A Perfectly Cromulent Website

Recently I ran into a problem with IE 8 at work. Yes, that can be a wide range of problems but I found something a bit more specific than that.

We recently implemented a Share Point site and I noticed when doing speed tests for uploads of large files through IE, the speeds were quite a bit slower then the upload speeds in Chrome and Firefox. I thought that this might be a problem being that most of our users are going to be accessing the site through IE 7 or IE 8. I did a lot of searching and couldn’t really find much of anything. Most articles are about either speeding up torrent downloads or disabling plugins and things of that sort to speed up your browsing speeds in IE.

Then I found this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329781

This article talks about changing the “Socket Send Buffer Length” in the registry to give IE more buffer space to upload files. The article gives the following steps in order to resolve the slow upload issue (as always back the registry and be careful when editing the registry):

Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe)

Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:Value name: SocketSendBufferLength
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value data: Buffer size that you want (in bytes)

Buffer Size Value Options

16-KB Buffer = 16384

24-KB Buffer = 24576

32-KB Buffer = 32768

40-KB Buffer = 40960

48-KB Buffer = 49152

56-KB Buffer = 57344

64-KB Buffer = 65536

Quit The Registry Editor

Reboot the computer or Log-Off and Log-In again

In these steps I found the sweet spot for my machines to be 40-KB. You can setup the higher buffer sizes  but I didn’t really see any benefit to the higher buffer sizes. This fix really did increase the upload speeds to be about the same as Firefox or Chrome.

Give it a try and see for yourself!

Recently, I have setup some systems on a 10G Network connecting to iSCSI solid state storage. This setup is REALLY fast but I have seen some problems with it recently. In fact, just the other day one of the systems became unresponsive and I saw the following error in the event log:

tcp/ip has detected high memory utilization and has terminated some existing connections to  maintain system stability.

Also in the event logs shortly after that I saw entries about the iSCSI initiator losing connection to the storage and other nasty messages of that sort. After searching around a bit I came to a couple of potential fixes for this problem:

1. Removing the Symantec Endpoint Firewall from this system, as this could be cause problems when inspecting every packet that comes across  that 10G port.
2. Disabling Memory Pressure Protection in Windows – article discussing this topic

Hopefully between the two this will solve the problem. I didn’t know that such a feature even existed in Windows. But basically this “feature” will start dropping packets if windows detects an attack on that port. I don’t really know what Microsoft considers an attack, but I am sure 10G of traffic across a port is something that might seem odd to the application.

You learn more and more!

This is really for my benefit, but the quick and easy way to detect and fix orphaned Microsoft SQL Server users:

1. Open a query in SQL Server and select the database you want to fix
2. Run the following command query analyzer: sp_change_users_login 'Report'
3. Create a list of the users that get reported back
4. Make sure the users exist on the new servers, if they do not be sure to create the users
5. Delete the command form query analyzer in step # 2
6. Run the following command in query analyzer, replace “UserName” with the user name you want fix: sp_change_users_login 'Auto_Fix', 'UserName'

Y0u can find a lot of articles going into lots of detail on how to fix this problem, but i know when I look it up I just want to see the command not why it does what it does. If you want a really good detailed article you can view this really good article.

This weekend has been a very good weekend for Android phone news. It has leaked out that google gave all of their employee phones after a meeting and the news has been causing a frenzy.

This new phone is known as the Nexus One. Engadget has a lot of good information on the phone:

• Exclusive: first Google Phone / Nexus One photos, Android 2.1 on-board
• HTC Nexus One blessed by the FCC

It is amazing how good these guys are at finding information from the FCC and from google employees who want to show off their fancy new phone. Hopefully more information will come out soon, if that phone has a snapdragon processor, I am sold.

PLEASE release some more information on the phone! It’s bad enough that many of us are waiting for that perfect Android phone to come out, an official Google phone is out.

Softpedia is reporting on a new website that obviously wants the readers to think that the HTC Passion/Dragon will be coming out very soon. As much as I would like to hope that this is a sign that this phone has been announced a bit of research shows this isn’t true. After a quick look at that site and comparing the WHOIS information on that URL vs Verizon Wireless and the HTC Homepage shows that the site is obviously fake. The information does not match up and I don’t think that Verizon or HTC would use Made2Own Hosting (as seen on the HTCPassion.com WHOIS). Just See for yourself

Verizon Wireless -

Registrant:

Verizon Trademark Services LLC

Verizon Trademark Services LLC

1320 North Court House Road

Arlington VA 22201

US

domainlegalcontact@verizon.com +1.7033513164 Fax: +1.7033513669

Domain Name: verizonwireless.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com

Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com

Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Administrative Contact:

Domain Administrator

Verizon Trademark Services LLC

1320 North Court House Road

Arlington VA 22201

US

domainlegalcontact@verizon.com +1.7033513164 Fax: +1.7033513669

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:

DNS Admin -(AQKUABCKBO)

Verizon

919 Hidden Ridge

Irving TX 75038

US

DNSAdmin@nw.verizonwireless.com +1.9492868585 Fax: +1.5094717731

Created on…………..: 2000-03-02.

Expires on…………..: 2011-03-02.

Record last updated on..: 2009-05-31.

Domain servers in listed order:

ns-irvn.verizonwireless.com

ns-orbg.verizonwireless.com

ns-dbln.verizonwireless.com

HTC’s Homepage -

Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :

High Tech Computer Corp.

dnsmaster@htc.com

23 Hsin Hua Rd.

Taoyuan, Taiwan 330

TW

Phone: 886-3-3753252

Record expires on 17-May-2016

Record created on 16-May-1990

Database last updated on 23-Jun-2006

Domain servers in listed order: Manage DNS

HTCTAO1.HTC.COM                       220.128.71.129

HTCTPE1.HTC.COM                       220.128.67.130

HTCTAO2.HTC.COM                      219.87.71.130

HTCTPE2.HTC.COM                      202.147.62.188

HTCNS1.HTC.COM                          220.128.71.245

HTCPassion.com

Registrant Contact:

WhoisGuard

WhoisGuard Protected ()

Fax:

8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 – 732

Westchester, CA 90045

US

Administrative Contact:

WhoisGuard

WhoisGuard Protected (a61918b6a7624a608988e8d3194a8d99.protect@whoisguard.com)

+1.6613102107

Fax: +1.6613102107

8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 – 732

Westchester, CA 90045

US

Technical Contact:

WhoisGuard

WhoisGuard Protected (a61918b6a7624a608988e8d3194a8d99.protect@whoisguard.com)

+1.6613102107

Fax: +1.6613102107

8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 – 732

Westchester, CA 90045

US

Status: Locked

Name Servers:

ns1.made2own.com

ns2.made2own.com

Trying to create a new data-store in VMWare? Is it giving you errors that are not very specific? Does the error happen to be:

“Error during the configuration of the host failed to get disk partition information”

Well if this is the error you get, you might want to try the steps found in the following article.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1382

This post solved my data-store problems. The linux voodoo that this document had me perform created my data-store just like it needed to be created and even let me move my data over. This is quite a big improvement when I wasn’t able to do much of anything.

I found a great test for SQL Server and Storage alike. It uses SQLIO and runs a large variety of tests with different parameters to let you know which SQL Server setup would be optimal. I also like using it for storage as the wide range of tests shows you the potential of the storage.

Check it out at: SAN Performance Tuning

Wouldn’t it be nice if this blog had something useful on it?