That’s the way I felt today about my laptop.  I’ve been living with a sporadic yet horribly annoying network disconnect issue with Vista.  I’ll get dropped off the network and the only way to fix is to reboot. After being disconnected for the fourth time today I finally was annoyed enough to try to figure it out.  I made two changes.  One being modifying the Power Management on the NICs so the OS can not turn them off to save power.  The second was a tip I found over at nerdlogger.com to disable the “autotuning.”  The command I ran was:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Now…if this damn laptop falls off the network one more time I’m gonna drive across the Missouri river and see if this thing can float.  I’ve even defended Vista in the past.  What the heck was I thinking?

Side note #2…why the hell is that SQL Slammer worm still running wild?  That stupid worm came out over 5 years ago.

Every large customer I talk to doesn’t want to bet the farm on just one vendor.

That’s us.  We plan on trying XenServer once time allows.  You’d have to think that XenApp will be better suited for XenServer than ESX, right?

Side note…am I the only one having trouble adjusting to Network World’s new layout?

We had another strange thing happen today.  We are in the process of evaluating a Citrix Netscaler and today while we were doing some configuration and testing it went “banana sandwich” on us.  I was in the middle of assigning an IP address to a VLAN and all of a sudden it went unresponsive.  El Sidekick went back to look at it and the display on the unit was dark.  It had to be rebooted.  That doesn’t exactly give a person evaluating a warm fuzzy feeling.  Also, when it came back up all of the external IPs and VLANs were gone.  El Sidekick swears he hit save on the config so I have to chalk this one up in the “strange” category as well.

We’ve been talking recently around the office about “What the hell took you so long to do it that way” type things.  Like the peel back top on a bag of oreos that are out now.  What in the hell took so long to figure that out?  Or puting the console connection for a Cisco router on the front of the router instead of on the back.  What the hell took so long to figure that design out?  Some of these new features of Exchange 2007 fall into that “What the hell” category.  Some of the new features of Exchange 2007 that caught my eye were:

• Message classification - message transport rules can take action based on sender, recipient, content, etc, etc
• Smaller transaction logs - tlogs decrease from 5120 KB to 1024 KB
• Out of Office Assistant improvements - the ability to schedule when to turn it off and on
• Autodiscover - users can put their name and email address in their Outlook profile and it will configure the correct Exchange server automatically
• Edge Transport Services - spam filtering, virus scanning, recipient filtering, real time IP blocking, etc, etc

So there you have it.  I think a couple of those are key improvements…particularly the Out of Office Assistant scheduling and the Autodiscover for Outlook profile creation.  I’m late to the table with Exchange 2007 but better late than never is what I say!!

You’ll notice at the top I’ve added a page to BITW.  You can now contact Mr. Bump via a form!  I’m really classing things up around here.

Thought I’d share a few tips from over the holiday weekend involving El Sidekick replacing a router.  For his first time it went fairly well except for a few “Doh!” moments.

• “copy run tftp” is your friend.  Backup the config.  Its easy and free.
• If you change the configuration register to recover a password, change it back after you’ve recovered the password.
• When changing a password or deleting a local user, start a different connection to test the change.  Don’t exit out of your current connection.  You may lock yourself out of the router!
• Be careful with the “write” or “copy run start” statement.  If you’re not sure of something you can always reboot the router and go back to the startup config.

Hopefully next time these tips will help!

We did well in the BBQ contest.  We finished 29th overall out of 187 teams and we get “a call” in brisket with a 4th place finish. Getting a call at a big contest like that is a pretty big deal so it was exciting for us to accomplish that.  Unfortunately myself and the two other husbands of the “Three Angry Wives” missed the call.  We figured we save some time and go pack about halfway through the awards ceremony because we figured we wouldn’t finish in the top 10 of any category.  Boy were we wrong.  Then the insanity continued after everyone got back and we were celebrating.  A team member put our ribbon and prize money envelope in the truck of another team and they drove off with it.  Luckily we hunted it down yesterday and took possession of it today.

Here is how we placed in each category:

36th in Chicken

52nd in Pork Ribs

142nd in Pork Butt

4th in Brisket

44th in Sausage

29th Overall

Not to shabby for our first competition ever.

Have a great holiday weekend!!

As I mentioned earlier its BBQ week.  If anyone is going to be in Lenexa, KS at the Great Lenexa BBQ Battle stop by pit 226 and have a beer with Mr. Bump.  This isn’t grilling a few brats in your backyard.  This is a two day gut check.  We will check in at 7:00 AM Friday morning, finish getting set up as soon as possible to have the smoker fired up by about noon to start smoking ribs for a 5:30 dinner.  Then we party the rest of the night and start cooking the competition meat at about midnight or so.  Its an all night affair and is going to be real test of the stamina.  Mind over matter.  If you don’t mind it doesn’t matter.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  — Benjamin Franklin