I recently got a good eBay deal on a DRAC 5 remote access card for my Dell PowerEdge 2900 server.

Well it seemed like a good deal until I installed the card and got this message on bootup:

Remote Access Controller detected
!!*** Error: Remote Access Controller initialization failure***
RAC virtual USB devices may not be available...

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I hate it when this happens.

Under Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 was giving consistent messages when JavaScript tried to open a new window:  "No such interface supported."

Google has many suggestions, mostly about using regsvr32 to re-register actxprxy.dll (which works) and shdocvw.dll (which fails with a message like "The module 'shdocvw.dll' was loaded but the entry-point DllRegisterServer was not found. Make sure that 'shdocvw.dll' is a valid DLL or OCX file and then try again.").

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Recently I've been testing Microsoft's free bare-metal hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Especially now that Hyper-V supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, could Hyper-V be the answer to virtualizing PiaF on a Microsoft platform?

Let's try it and see what happens.

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I recently installed a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch, my first foray into managed switches and gigabit networking. I blogged earlier about how to set it up and how to use it for bandwidth monitoring.

The client where I installed the switch reported that an XP workstation (a Dell OptiPlex 755 with a gigabit NIC) was extremely slow to log on immediately after a reboot. Like five minutes or more slow. Once the logon did finally complete, I saw that a logon script had failed to map network drives, although I could map them manually. The issue did not seem to happen on older workstations with 10/100 NICs.

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Often home users connecting to a remote computer would like to print to their local printer. It is possible, at least sometimes, depending on the printer. The basic idea is that the host computer needs a driver for the guest computer's printer, then it needs to be able to map that driver to the printer when the terminal services session is established.

When the remote user's printer is an HP-Postscript enabled LaserJet HP2605dn, I have had some success installing the HP Universal Print Driver - Postscript and using the printer mapping described in MSKB 239088 and near the end of this article:  Windows Terminal Services Printing. And yes, this applies not only to servers running Terminal Services (aka Remote Desktop Services), but also to individual desktop computers that allow remote users to connect via Remote Desktop.

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Recently installed a new Dell Optiplex 960 running 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise. The system board includes an Intel 82567LM-3 network adapter. With the latest Intel driver from Dell, version 11.5.4.0, the card would frequently lose connectivity for two seconds (e1kexpress events in System event log). When it reconnected, it would often be at 10Mbps instead of 1Gpbs. Also at startup, the card apparently did not connect fast enough, which led to various errors (DNS lookup 1014, NETLOGON 5719, Time-Service 131, group policy failures).

There is some confusion as to whether System Idle Power Saver (SIPS) causes this issue, and whether SIPS is available on the 82567LM-3. It is not exposed in the driver settings.

Upgrading to the latest driver from the Intel site, version 11.5.10.0, did not help.

Rolling back to the base Microsoft driver included with Windows 7, version 10.5.1.0, does help. No errors and consistent 1Gpbs speed in 39 hours since rolling back.

Intel threads discussing this issue:

http://communities.intel.com/thread/9913

http://communities.intel.com/thread/7057

The Remote Desktop experience in Window 7 computer has changed significantly since the Windows XP days. Here's a brief overview.

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The previous post described basic setup of the Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch. One of the reasons I bought this switch is its ability to "mirror" a port. This allows a properly-configured computer to sniff all the packets going through the mirrored port. If you mirror the port that goes to your external router, you should be able to monitor all the traffic between your router and all internal computers.

Setting up the switch and the free PRTG Network Monitor was pretty easy. Setting up the computer itself (an old Windows XP Home box) took some fiddling. Here in brief are the steps.

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I recently purchased a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch for use at a client site. The switch has some great features for the price, but the setup instructions are very wrong. I finally gave up and called Dell Support. As soon as the technician saw the 28xx model number, he knew why I was calling; he said about 75% of the calls on these models are due to the incorrect documentation.

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I had this issue with Vista and now it has returned with Windows 7. I got some good advice in the Microsoft Partner Newsgroup and wanted to pass it along.

After adding a Windows 7 machine to a Windows Server 2003 R2 domain, I started getting lots of 675 errors in the server's Security Event Log.

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