SERVER 2008 R1 SLOW RESPONSE

If you are having issues with a fresh install of 2008 Server (I was using R1 64 bit)...
I found that network issues can seriously hamper performance on this operating system.

This forum entry helped me enormously in disabling the network features that were
hampering performance, eventually found to be a DSL broadband access issue.

Apparently 2008 server R1 stability is very dependent upon network stability.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/126458-very-slow-everything-server-2008-ent-64-bit/

Win7 Domain Client accessing WinXP share

For some reason Microsoft makes it a royal piain in the ass for a Win7 domain client to attach to a
WinXP share...  I had a Win7 Enterprise client on a domain attaching to a shared WinXP Pro SP3 client on that same domain.. nothing worked.  I tried the following...

On XP shared client, disabled simple file sharing.
On Win7 attaching client, set Administrative Tools... Local Security Policy... Security Options...  Network Security LAN Manager Authentication Level to "use LM & LMNT as well as negotiate LMNTv2".  Also set Network Discovery to ON and allowed lower level encryption support.

When that all still didnt work... I did the following...

On the XP shared client, I created a new network share...
I then created a local account called shareaccess with local Administrator group priviledge and added that user to the shares access list, having with full permissions.
On the Win7 attaching client, I created a Generic Credential pointing to the IP address of the XP machine, using the shareaccess account and password I just created.

Worked like a charm.

DELL laptop force BIOS update

Recently I needed to troubleshoot a battery charging issue with an Inspiron 1700 series dual core laptop... as the battery was no longer recognized by the laptop.  Is suspect the message "battery not recognized" also means the one of the cells is bad in the battery, moreso than it being a suspect or knockoff battery. 

Anyway, one of the troubleshooting steps was to upgrade the laptop BIOS, but thats a catch22 as the
BIOS update requires a 10% charged battery and AC power concurrent during upgrade.

There is a verified process that I found... create a DOS bootable image on USB or other bootable media, making sure of a clean boot (NO drivers or shared memory managers running),  and once booted into it... run the BIOS update with the /forceit switch.  This bypassed the power check for me.

Network interface issues with Fedora

If you are having issues with Fedora (I was using v10) interfaces (such as eth0) staying up after reboot when assigned static IP, there are several things that must be checked for you to stabilize connectivity...

1. Check the GUI network interface configurator to be sure all settings are correct.  Note that hostname is the machine name, not the FQDN.

2. Check the files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default... this directory houses all your networking-related files relevant to the interfaces... check your hosts, resolve.conf, network, and ifcfg-XXX files to be sure they are correct.  Also, double-check the ifcfg-XXX files to be sure the netmask is correct, FC10 has a bug when using the GUI that inserts the gateway in the netmask field.

3. Run the commands "chkconfig NetworkManager off" and "chkconfig network on" to disable Network Manager and assure that default networking is activated in all runtime modes.  This was key to having interfaces come up as Network Manager is a buggy piece of garbage when using static IP.  

Make sure your ifcfg files look something like this...


ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no
GATEWAY=135.112.66.1
TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=00:1c:c0:98:62:21
BOOTPROTO=none
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
IPADDR=135.112.66.94
DNS1=135.222.4.10
DNS2=135.222.4.11
DOMAIN=domain.com
NM_CONTROLLED=no