from the thumb drive because the hot key that you had to hit to get to the BIOS and then to pick the "boot from USB option" was difficult to time. You basically had to hit the escape key twice immediately after it was powered on.

It supports the new (yet to be finished) higher speed network standard of 802.11 N. My current wireless access point goes up to G and is flaky (update on why it might be flaky) often knocking the modem offline if a wireless device is connected to it. As such I've just been doing a whole ton of research to see what I can add to my network that will give me that best quality wireless and hopefully last several years. I hate shopping for stuff like this that I'm not expert in as I never know if I'm going to get a good deal or not. I'm also suspicious of the specs published by many of the comparison sites and even the manufacturer as they are sometimes inaccurate and I never know if the customer reviews are written by the company trying to boost their product or by a competitor trying to discredit their product.

Anyway I had to make a decision and finally went with the BELKIN N+ Wireless Router. I was comparing this to the BELKIN N Wireless Router and the only difference that I could find was that the N+ has gigabit ports while the N has 10/100MBS ports. Considering that I'm all about speed and constantly wanting to saturate my network I selected the former. I'll report back when it's installed.

ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005HA

I'm in the process of buying:

ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005HA-PU17-BU Royal Blue 10.1" WSVGA Netbook

from NewEgg. I will post more details here once I get the product.

I tried to customize the HP Mini 311 from the HP web site but it wouldn't let me order one with 3GB of RAM and Windows XP. Insisted that I order Windows 7 at an extra $50 if I wanted 3GB of RAM. According to the sales rep and the web site Windows XP does not support 3GB of RAM. Tell that to the millions of users with 3GB of RAM and Windows XP.

If you're thinking about buying one of these then wait a couple of days until after I've bought it. The price usually plummets as soon as I've bought something like this.

Update:

12/18/2009: First impressions of the ASUS Netbook.

Hard Disk speed comparison

These are five hard disks that I have in three machines that I frequently access.

Machine	Drive	MB/s	Model	Description
Pavilion	C	35/35	ST3250823AS	Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Pluto	C	225/225	PFZ128GS25SSDR	Patriot Torqx PFZ128GS25SSDR 2.5" Internal Solid state disk (SSD)
Pluto	E	60/120	ST32000542AS	Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Monster	C	150/200	WD3000GLFS-01F8U0	Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Monster	D	90/110	ST31500341AS	Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive

I was thinking of replacing the 250GB Seagate in the Pavilion to improve performance on that machine but wanted to get an idea of what sort of performance boost I thought I might be able to get so I copied some hard disk benchmarking software (ATTO) onto each of the machines and ran it.

The MB/s column shows the write/read speeds measured for each disk. This is a rough average for each disk.

My surprises were as follows:

• The solid state drive (SSD) was not much faster than the velociraptor.
• The seagate 1.5TB had a faster write time than the 2TB. (It doesn't feel faster, it feels slower.)
• The 2TB driver is less that twice as fast as the old 250GB Seagate. (Again, the 2TB drive feels much faster.)

I've decided to replace the Pavilion's 250GB Seagate with a 2TB Seagate. The bottleneck with that machine at the moment is the hard disk and I'm confident that I'm going to get at least a triple speed improvement even though the numbers don't give that.

Since I installed my Windows Home Server nothing has crashed on my network so I have been unable to try out recovering a hard disk from its backup. I plan on using this new disk as an opportunity to try this with the Pavilion machine. I will add the new hard disk and then set the bios to treat this disk as the boot drive. I think that I then have to generate a recovery CD from which this machine will boot and restore the OS etc. to the new disk.

I'll post a link to my results here when done.

Destroying a Hard Disk

A number of years ago I got myself a Maxtor 250GB external hard disk which at the time I used for all my backups. It cost me a fair penny then (2003) and I can now in 2009 buy 4TB of space for the same amount. Don't think that I'm complaining though, I think that's great progress.

Like all good hard drives it eventually died but it died a slow bit by bit corrupting death. It started to become inconsistent (that's when I should have taken an image of it) and then just started to corrupt and not be able to read data. Luckily I manage to recover all my important data and just lost a few albums of songs and movies that I could easily buy again.
The drive had only lasted about 2 years and Maxtor refused to entertain the idea of replacing and knowing how much I'd spent on it I didn't want to through it away it so it went into the box of computer parts that every geek has.
Years passed and during a cleanup I agree with myself that it had to go. I really couldn't remember what else was on it but I was pretty sure that a good hardware recovery technician could get data off it so I wanted to destroy it before disposing of it.
To this end I pulled out a drill and started drilling holes in it. The white box around the photo below shows a broken drill bit and the other end of the bit is lying on top of the circuit board.

With a larger and stronger drill bit I was able to get some deeper and more crippling holes into the disk before I decided that I had limited data recover-ability from it.

When you read the instructions on how to handle these devices they always tell you to discharge any static before handling and work in a static free environment etc. I ignore all of that when I was doing this.

Hard disk capacity is getting smaller

I'm just about to go to Fry's Electronics and get myself a Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive (that link is to the same drive but at NewEgg). I was curious to know how big this 2TB drive would be so I did a quick calculation and discovered that it will be 1.82 TB. As most people know, disk drive manufacturers calculate disk sizes to make them appear bigger than they actually are. They measure a Kb as 1,000 bytes instead of 1,024 bytes.

This caused me to do a little calculation to see what were were getting when sold drive space:

1MB (advertised) = 0.95 MB (actual)

1GB = 0.93 GB

1TB = 0.91 TB

1PB = 0.89 PB

Do you see the progression? they're getting smaller. Eventually that number will be 0.00 Xb.

A PB is a Petabyte which I have always considered to be 1,024^5. However, according to wikipedia I'm wrong and it's 1,000 terabytes and not 1,024 terabytes and a Pebibyte abbreviated as Pi is what I should be using. Also all my other references are apparently wrong and I should be using Mi, Gi, Ti, and Pi as abbreviations.

 

 

Network Saturation Finally

I have finally achieved my goal of network saturation on my home network.
As with most people, I have a small off-the-shelf router that does the standard 100 Mbs. Most of the computers in my house are hardwired because the wireless signal is slower and weaker in the far corners of the house and also because we bought a spec home that had all the rooms pre-wired with Ethernet.
In the past, when I've been copying files from one computer to another and I've looked at the transfer rate over the network I've been disappointed that only 40% to 60% of the available bandwidth was being utilized. The hardware supports 100 MBS so why isn't it transferring data at that rate dammit?
The reason is because of the slowest component in the chain which has always been the hard disk speed. Well not anymore. I've just bought myself a new computer and with this I got a Patriot Torqx PFZ128GS25SSDR 2.5" Internal Solid state disk (SSD) which promises 260 MBS read and 160 MBS write.
The computer that I was copying from had the data sitting on a Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive. I don't know what the read speed of that is (yet - I'll come back and update this later) but I'm guessing that it's over 100 MBS or I wouldn't have achieved network saturation.
Is it going to be worth getting a faster router? Not yet I think. The times I'll be copying between computers with fast hard drives is probably going to be rare. I'll wait until my internet connection exceeds 100 MBS. My prediction is that will happen in about 7 years time.

10GUI

The genius behind NinjaCamp recently sent me a link to 10/GUI. I try and follow the zero Inbox policy but for him I made an exception and allowed this email to languish in my Inbox so that I could take a relaxed 10 minutes out of the weekend to watch what he was so abuzz about. I have to agree with him, this is an amazing concept and I want one now.

From what I can work out this is as simple as a touch pad with up to 10 points that are recognized by it. Instead of the mouse you have a surface lying in front of the keyboard that will understand all your fingers including the motions now recognized by hand held devices such as the Android and iPhone.

The only thing missing, and I think this is just a matter of time, is for a keyboard to appear on there. If there were keys that could quickly inflate themselves on this device when you needed a keyboard and then disappear when you wanted the touch pad that would be the ultimate human interface.

HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server

I recently bought this HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server from Amazon:

Which image do you think looks like it was more professionally produced? The one that I took above with my digital camera or the Amazon image below?

 You can see that I have the bottom 3 drive bay lights lit up because I don't have a drive in the top slot.
The machine comes with a 750Gb drive and I stuck a 1.5Tb and 1.0Tb drive into it to expand the storage and add some redundancy. When I stuck the first drive in (1.5Tb Seagate) I powered the server down and then pulled out the drive bay tray, stuck in the drive and replaced it before power it up again. It worked perfectly. The reason that I didn't stick the new hard drive in while the machine was running was because (1) I had never done it before and (2) I remember reading that Scott Hanselman said that he wasn't brave enough to do it and I get the impression that he's braver than me when it comes to trying potentially unsafe changes to a server. However, when the second hard drive arrived I decided to throw caution to the wind and stuck it in while the machine was powered on and it worked like a dream.
If you're going to get this then I recommend that you go for the cheaper version like I did. The only difference between the cheap one and the more expensive one is that you're getting a second 750Gb hard drive but the price difference is $150 to $200. For $117 I picked up a 1.5TB Seagate drive so less money and double the space and considering how easy it is to stick in this is a no brainer.

Canon PIXMA iP1600 from Server 2008 x64

I finally got my Canon iP1600 printer that's connected to my Server 2003 x86 machine via USB to work from my Server 2008 x64 machine and wanted to note how I did this in case I need to do it again in the future.

From Canon's PIXMA iP1600 page select the Drivers & Downloads tab. From the OS drop down select Windows XP (x64). Install driver with filename ip1600x64190dej.exe

Now find the printer on the network and add as printer.

Before doing the above I'd selected the Windows Vista x64 OS and had installed the Add-on Module for Printer Driver (aomvstea23us.exe) but I don't believe that this was neccessary.

CPUID Hardware Monitor

Ultramaroon put me on to the CPUID Hardware Monitor. This is how my machine is currently running:

Buying a PCI bus card on Craigslist

 Here's a question that I can't find an answer to. I've found a PCI bus card (TV tuner) on Craigslist that I want to buy. The seller says that they've got rid of their PC and now have a Mac and so don't have a need for this card. How can I find out if this card is working without lugging a PC around to his house and installing it then and there before buying it?

Reinstall of Vista and Ubuntu Virtual Machines

Over the weekend I was trying to install a few things on my Vista and Ubuntu Linux virtual machines. Both are 64bit VM's runing under Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V. I ended up in the situation where the Vista machine lost its network connection and then wouldn't power down. It got to the point of almost powering down and then hung. I tried all sorts of things to sovle this problem but was unsuccessful. This state of the VM was also causing Server 2008 to blue screen on about every fifth reboot and when I looked at the log files they always related to the VM. I also tried to start and stop the Linux VM (which had been in a stopped state all this time) and the same thing happened inasmuch as I couldn't power it down.

In the end I uninstalled the Hyper-V role in Server 2008 and deleted the VM machines from the hard disk. Here are my notes about what I learned and the mistakes that I made.

1. Download and get the ISO ready before creating a virtual machine.
2. When setting up a VM that does not have Integrated Components select a legacy network adapter.
3. Uncheck the box that says "start VM when this wizard finished" (or somthing like that).
4. Once you've created the VM open the settings and check them all. Check that there's a single network adapter and that it's a legacy adapter.
5. As soon as you've run the install of the operating system and it's completed its initial updates take a snapshot of the VM.
6. Take regular snapshots of the VM after each operation that you perform.

 

Hyper-V with Vista x64 and Ubuntu Linux Desktop x64

Notes about setting up Vista x64 as a guest virtual machine on my Windows Server 2008 x64 machine.

The installation ran relatively smoothly. I pointed the Hyper-V wizard at the Vista x64 iso and the installation happened.

The only tricky part was getting the network connection up and running. On Hyper-V, under settings for Vista x64 I had to add a Legacy Network Adapter and set that to my point to my Virtual Network. I also left the MAC address at Dynamic and unchecked the "Enable virtual Lan identification" check box.

When setting up Ubuntu Linux Desktop x64 I had to use the same strategy with setting a Legacy adapter to get it to hook onto the network.

I read somewhere that it's the x64 part of these operating systems that cause you to have to use the legacy adapter. I'm right on the edge of my knowledge at the moment as I've never done any of this before so take what you read with a pinch of salt. I now believe that it's because the Integration Components (IC's) are not available for these OS's.

From power on to a working system

I've just built myself a new computer. It has 8GB of RAM, a fast processor and plenty of fast disk space and is running Server 2008 Enterprise. What I'm doing here is recording how long it takes from power on to windows loading to the sign-on screen. Because the system is new and fresh this time should currently be the shortest time that the computer will ever take to perform this task.

I intend to come back to this post and add more times in the months (years) to come and see how much the system slows time as I add bagage to it.

17 Sep 2008 - power to windows: 30 seconds; windows to logon: 40 seconds (Checked build of Server 2008 - later uninstalled)

On new installation of retail version of Server 2008:

18 Sep 2008 - power to windows: 30 seconds; windows to logon: 27 seconds

Time Estimates

When someone asks me how long it will take me to do something my brain immediately gives me the best case scenario. If I'm being realistic I double that because of all the unforseens that make it longer.

Last Saturday I went to Fry's Electronics with Rob and bought all the parts for a new computer. My estimate to put this computer together was about a week using Sunday and the evenings over the next week. I was going to take my time and make sure that this first time assembly was done correctly and that I didn't break anything.

Rob being the generous genuis that he is came over on Sunday morning and before lunchtime the machine was running and I was installing an OS. This is probably the only multi-hour project that I've estimated that came in so far ahead of the best case scenario. However, this wouldn't of been the case if I'd done it by myself.

Thanks for all your help Rob.

Network card Speed and Duplex

We've been having a problem that's been plaguing us for weeks and today we finally solved it. We have 4 Windows Server 2003 machines running a handful of web sites in a cluster being accessed through a non-sticky VIP (Virtual IP). Some of the web sites allow uploading of files to the server which saves them to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) file share.

The problem was that two of the machines uploaded files like dogs and the other two were lightening fast. The speed difference was about 100 to 1.

The first test we ran was to make sure that it was the file share (NAS) that was the problem. We did this by setting up a test that uploaded files to each of the servers' local disks. They all ran fast. The same test was then modified to upload to the NAS file share via the servers and that isolated and confirmed the problem to be the NAS part of the equation.

It turned out that the problem was that the Speed & Duplex setting on the dog slow machines was marked as Auto. Changing this to 100 Mb Full solved this problem.

To get to this setting, on Windows Server 2003 click on Start -> right click My Computer and select Properties to open up the System Properties dialog. Select the Hardware tab and click on Device Manager to open the Device Manager window. Select the active network card and right click and bring up the properties dialog for that network adapter. On the properties dialog box for that adapter select the Advanced tab and in the Property list select Speed & Duplex and from the Value drop down select 100 Mb Full.

I hope this post helps at least just 1 person save several hours.