Until a few months ago I had 2 internet connections at home - one for work purposes and one for everyone else in the house. With rising speeds on one of the lines, I decided to merge the 2 connections, but retain the separation of networks through VLAN'ing. Whilst a Linux/BSD box is an option, I wanted something that I couldn't fiddle with too much. I'm ultimately providing a service to my housemates, so it should Just Work(TM).

All in all for the last 5 years I've worked exclusively from home, and prior to that it was on and off depending on circumstances, and so on. During this time I've often been asked the same sort of questions over and over again;"Is it lonely?“"How hard is it to motivate yourself? I don't think I could get stuff done!“The first question I can understand. Sometimes you do need to see someone else, physically there in front of you, but to be frank, I've never been a great social animal, which probably helps massively.

Mark Baggett over at PauldotComput together an interesting article on running a command on every machine in your domain from the command line. I genuinely hadn't considered tying dsquery and wmi together in this way. The best thing is that with a little tweaking you can easily run the same command against a subset of your domain. For instance, say you had X terminal/web/sql servers that all lived in the same OU - just dsquery against that and you're laughing.

I've been playing with Micromiserfor a few days, and wanted to graph what it claims to be saving on one of the servers. Luckily this is pretty easy with Munin (which is already running on the box), since Micromiser logs into syslog occasionally. Below is the plugin I hacked together that looks at syslog and uses sed to extract the percentage saving. It's not pretty, but it does work. Perhaps this'll save you a few minutes.

Over Christmas we had to do a bunch of VMWare to Hyper-V conversions at work. Once you've sufficiently prepared the VM, there are a whole bunch of ways you can do this, ranging from raw converting the vmdk, to mounting the vmdk and a blank vhd and then copying the contents between. We chose it as an opportunity to play with Disk2VHDfrom SysInternals. If you're using SCSI disks in your VMWare VM then you will first need to ensure that you add the IDE controller driver, to hopefully avoid a BSOD when you boot under Hyper-V for the first time.

If you've noticedthat the next Ubuntu Server version (10.4, Lucid Lynx) has the Hyper-V kernel modules packaged, alebit in drivers/staging, I'd suggest not dist-upgrade'ing even your development servers for the moment. The reason is simply that you need to devote time to ensuring that the kernel modules will continue to work with each kernel version - right now you can't seem to rely on the modules actually loading successfully from the corresponding /lib/modules/2.

If you've got an application that sends messages via your Exchange 2010 server, using SMTP, you might've noticed that things have slowed down a bit. The reason for this is because the Exchange 2010 receive connectors have a “MaxAcknowledgementDelay” setting, that will inform you if the delivery is successful, within a certain time frame. If the timelimit is hit, it then acks the submission. To disable this you can set your receive connector not to use this feature:

If you're having fun with a pre-2007 version of Outlook, or any non-Microsoft product trying to talk MAPI to an Exchange 2010 server you might be interested in knowing that the defaults have now changed in the new version, and it expects traffic to be encrypted. This caught us out today as we'd only tested Outlook 2007 before rolling one of our boxes over to 2010 over the weekend. Two options;

I'm sorry that I couldn't do this to your face, but I'm writing to tell you that it's over. You might not have seen it, but I've tried to be loyal, but the temptations were just too much in the face of your problems, which I'll admit seem quite small and petty to begin with - but they build and they build. I loved using your beta interface, but it's been in beta for quite sometime, and getting less reliable; the SSL issues that happened during June/July/August and the endless “Server Communication Error"s.