APC Smart-UPS 1500

Frequent power cuts have caused my dev workstation to restart unexpectedly a few times recently. This isn’t really a problem for individual desktops, but as this machine runs Hyper-V and hosts 20+ virtual machines there’s some small risk that sudden power failure might leave one or more boxes in an inconsistent state leading to some work to repair them once power is restored. Seems like a no-brainer: stick an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) on and do a clean shutdown before the juice runs out.

I’ve not bought a UPS before so was not really sure what to go for. This Dell Precision T7600 chassis is rated for 1300W, but I’ve no idea what it actually consumes or how variable that might be. In the end I got an APC Smart-UPS 1500 for around £500, which reports my current load, for the workstation and one monitor, as around 20% loading giving 80 minutes of battery time.

Windows Server 2008 R2 detected the battery automatically when I connected the UPS to the server via a USB lead and integrates it with power options just like with a Windows laptop. I configured a new power plan and set the critical level to 50% and the action to Shutdown, which is the only one available, expecting this to initiate the same shutdown you get from Start > Shut Down.

I switched the power to the UPS off and the battery took over. After 30 minutes it got to 50% remaining. A crash message window appeared briefly before the server was dropped. It wasn’t a nice Windows shutdown – it just gutted itself!

Upon power restore we get asked the “unexplained shutdown” question and the VMs are “Off” when I was expecting them to be “Saved”. Not good. More Microsoft stuff that doesn’t work out of the box. Worse is that it all looks OK, until you try it.

Fortunately the UPS comes with its own monitoring system, APC PowerChute, which monitors the battery and does do a proper shutdown. It’s just a shame I have to install some vendor-specific crapware to achieve something that Windows can clearly handle itself (if only it were not bugged).

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2 is very similar to the original. It keeps the 4-player co-op, cartoon-like graphics, dark humour and extreme violence. I stopped playing the original after the first play though, not realising that things would be more challenging on the second attempt and consistently difficult on the third having capped at level 50. I aim to keep this sequel and keep going back to it.

Elemental damage modifiers

Borderlands 2 has damage modifiers similar to the first, which I’ve summarised below. Using the right weapon against the right enemy is important and some enemies are resistant to some effects (Crystalisks are immune to incendiary, shock and corrosive, for example – punching their legs is effective), so I generally keep an incendiary (up), shock (left) and corrosive (right) weapon equipped with an unmodified, slagged or explosive in the fourth slot (down). Below are the modifiers for the second play-through (True Vault Hunter mode) – the first play through has similar bonuses and penalties, but much reduced.

	Flesh	Shields	Armour
Incendiary	175%	75%	75%
Shock	100%	150%	100%
Corrosive	60%	40%	175%
Explosive	200%	160%	200%
Slagg	Other weapons do double damage (200%)

Incendiary and Corrosive are strong against flesh and armour respectively, but weak against the others, so you have to switch around. Electricity is strong against shields, but neutral against the rest, but you are still losing out by missing the bonus you would have if you swapped, although the Mecromancer’s skills can focus on electricity making a single-damage build possible.

Explosive does its normal damage, plus the same in splash damage, so can hit multiple enemies at once and does both (so double damage) if you hit. This doesn’t apply to critical hits though and doesn’t latch an elemental effect, so the other elemental types still seem stronger to me. Also, the splash area seems quite small.

A slagged enemy takes double damage, but it doesn’t last long and you have to swap weapons to take advantage of it so it can be a pain if soloing. It can also be applied by grenades and some of the character skills.

Endgame

Half way through your second play through your character will cap at level 50 and the environment will also cap at that level, but with badasses being a level or two higher as usual, so the game stabilises. Any golden keys used will yield rare level 50 items so save them up until you hit the cap. Moxii also gives 2 items if you tip her, but I’m not sure if they follow the cap as well or whether they are preset to lower levels.

I’ve not finished True Vault Hunter mode yet. It seems the impending update will add a 6th character, a third play through and raise the cap to 61.

Hints & Tips

• Use the appropriate elemental damage type – keep one of each in your weapon slots.
• Get used to weapon-switching with the Y button, rather than the D-pad. It’s a bit trickier to get the weapon you want, but can be used while dodging.
• Equip a selection of weapon types, to spread out ammo use and to provide weapons at the right distance to the target.
• The Law & Order item combo is pretty good – does high melee damage and steals health. Especially good with the Assassin, for example.
• The Mecromancer’s Anarchy skill increases damage but reduces accuracy so you end up using sniper rifles at close range and have no hope of hitting at medium or long range. Artifacts, relics and special weapons can increase the accuracy a bit and you can always consume the stack to reduce the penalty. The 9th Bullet and Close Enough skills add a heat-seeking ability to some bullets, and there are other skills to increase accuracy. So a good build, but needs care.

SharePoint 2010 Workflows broken OOTB

I just setup a Disposition Approval workflow in SharePoint 2010 on a wiki site. More SharePoint functionality that is broken out-of-the-box (OOTB).

What I’d like to do is get reminders to review wiki content periodically so we can tidy up stale information – seems simple enough.

SharePoint 2010 appears to offer this through it’s Disposition Approval (who names these things?) workflow. This turns out to be fairly complicated to configure. There’s an Information Management Policy Settings link to find on the library settings page which kicks off the workflow, and a timer job that only runs once a week by default.

The workflow is defined on the wiki site’s page library, but relocating the workflow once it is created is a pain as not all “workflow settings” buttons go to the same place. The tasks, however, get created in another list under the wiki site, so are a sibling to the wiki pages.

The whole feature looks like it’s bolted together out of pre-existing parts that don’t really fit.

However, after running that gauntlet I find the following 3 total fails that make the whole feature more trouble that it’s worth:

1. The tasks created by the workflow don’t get assigned to anyone. It expects you to come and look for them. Setting up an alert on the task list gets around this.
2. The bulk workflow tool from 2007 is missing or hidden or something in 2010 so you have to open each task individually, which makes the whole thing too much effort to bother with.
3. There’s a stupid bug which means all my existing wiki pages throw an error when I try to open them for editing. Chasing down the correlation id in the logs (blech) and googling the stack trace leads me to some mumbo-jumbo about some missing Data Association XML or some-such.

In the end I just switched off the retention approval again and deleted the workflow. Too much pain for a crap little feature.

UPDATE: Now when we try to create a page in the wiki we get an Article Page instead of an Enterprise Wiki Page. I deactivated the SharePoint Server Publishing feature from Site Settings, but this didn’t fix it and also caused this error when I tried to save an existing wiki page after editing it:

System.ArgumentException: Invalid SPListItem. The SPListItem provided is not compatible with a Publishing Page

I activated the feature again and can now edit existing wiki pages without error. Eventually I found Site Settings > Page Layouts and Site Templates > New Page Default Settings. This was “Inherit Default Page Layout From Parent Site”. Changed to “Select The Default Page Layout > (Enterprise Wiki Page) Basic Page” and now new pages are wiki pages again.

Added secondary AD & DNS

I just installed a second Active Directory server into my test domain. Dead easy – just install the role on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and follow the prompts. I chose to install DNS at the same time (the AD setup wizard defaults to ticking this so don’t need to change anything).

At the end it synched my AD domain from the original server. It brought over all my DNS zones automatically, including: both the AD forward lookup zone and a manual forward lookup zone; my reverse lookup zone and DNS settings such as my forwarder IP addresses (which the server uses to resolve external DNS names on behalf of clients).

More details here.

Now I have two DNS servers I can point my clients (including the DNS servers themselves) at both of them and should have basic networking (AD logons & DNS) even if one server goes down.

I also added the new DNS server to the DHCP Server Options so the new DNS server should get offered to DHCP clients automatically. My Windows 7 client picked this up without needing a DHCP release/renew which makes me suspect it got the new DNS server IP from somewhere else. I removed the new DNS server IP from the DHCP Server Options again and will check to see if clients are finding it on their own somehow.

AMD FirePro V7900 & RemoteFX

I’ve been playing with my Dell Precision T7600 for a few months now. I’ve got it running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V enabled. The whole box is a dedicated VM host for my development environment. I’ve been trying to use RemoteFX to get advanced graphics running in Windows 7 & Windows 8, but not having much luck.

My first problem is that the Dell website doesn’t list Windows Server 2008 drivers at all. I’ve been using the Windows 7 drivers. They *seem* to work, but when problems start it’s always a worry.

My graphics card is an AMD FirePro V7900 and it’s not clear whether this supports RemoteFX or not. The AMD FirePro range appears to, but this specific card is not actually listed, although the unified driver does list it. Once I found these I swapped over to using them as they at least offer a Windows Server 2008 R2 version.

However, performance in a Windows 7 Ultimate guest seems poor. There’s a noticeable lag when scrolling in IE 9 or when switching between applications, and sometimes the screen doesn’t repaint at all. Occasionally the guest graphics driver fails completely, the screen freezes then refreshes and a little pop-up tells me that Windows recovered (presumably by just starting another copy of the driver). It’s so bad I gave up after a couple of days and removed the RemoteFX driver from the VM.

Windows 8 Enterprise won’t accept it at all. The driver (Microsoft RemoteFX Graphics Driver – WDDM) has “stopped working because it reported problems (code43)”.

An email to AMD customer support has not been especially useful. They claim that “the AMD GPU is not virtualized within the RemoteFX desktop. It is used to assist with compression and accelerating 3D calls”. This appears to be the opposite of what the AMD FirePro blurb says: “AMD FirePro professional graphics combined with Microsoft RemoteFX enables full GPU virtualisation”.

AMD also implied that things might be better under Windows Server 2012, but that they don’t have any supported drivers (that is, WHQL tested) as yet. So not really very useful there either. I asked them when they expected the drivers to be available and was told “our next driver release will most likely support Server 2012”. So no date then.

I must admit, I’m not really sure whether Windows 8 is supported by RemoteFX on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 – maybe Windows Server 2012 is required for Windows 8 RemoteFX?

Secure Cloud Storage

SkyDrive is great for synchronising my documents between my home and work PCs, but I don’t trust it (or anything else) enough to hold my passwords, bank account details, etc without some additional encryption.

I first tried using the Encrypting File System (EFS) that is built in to Windows 7, for example, but it encrypts at the volume level – the data are decrypted when Windows applications access them. The SkyDrive client is a Windows application, so it sees the decrypted files and pushes them to the cloud. Not what I wanted.

TrueCrypt is an open source encryption system. It can, amongst other things, create an encrypted container (such as a file) and present this to Windows as another volume. I created one of these and put it into my SkyDrive folder so it synchronises the encrypted file up to the cloud.

First I needed to unset Settings > Preferences > “Preserve modification timestamp of file contents”, which is on by default. The SkyDrive client uses these timestamps to tell if things have changed so if TrueCrypt doesn’t change the timestamp SkyDrive won’t sync it.

Also, SkyDrive isn’t yet clever enough to only detect partial file changes, so any change to my encrypted files causes the entire container file to resync once it is dismounted. I initially tried a 1 GB container, but this takes ages to sync. I abandoned that and used a smaller one (10 MB) instead. I’m told that DropBox only syncs changes, so would be a better choice here. Hopefully SkyDrive will catch up soon.

The obvious down-side to this is that you need TrueCrypt installed to decrypt the data before accessing it, which means you can’t access the files from Surface, Windows Phone 7.5 or skydrive.live.com.

At the time of writing I was using SkyDrive 2012 (build 17.0.2003.112) and TrueCrypt 7.1a (7 Feb 2012).

Samsung TV

Some friends recently bought themselves a nice new TV, a Samsung 46ES6800: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-46-inch-UE46ES6800-Widescreen-Processor/dp/B007JURIDQ

They previously had a Sky decoder and satellite dish, but had stopped subscribing to Sky. They had connected the satellite to the TV, which has its own built-in decoders, so no longer using the Sky decoder, and were getting 300+ channels, but almost all of them were scrambled. Channel 5 was missing entirely and the channel numbers were all over the place – they wanted BBC1 on channel 1, BBC2 on 2, etc.

The TV has an auto-tune feature with 4 input settings:

• Air is for old-style aerials, which can still pick-up old analogue channels as well as the new digital Freeview ones (depending on where you live in the UK), but they don’t have one of these.
• Satellite is for the satellite dish and is what they were using which gave the results described above. Freesat (below) turns out to be the better choice.
• Cable would be for a cable service such as Virgin Media, but this isn’t widely available in the UK and was not relevant.
• Freesat turns out to be the one they wanted. After selecting this and letting it auto-tune they now have 50+ free channels, including Channel 5, all nicely ordered.

The TV remote has some recording buttons near the bottom. Pressing these brought up some warnings about USB devices being missing. The printed user manual doesn’t mention this feature, but the TV has a built-in user manual. A bit of digging implies that the TV can record to hard disk (HDD) via USB to provide video recording (PVR) functionality and recommends a minimum of a 5,400 RPM drive. These are quite common now and can be had from Amazon. Here’s an example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Slimline-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B008PABFX8/

Not tried it yet though.