Disabling IPv6 – Confessions of a UI

A couple of days ago I decided to disable IPv6 on the network and set about to find the best way to do it. The reasons for/against disabling IPv6 are quite a talking point and outside of the scope of this article, however I will provide a brief summary:

• MS best practice is to leave it turned on
• MS test all of their products with it turned on, so if you want the most compatible environment its probably better to leave it on.
• Disabling IPv6 means you lose features that are dependant on it, such as Homegroups – but there is nothing “essential” that will break.
• Disabling it can lead to faster network performance (marginal) as the OS will try and use IPv6 as default and fall back to IPv4 after a short timeout. a good example of this is DNS and DHCP as it will check the IPv6 versions first, wait for the timeout and then go to the IPv4 versions that you almost certainly use.
• Regardless of it being enabled/disabled, if want to make security the focus then you should block all IP protocol 41 and UDP 3544 traffic at the perimiter firewall – just to be sure no IPv6 traffic gets routed into the network.
• It is the future, although clearly not as immediate as everyone makes out. To be honest I wouldn’t be suprised to see IPv6 making more of an impact in the cloud environments over the next couple of years, but I don’t expect any local networks or businesses to migrate to it any time soon. Too much cost, not enough benefit.

Anyway back to the issue, essentially there are two ways of disabling:

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MS Online Archiving or ‘a pain in the archive’.

 Providing for Exchange archiving for Online Exchange

A new customer referral out of the blue, direct from Microsoft looking for archiving for online exchange, only 5 licenses so the sales guys don’t flutter an eyebrow, but we are here to help, and this should be a rudimentary task, the service details are:

£3 PCM per seat (min 12 months) plus the optional cost for archiving data that already exists on a volume basis.
This archives the data for 10 years satisfying all current compliance regulations.
It can also capture IM and Bloomberg messaging.
It is described and available on the MS website, surely click and add and away you go? Not quite….

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Access Denied message when changing printer port

I have just changed the IP address of my network shared printer. When I have done this in the past it has been straight forward but it looks like Server 2008 R2 had different plans for me

I went into the printer properties:

selected the ports tab and found the port I wanted to change:

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Microsoft Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event

Well worth a look: http://www.appinfrastructure.com/

Lots of good informational videos, case studies, whitepapers, etc. No registration required.

Fastest laptop disk setup ever?

People that know me will know I have a bit of a love affair with shiny laptops, but also that I have high standards and if something isn’t right then I won’t accept it. I have sent back a total of NINE (just done a quick count and even surprised myself!) for full refunds over the past 3 years and in fact due to these refunds until a few days ago I still had the very same £2.5k I spent in late 2006! It might sound like the ideal situation, but its not all sipping champagne and using bleeding edge laptops for a few weeks at a time, it was actually a real nightmare not having a laptop you can rely on!

But anyway, I have just finished my latest round of research, searching the owners forums, etc and have parted with my hard earned money once again. I have a shiny new Sony Vaio Z-Series: http://www.sony.co.uk/product/vn-z-series and first impressions are excellent, which is unusual for me.

In the past I have always gone for power over portability, have never bought anything smaller than 17” (weighing around the 4kg mark) and they have always been “pimped” out with the highest specs possible. They have not really been laptops as such, more portable desktop PCs with a TFT strapped to the top!

This little ZSeries laptop is 13” and defies belief in many ways. First of all it is the lightest laptop I have ever seen weighing in at just 1.4kg – yet the specifications would have me believe I am still using one of my 17” monster laptops:

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iSCSI Target Performance: DataCore – expensive but worth it.

Carrying on from the post yesterday regarding the software iSCSI SAN I was building I thought I would post a few performance figures for the vendors I tried.

In the past I have used a Product called “SanMelody Lite” from Datacore. Their full SanMelody product has been proven in many large scale environments and the “Lite” version was essentially a starter pack costing $199, limited to 2 targets, 2TB of storage and none of the enterprise features such as thin provisioning, snapshots, etc – which was very reasonable for the cost.

Sadly when I tried to purchase a new licence last week I discovered they had discontinued it and in its place is a package costing $950, limited to 3TB and containing features that while useful are frankly unneeded for my deployment. I phoned Datacore to see why Lite was discontinued and was told they didn’t sell enough, make of that what you will I suppose…

Anyway, with that gone I decided to check the latest offerings from other Vendors. The two main ones I looked into were:

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Windows 7 Wi-Fi Connectivity issue

I recently rebuilt a new laptop to get rid of the manufactures image. Post fresh Windows 7 installation, I duly went on the Dell website and downloaded all the latest device drivers.

Whilst on a client site a few days later I had intermittent issues with Wi-Fi connectivity. The laptop initially discovered and connected to their public Wi-Fi, but a few hours later dropped off. The following day, Windows couldn’t even detect their Wi-Fi SSID. Puzzling….

As I didn’t have any LAN Manager or Wi-Fi catcher installed I couldn’t blame that. I moved my attention to Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS) assuming that, as it ties into the NIC, was throwing a spanner ion the works. With KIS disabled I was able to detect and connect to Wi-Fi. KIS re-enabled the connection maintained.

With the problem successfully bodged I went to a meeting thinking I’d at least found the culprit. On return to my desk, no Wi-Fi!

Tinkering continued for a further 2 or 3 minutes until, out of anger more than anything, I removed the device drivers and rebooted. Once logged on, Windows 7 discovered the WLAN card, installed its driver and connected to Wi-Fi in seconds.

That was a week ago and no issues since. The lesson learned; Windows 7 rocks. Just trust it to work it’s magic and only install drivers when it can’t do it for you.

Cloud Computing – the sixth phase of computing? Wait a minute…

Last week I attended an excellent seminar on Cloud Computing. Speakers included Bob Muglia (President of Server and Tools Business for Microsoft) and David Chappell. Both were excellent but it was Dave Chappell that really got me thinking, he was talking about how computing has changed in the past 50 years and how we are now entering the sixth phase of computing. He listed the phases as:

1. Mainframe
2. Server
3. Personal Computer
4. Laptop
5. Mobile Phone
6. Cloud Computing

He is an excellent speaker and I would highly recommend him, but I must confess to drifting for a minute or so at this point, thinking about virtualisation and why Dave did not include it in the list….

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Fake-Raid or not Fake-Raid, that is the question…

Last week I was building a cheap and cheerful file server using a software iSCSI target, a workstation and some off the shelf SATA disks. I have done it before with great results, but sadly my preferred iSCSI target vendor has recently stopped selling the low cost edition of their product and the new “entry level” is almost three times the cost – forcing me to re-examine the competition.

I will leave the comparison of other target vendors for another blog – this is more of a flashing red “Danger Will Robinson!” warning to others using workstation RAID configurations for such tasks so they don’t get caught out as well.

The workstation used was a Dell Precision 390, their top end enterprise level machine from a couple of years ago. It comes with an onboard Intel raid card capable of RAID0/RAID1 and RAID5 and I have used it with success on Windows platforms in the past. However while I was exploring other iSCSI vendors I tried to install a Linux based platform and discovered it was ignoring the RAID configuration and able to examine the individual disks.

There were five disks in total:

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