windows

Zero Out Free Space

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This is post #10 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” When we talked about the rationale behind storing logs centrally one big reason was thin-provisioned virtual disks. Those disks grow over time because filesystems on a virtual machine currently have no way to tell the underlying storage that they’re done using certain blocks on disk. There is a way to make these VMs thin again, and I wrote about it as step 9 in my guide to preparing Linux Template VMs. In short, we run a script on the VM that writes zeroes to most of the free space on the VM: #!/bin/sh # Determine …

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Disk Partition Alignment Is Still Important

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This is post #9 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” I have written about this almost yearly (beginning all the way back in 2006), but even now I routinely run across something, like a virtual appliance, that has poor partition alignment. What’s the big deal? In short, misaligned I/O is killing your disk performance. Blame Logical Block Addressing, or LBA. Back in the day, a BIOS interacted with drives by knowing the exact geometry of the drive, namely how many cylinders, heads, and sectors were on a disk (CHS). Unfortunately that limited the size of the drives that could be used, and ignored some basic …

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Don’t Start GUIs and X Windows On Servers

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This is post #5 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” There are stories out there about system administrators with intermittent performance problems on their Windows servers. Like many problems, it would never happen when the administrator was around, but when they walked away from their servers suddenly the issues would crop up. It was the OpenGL screensaver, sucking up all the CPU. GUIs make life easier sometimes, especially if you aren’t as familiar with an environment as you’d like to be. However, they come at a cost: additional RAM, CPU, and disk overhead. In my travels I’ve seen virtual environments more than double their consolidation …

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Three Reasons Why Hatred of the Windows 8 UI is a Good Thing

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There seems to be a lot of negative sentiment about the Windows 8 user interface (the interface formerly known as Metro). It might be counterintuitive but I think this is ultimately a good thing. First, mainstream OS user interfaces have stagnated, and I like that Microsoft is thinking about what the next steps might be. I also like that they’re thinking about it in a different way than other OS vendors, especially not emulating Mac OS’ ridiculous skeuomorphism. Trying to maintain some common interface elements between desktops, laptops, and mobile devices seems like a good idea, too. They’re obviously not done thinking about the problem, otherwise they wouldn’t have left the desktop in Windows 8. That’s the main problem people …

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Impressions of Windows 8

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I’ve spent about 20 hours now with Microsoft Windows 8 release running in VMware Workstation 9. I’d looked at the developer preview months ago but not exercised it very much, figuring things would change. Some things did, for the better, but the UI changes, by far the most controversial, stayed pretty much the same. Windows 7 was called the successor to the wildly popular Windows XP but in my mind Windows 8 only succeeds the star-crossed Vista. It’s really too bad that all the seriously cool things — the new task manager, Storage Spaces, all the personalization updates, File History, the task bar improvements, several billion other tweaks — are all being overshadowed by the interface. Desktop PCs are not tablets. …

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How To Find Your iPad/iPod/iPhone's UDID Without The Device

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Sometimes you need the UDID for your iPad, iPod, or iPhone and you don’t have the device. Or you do have the device but it’s b0rked, like from installing development iOS and forgetting to add the device to your account. And you’ve got a Windows desktop, so all the Mac instructions out there don’t help a ton. It’s simple. Start->Run, then: %appdata%Apple ComputerMobileSyncBackup The folders there are named according to your device UDIDs. You can probably use the folder dates & times to figure out which is which, or if you need to get more detailed open Info.plist or Manifest.plist and look at the applications that were installed. If you need your device’s serial number check this post. Good luck!

Align Your Partitions

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This is post #1 in my December-long series on Linux VM performance tuning, Tuningmas. I wrote about it back in 2006, and lots of others have written about it since (Duncan Epping has a nice vendor-agnostic post with diagrams): misaligned storage trashing your I/O performance. What’s the big deal? In short, it is killing your I/O performance. Logical Block Addressing on your disk drive makes the Master Boot Record 63 bytes long. This means it occupies sectors 0-62 on disk, and the first partition will start at sector 63. The number 63 is a persona non grata in the computer world. It isn’t a power of 2, and it certainly doesn’t line up with your storage’s idea of the world …

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How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with terrible font rendering in Chrome. In fact, it’s been my biggest complaint about that browser. I get fonts with missing pieces, fonts that don’t render completely, text that is completely absent, and text with severely pixelated edges. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, but I look at this thing many hours every day, and I’d like it to work right. Here’s a severe example. The image on the left is what I saw in Chrome, and the image on the right is what I should have seen when visiting a particular web site:         That’s like WTF levels of crappy, right? It was happening all the time, on …

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How To Disable Teredo IPv6 Tunneling in Microsoft Windows

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Greg Ferro’s post about how Microsoft Teredo is a suboptimal networking solution made me think it’s time to update my old post on how to disable Teredo in Windows 7 and in Windows 8. For the record, I agree — I’ve had serious problems with it conflicting with my native IPv6 connectivity. 1. Open a command prompt with administrator privileges (Start->Accessories->right click on Command Prompt, choose Run as Administrator): 2. Issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state disabled 3. You may need to reboot, depending on your version of Windows. If you wish to re-enable Teredo at some point you can issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state type=default  

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