Restless C#ding

Oh boy is this one fun... so you like having your VMWare images (virtual machines) on a separate hard drive, so they run faster. You have your PC's OS hard drive on different physical hardware than the VMWare image. Here comes the fun part -- you love the portability of being able to move the hard drive from machine to machine, running the virtual machine on both VMWare Workstation and VMWare player. You suspend your VM when you're done for a while, and resume it later on, sometimes on a different PC. You always safely remove your hardware using the windows OS tools, until one fateful day.

You unplug the harddrive thinking you're done, when you get a windows error message: "Delayed Write Failed". Uh oh.

You've just corrupted your saved state. This is because even though vmware said it was done writing the ram out to disk, it really was still writing... this way you could still work in the background!

OK, you think -- as far as the VM is concerned, the RAM is corrupt (or rather the data stored in virtual RAM is corrupt). How can we get this back?

The easy way is to close your vm software of choice (vmware player or workstation), rename your *.vmem file (a file containing the contents of the virtual ram), and start up the virtual machine again.

It will die. You'll get a message saying the vmem file cannot be found, and there's something corrupt with the saved state... do you want to preserve or discard?

You should select "Discard", and then start up the VM again. This time it'll boot up, just like windows crashed (do you want to enter safe mode? no.). You should still have all of your data (assuming nothing was acting on the data in RAM as you were suspending, in which case you can add data loss to your list of accomplishments for the day.

I had talked in the past on how fantastic Windows Home Server is (dreams about subpoenas and warrants notwithstanding.

Here's an annoyance I just had... well, perhaps that's a bit harsh. It would be an annoyance for the true "home" user that is the target audience. I'm restoring my media pc, by replacing a hard drive that's probably a month or two from death. So I made sure there was a good backup, and swapped out the hard drive (which was in a very annoying place on my media center pc).

I pop in the home computer restore disk (the one that allows it to boot from CD, find the home server -- must have a basic network stack -- , and restore from backup), tell it that it's fine to boot from the CD, when I get a message I almost don't think twice about. Two options (paraphrased from memory):

Restore a PC that has 512mb RAM or Less

Restore a PC that has more than 512mb RAM

Is it just me, or is the separation between RAM and HD space lost to the mainstream computer user? It should just default to >512mb -- how long has a gig or more been the standard?

Working on trying to repair a friend's PC, I've encountered a hard drive so toasted, the file system is unrecognizable. The funny thing is that there's actually no "click of death" coming from the disk, but even a FIXMBR failed to recognize the old school FAT file system ("unrecoverable errors", file names that are all smiley faces (!), and my personal favorite, the reporting of the size as "10,XXX kilobytes" -- ouch!).

So I'm installing a fresh OS on the machine and giving it back as a pristine machine.... sans all saved data, documents, personal information, and settings.

Makes me feel a bit defeated....

It seems the cardspace team has been at work simplifying the user experience for Cardspace prompts. See codename "Geneva". This looks pretty good; they've even included the new Geneva server for creating managed cards, which is something I'd like to explore at some point. I'm very curious what work if any has been done to integrate OpenID in conjunction with cardspace.

I'm not sure just how far Cardspace is penetrating, as I've yet to run across a site (aside from Windows Live, and even that's in beta, and has been since at least August of 2007!), which actually uses cardspace for authentication. I have found many articles from the 2006/2007 timeframe purporting firefox 3.0 support of cardspace, however the plugins online don't show them. Windows live login requires IE to even attempt a cardspace login.

In this month's TechNet magazine the last article, by Raymond Chen told of the reasons why reboots are required after installing updates. It's not so much that windows is unable to swap out dll's that are being used, it's more a product of not needing to support parallel versions of the same dll for apps or services that are already loaded.

I've been slowly attempting to decommission our work server closet without the luxury of downtime. Couple that with the fact that my job does not specialize in server administration, and there's a single user on a Mac, and my lack of formal expertise in network administration, and it becomes a much bigger project.

Today I was quite happy to decommission yet another physical server in favor of a virtual machine. That leaves me with 3 physical machines left to take down (1 is probably going to stick around for quite a while, unfortunately), and that means I've pared down the server closet enough to allow me to move the new hardware in.

The new hardware is quite cutting-edge, with the VM's running in Hyper-V. I've been quite happy these days with our development environment. We've got immediate building going on through TeamCity and NAnt, which allow true Continuous Integration. One of my employees has created the nightly deployment script, and I've just added in another more stable build that's also triggered through TeamCity.

While upgrading home machines, my wife and I bought an upgrade machine for her that was in fact 64 bit. I figured these days that the primary hurdle had been jumped and most hardware and software supported the 64 bit vista platform. What transpired was that it was mostly true, save for Palm.  After checking (way after buying the hardware), Palm (and their OS provider "Access") are quite adamant about the lack of support for the 64 bit OS.

Specifically, this is due to the USB charging / synchronization cable, but even attempting to use a Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle failed to allow syncing the Palm with Vista 64. The return on investment is not enough to justify my continuous battle with the synching process; the current plan is for her to use our laptop to do so.

What's amazing to me however is not only that it didn't synch, but that it didn't even cross my mind to check, even after seeing the "64 bit OS installed" sticker on the machine on the Best Buy display. Clearly the platform / architecture even still has room to grow with respect to driver support!

Recently, I swapped out the last machine I had on XP, a 5 year old laptop, to Vista. I even got my wife a Vista box, and things went mostly smoothly. Until she came to me one day and said things weren't working.

I dug around for a while, and tried to get into the management console as admin, sure enough a UAC dialog beep sounded, but there was no dialog asking for elevation of privileges. That's when things went crazy -- there was no dialog, but the system was still waiting for input. The screen didn't dim with the protected desktop, and the app that was asking for permission was hung. Alt-Tab worked except for the hung tab -- but no windows/apps could be closed/exited.

I pulled out the standard tricks to combat the situation, all failures, and finally went to safe mode. Even that failed to pull up the dialog. It wasn't drivers, it wasn't registry. Then came the last straw. I restored a backup of the machine from before the problem -- it didn't work!

Gave up for a night, and the next day she mentioned: "Oh, and the date's wrong". So I figure, ok.. i'll just change the date. But you can't because it requires UAC! I was fed up and booted into BIOS to fix the date, laughing -- at least I can fix this, I thought.

The punchline?

Changing the date fixed UAC. The machine was set to a year in the future. The worst part of this is that the PC should not have known it was a year in the future... is Windows phoning home on UAC requests? What's really going on with the time/date settings?