Recently I setup a Hyper-V Server and ran into a few issues around networking and setting up a virtual firewall with ISA 2006. It turns out that Hyper-V creates a virtual network adapter for the physical computer and plugs it into the physical adapter which is turned into a de facto network switch. So, if you’re going to use a router or firewall inside a virtual machine you will end up with two network adapters plugged into the “switch” on the external side of your firewall. That might be fine, but it poses a small problem when used in conjunction with Comcast because they see it as two computers and the physical computer may win out and get the external IP while Comcast ignores the other network adapter.

The solution is to disable the virtual adapter that was auto-created for the physical host on your external physical adapter “switch”. Thus Comcast will only see one computer and all will be happy. Searching around for the commands to do this in a Core/Hyper-V console only install of server 2008 proved to be a bit of a trek. After a few days and a few Google searches later I found the answer. Here it is…

Rename a network connection:

netsh interface set interface name=”Local Area Connection 3” newname=”Internet Connection”

Disable a network connection:

netsh interface set interface name=”Internet Connection” disabled

Pretty simple, but my install of Hyper-V Server also suffered from a bug that luckily has a hot fix. It was showing no interfaces when I ran this:

netsh interface show interface

…which is a bug. After I found the patch for that though the rest was done in no time.

I’ve been playing with a REST WCF service for a bit and noticed when I attempted to add it to Azure’s service bus that it blew up on me. It even goes so far as to kill the development web server in VS2008.

After a little debugging I traced it back to a small bug in the Microsoft.ServiceModel.Web code from the starter kit. Turns out the code relies on the OperationContext.Current which is null unless AspNetCompatibility mode is Allowed or Required, which doesn’t work on Azure (at least not that I could see). So… I fixed that bug and all was well, sort of…

You see, it seems that now I have an endpoint disagreement somewhere because I’m getting this now:

a:DestinationUnreachableThe message with To 'http://servicebus.windows.net/services/improvGroup/Manager/Contacts/help?apikey=bigGuidHereSnipped' cannot be processed at the receiver, due to an AddressFilter mismatch at the EndpointDispatcher. Check that the sender and receiver's EndpointAddresses agree.

I guess I’ll poke around with it later when I have a few hours. Any suggestions?

FOLLOWUP NOTE: I was able to get the service working on Azure if I disable the interceptor that adds the API key check. So, it seems maybe I only partially fixed the previous issue in the starter kit.

This is pretty obscure… EBS goes through its setup perfectly until it tries to install System Center Essentials, which we all know was invented by Satan himself because it never freakin’ installs correctly even by itself. So, if anybody reading this has any ideas about how to get around this issue, let me know… And no, installing VMware is NOT a solution, even if that might work.

So here we sit on Christmas day watching TV or just being lazy. Many of you are watching kids with their toys running around the house. I find myself here at this old comfortable spot, with the TV on in the background, the coffee brewing and the chill air outside, wondering what the next year will bring and looking back at the last. It’s been fun this last year and the next will be completely different. What, you thought I had some profound point? LOL Not likely.  hahahahaha… or should I say hohohohoho….

Merry Christmas!

I did a 3D Photosynth of our Heliotrope Hike. It has a 360 degree view of the high spot where we went.

  http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=23cc0b80-6899-44c1-94df-2b4374d24d98

This year I was on the Festival of Trees team with the Mount Vernon Chamber of Commerce and Skagit Young Professionals. Our team was made up of mostly women, so the theme is decidedly girly. It was Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend from the old Marilyn Monroe movie. Our tree was part of the overall event which is a charity gala for the local cancer foundation where they auction off the trees we made. We gathered about $6000 of stuff donated as part of our tree. On Tuesday there was a Designer Appreciation Night and we were voted Designers’ Choice by all the other tree designers. I’ve uploaded a ton of photos to Flickr, most of which I have to get permission from people before I make public, but I do have some public photos to show.

There was also a Tiki tree there that I really liked and I took a few photos of it too.

Ya know, sometimes I feel like I’m watching the world flow past me like so much water down the river. In a few days I’ll be 31 and the last few years I’ve been searching for something. Myself. You see, somewhere along the line I lost who I was in so much work and blind ambition to build a business or two that I seldom took the time to step back and actually see where I’ve come from and where I am now.

This time of year, when it gets cold outside and I get a little older, I look around me to see what I let slide past the rest of the year. The fun hikes, the work, work and more work. The dinner out with friends. I started a new business this year as well, became a chamber of commerce ambassador, took lots of photos, and generally got in the way a lot.

It’s been a fun time, but something has been missing, or rather someone. I thought for a minute that I’d found her a few years ago, but alas she slipped through my fingers. Maybe the next year will find her, whoever she turns out to be. Until then I’ll wait and see, there’s always the work, it never leaves.

So, my friends who read my rambling, remember to take a minute to see what’s truly around you or you just might be surprised when it’s gone.

For those of you who don’t follow my flickr feed, I went on a hike a little while ago and took a few photos. They are in reverse order so you see the hike backwards from the end to the top. I don’t usually take photos on the way up. Enjoy…

Yeah, I know, guilty… Turns out the reason my Visual Studio 2008 has been having TypeLibBuilder.exe crash constantly on client side script is the dpAgent.exe helper process from DigitalPersona. If you kill the process all is happy again. Thanks Josh.

http://jberke.blogspot.com/2008/05/typelibbuilderexe-crashes-javascript.html

A friend sent me this link. The video is pretty funny if you're looking for a laugh.

Fonts: Font Conference Shows Your Fonts as People, and They Are Ridiculous

Searching for information on this has been a MAJOR headache, mainly due to the fact that every moron on the Internet has posted the error code without knowing anything about the actual error or a way to fix it. Most of them just tell you to dump your outlook profile and start over. Well, I say that isn't good enough! Someone, preferably from the product team that made this thing, needs to get off their butt and post about this issue and how to fix it so that it doesn't keep popping up on me and the other thousand or more people I saw posting about it in the last half hour I've been searching for solutions.

In a so far vain attempt to get somebody to answer the question as to why Outlook stops synchronizing a mailbox after a few changes I've posted a question in the community support forums. Let the carnage ensue as they read, completely misunderstand, and post ridiculous non-solutions to my question.

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general&mid=a1e35133-6ae2-4221-af97-9bae2fdb6aee&sloc=en-us

Ok, I'm done ranting now. Honestly though, how hard can it be to just fix this?

I ran across this interesting little app today. Since one of the many things I've been occupied with lately has been managing a web server it caught my eye as a possible way to stop all the foreign scanning bots I've seen hit it lately. Worth a look anyway...

Blocking IP Addresses in IIS

Well, the Skagit Young Professionals met again for pool and darts. I took a few photos, but they were mostly blurry. I'd just been to the dentist so I wasn't my usual jovial self in case anybody was wondering.

We need to do this more often, preferably when I don't have a sore tooth. If you shrink them some of the blurry ones look ok though none are that great. Anyway, the photos are on Flickr and here are the links...

Last night we had snow! Snow around here is usually a once or twice a year thing in December or January, not April! I woke on Saturday to find the yard covered in the stuff. The weather around here sure has been weird lately.

Unless I'm not reading this right, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have put a limit on how many copies of Vista Ultimate you can receive for your software assured copies of Windows...

Clarifying the Role of Windows Vista Ultimate in Software Assurance for Enterprise Customers
Windows Vista Enterprise is the ideal operating system for enterprise customers, whereas, Windows Vista Ultimate is ideal for consumer scenarios and is useful for enterprise customers in conference and training rooms.
With this in mind, Windows Vista Ultimate entitlements for new customers with Software Assurance coverage for Windows Client licenses have changed:
Customers with fewer than 600 Windows Vista Enterprise licenses are eligible to receive 5 Windows Vista Ultimate product keys
Customers with 600 or more Windows Vista Enterprise licenses are eligible to receive one Windows Vista Ultimate product key for every 100 Windows Vista Enterprise licenses

So before you could get Ultimate for every copy you had software assurance on. Now it reads that you can only have 5 for the first 600. So they've actually taken away your right to use more than 5 via your Software Assurance.

As I've stated before, Software Assurance is effectively just an upgrade program. They can put more stuff into it all day long, but none of my small to medium sized business customers are interested in anything but the software itself and I'm sure they're going to be hopping mad when they find out that some marketing or legal dufus has decided that they should take this away in hopes of increasing their bottom line in Ultimate upgrade sales.

The main argument I've heard against Ultimate is that you can't manage it in a group policy environment. If that's true, who controls that? Microsoft does. Who's a bunch of lazy <insert expletive here>s for not making it manageable in the first place? Again, Microsoft are. So in the end, that argument has no merit at all.

The other flaw in this logic is that Enterprise has no upgrade path to Ultimate and vice versa. The basic difference between the two is Media Center functionality. So, if you have a machine with Enterprise on it you can not upgrade or move to Ultimate without a reinstall of the OS. This is a really dumb move on Microsoft's part. Ever since they came out with Ultimate they have screwed it up one way or another by omitting pieces of the other editions from it. The whole idea of Ultimate is to be the edition that includes everything and not just some of the pieces of the other editions. That is how it was marketed anyway. If it isn't that then change the name to Media Center Edition and stop talking about it like it is that.

Just my $0.02.

Here are the photos from the meet up last night...

On the way back from lunch with the Emergency Reporting crew yesterday we passed this teriyaki shop... Most of the people who know me know that Nate and I hang out and make it a point to go to just about every teriyaki shop we can find. We haven't been to many in Bellingham though so I guess I'll have to add this to the list.