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  1. Mercutio

    Setting up the Heartbeat NIC in Hyper-V server 2012 R2

    Here's the relevant command reference. Try: net int ip set dns name="lan2" source=none
  2. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    Video Downloadhelper is a ridiculously handy Firefox add-on in the first place, but I just noticed something that makes it even better: In Firefox, if you right click on selected text that contains Youtube links, you'll see that you have the option to "Download video from selected Youtube...
  3. Mercutio

    Setting up the Heartbeat NIC in Hyper-V server 2012 R2

    My thinking is to just disable DNS on that interface entirely, something that should be pretty straightforward: net int ip set dns name="lan2" none Will work I think. netsh doesn't directly have a context for dealing with NetBIOS-anything so I think you have to do that with wmic. Again, the...
  4. Mercutio

    Setting up the Heartbeat NIC in Hyper-V server 2012 R2

    netsh is one of those commands I kind of hate, because it's so overloaded with functions. Does that interface need to handle DNS at all or is it just a static route to some other single NIC or address range?
  5. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    The more I use this thing, the more I think that I could live with it if three problems were fixed: 1. Either a different web browser or some ability to customize modern IE. Modern IE doesn't leave tab controls or even navigation on screen. That's pretty awful for someone with my browsing...
  6. Mercutio

    Cold

    I have strictly indoor cats. They go out on the balcony in warmer months, but the biggest difference is that my girl cat is willing to tolerate sleeping next to the boy. She's normally very territorial about my bed, which is the one place she thinks is hers. And hey it was only -6 today, so we...
  7. Mercutio

    What were you worst computer related mistakes made?

    Look at it this way: You have an Athlon 2600 that's still technically useful some 10 years after you bought it. :)
  8. Mercutio

    Cold

    -16F on my balcony this morning.
  9. Mercutio

    LogMein free is terminating access

    It more or less only works when every firewall along the the transit path has been configured to allow it. You can very rarely assume that to be true. I stick Crossloop on all my client's PCs for remote support or use Join.me (which is also a LogMeIn service) for people I don't think figure out...
  10. Mercutio

    3D Scanners

    The MakerBot people announced some kind of huge deal with Dell today. Also: .
  11. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Those are definitely some bad circumstances. Let us know if there's something we can do.
  12. Mercutio

    Hypothetical New PC

    i3-3220 4GB Crucial DDR3 120GB Kingston SSD Foxconn H61 ITX motherboard ITX chassis + PSU $350 That's more or less the exact PC I'm building for office systems right now. It's a modest machine and I'd prefer a nicer motherboard (Gigabyte or Asus H77, maybe, but those are twice as expensive)...
  13. Mercutio

    New Computer

    That's true, but part of the advantage of the ridiculous i7 rig is being able to do other things at the same time as video encoding. The CPU utilization for my main home system stays pegged at somewhere north of 90% for days on end from batch video encodes, but when I'm interacting with it (even...
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    If it makes you feel any better, I just had to drive two hours to a customer site (in Siberian cold-ass weather) because some other vendor was screwing with LAN cabling in the server rack and plugged its ethernet cable into its IPMI management port. At least Google fixes their crap when they...
  15. Mercutio

    Something Random

    One of the multinational insurance companies a couple customers of mine deal with still requires IE6 for at least one of their internal portal sites. Everyone has an XP Mode VM that's a shortcut to THAT SITE and I even went through the trouble of changing everyone's IE favorites to launch the...
  16. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    The RealVNC Viewer is free on the Play Store right now. It's usually $10. There are freebie VNC viewers out there but RealVNC is probably the best known commercial implementation.
  17. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    For whom? I'm still really undecided about the Surface. It's frustrating for me because I know what I could do on an Android device and all of those features that I miss, like the swipe-able keyboard and consistent data sharing options. Having real Microsoft Office plus Remote Desktop plus a...
  18. Mercutio

    I'm retiring

    Congratulations, man! Get out now and enjoy the things life has to offer. Like model trains and strippers. Looking at how my folks have done, one thing I have got to say is make sure you have plenty of reasons to be out of the house. I can see a huge difference with my uncles (and also with...
  19. Mercutio

    New Computer

    Support for multi-socket configurations, ECC and more RAM.
  20. Mercutio

    New Computer

    Clock speed is a dead horse right now. Everything you get north of 4.2GHz or so is a gift and even if you buy the most ridiculous LGA2011 CPU and strap a Frigidaire to the heat sink, you're still not even going to make it to 5GHz on more than six cores. Evem with whatever-blah-something new...
  21. Mercutio

    New Computer

    $20k would get you in a 40-core, 80 thread Xeon E7 with 64GB RAM... Doesn't Photoshop offload a bunch of stuff to the GPU now anyway? Does moving to something with ever more CUDA cores represent any sort of real-world improvement?
  22. Mercutio

    Weird send email under Exchange issue on iPhone iOS 6

    Is the impacted account configured for Exchange ActiveSync or as IMAP/SMTP?
  23. Mercutio

    Harddrrive reliability

    My hatred of WD is based on a lifetime of collected data. The WD20EADs drives I have are supposed to have an order of magnitude higher MTBF rating than WD Blue drives but I think that only 17 of the 24 I had still work. I did use a lot of the 1.5TB -AS drives in one of my file servers for...
  24. Mercutio

    New Computer

    The short answer is that there really hasn't been that much progress on the performance front. I don't wanna say that Intel doesn't care about desktop CPUs any more, but Intel doesn't care about desktop CPUs any more. They're rapidly becoming a niche market.
  25. Mercutio

    What were you worst computer related mistakes made?

    Going with the pure computer-related mistakes: 1. Using "wall" (write all) as a demonstration command for something ordinary users wouldn't be able to do on campus UNIX systems. What I didn't know was that my student account had been granted some extra powers because of my duties as a lab...
  26. Mercutio

    Quad E5-4610 or quad Opteron 6376?

    Do you really want to be testing on hardware dissimilar to what you're using in production? As I understand it, Opterons are generally in the same place as mainstream desktop CPUs. The performance per core doesn't hold up, so AMD is selling on the basis of providing a lot of low-cost cores and...
  27. Mercutio

    LogMein free is terminating access

    I'm not sure if this covers Hamachi or not. The language of the press release suggests that it does, but Hamachi in and of itself has always been outside the main LogMeIn software suite. I use Ignition about once every two weeks to get to a machine at home via my tablet or phone, but I could...
  28. Mercutio

    What were you worst computer related mistakes made?

    Well, I've definitely dropped a case of hard drives but I think my biggest and most costly mistake was bothering to get an academic degree to work in IT. Not just because I had to pay off student loans but because I skipped out on the .com boom and the opportunity to move to San Fransisco in the...
  29. Mercutio

    problem Desktop pc freezes after I put it to Sleep a 2nd time

    Lunar, if your computers are noticeably louder or hotter than other normal office equipment, you need better computers. People have slept in the same room with my big file server and never noticed it.
  30. Mercutio

    problem Desktop pc freezes after I put it to Sleep a 2nd time

    That's one of those things that makes some people proper Engineers with the rest of us are just IT guys.
  31. Mercutio

    problem Desktop pc freezes after I put it to Sleep a 2nd time

    I'd rather eat the cost for leaving the drives running all the time than have them do anything but run 24x7. Servers I manage have had very few disk problems over their lifetime, something I'm thankful for, and I attribute that in part to not bothering to spin down drives.
  32. Mercutio

    Windows 8.1

    Apparently HP is going to resume shipments of consumer PCs with Windows 7. They are touting this as a feature.
  33. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    I didn't really think to mess with games, but the first two non-trivial titles I picked from the Windows Store, Avengers Initiative and Disney The Little Mermaid Undersea Treasures, both hang on startup on my Surface 2 even though both of them indicate they support ARM processors and that...
  34. Mercutio

    "Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad and malware-filled updates"

    Firefox asks permission to install Addon updates when it starts. They're not mandatory.
  35. Mercutio

    "Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad and malware-filled updates"

    Chrome REALLY doesn't have the rich Add-ons ecosystem that Firefox does, but the funny part about this to me is that it's going to impact the tiny percentage of Chrome users who are aware that they can install add-ons at all. It's not just that it's a new attack vector, it's an attack vector...
  36. Mercutio

    Cats of Storageforum

    Unlike human infants, absolutely all cat-babies are adorable.
  37. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    15 years of UI consistency!
  38. Mercutio

    Windows 7 on i865?

    As much as I dislike nVidia-based cards, you're most assuredly better off with that Geforce 2. You can find legacy drivers to work with it at Omega Drivers.
  39. Mercutio

    Windows 7 on i865?

    In order to get Intel's motherboard drivers installed properly, you need one or two things: The Chipset driver and/or the Intel Management Engine driver (though I don't think that applies on the i865 as it's too old). If your video driver isn't installing properly, it's because one of those...
  40. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Lunar wouldn't be the first person to use that line!
  41. Mercutio

    OpenBSD needs 20K$ to pay electricity bill.

    OpenBSD is kind of the Cult of Theo de Raadt. I wonder how many well-meaning supporters he has chased away over the years?
  42. Mercutio

    Windows 7 on i865?

    The i865 is compatible with Windows 7 and you should really go and get proper drivers for the graphics and system chipset (you may also want/need the Intel Management Engine component to make everything work properly if Windows didn't pick it up and is being weird about detecting hardware). I...
  43. Mercutio

    Crap selection of laptops

    Lenovo sent someone to pick up my T420 (with the cracked palmrest) at quarter to 7 Tuesday night, at the place I specified. It was overnighted to a repair depot 500 miles away and returned to me 8:30 Thursday morning. I spoke to a single Lenovo support rep after a hold time of less than 10...
  44. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    I've spent a couple days now using the RT-version of the Surface and I have a few thoughts. Most of them are complaints borne out of past experiences, but overall I'd call it pretty positive. 0. Surface needs a swipe-to-type keyboard. 1. There are no decent web browsers. There's IE. But TPLs...
  45. Mercutio

    Crap selection of laptops

    As a general rule, major-revision software upgrades on older devices are usually going to result in some sluggishness. The new software is almost always going to be built on a set of performance assumptions that aren't going to hold for older hardware, such as more CPU cores or available RAM. In...
  46. Mercutio

    Nice article on filesystems at ars

    Right now my main file server is a Server 2012 machine that uses a combination of SoftRAID1 or RAID5 arrays plus SnapRAID to maintain redundancy. FreeNAS/ZFS works, but it's much better with NFS than SMB, and NFS on Windows is somewhat lacking. I don't like how complex my file system structures...
  47. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    Hint: Stick a copy of your preferred ninite executable on your Skydrive so you don't have to sully yourself with IE. That's also a good place to add whatever other freeware downloads and web shortcuts to get your clients set. I actually have a whole Windows 7 and Windows 8 default user account...
  48. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    It was a good movie, especially for a "Holiday" release. I was a bit worried that it would be a bit of a diabetes-inducing glurge-fest, but it didn't quite tip over that line. It was a sweet story that deserved to be told. American Hustle, though, deserves to be seen if only for the moments...
  49. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The magic glue of all things ebook is Calibre, which runs on everything and deals with every format. If you buy the book from Amazon, you can use Amazon Kindle for Windows (NOT Cloud Reader, which is a different product) to get a copy protected .mobi on to your PC. Once it's there, you can use...
  50. Mercutio

    Surface Pro

    Hard as it is to believe, I have to teach a dozen people to use non-Pro Surfaces in two weeks. Anyone have any favorite Metro apps they wanna mention?
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