Stuff I Do

I had decided that Vista had been out long enough and the inevitable is that at some point MS is going to force us to use this OS so I had better figure out how to make it work in our environment. Grabbed on of our Dell Optiplex GX520 ( Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.66GHz, 1GB memory, 80GB HD, Broadcom 1GB NIC, and Intel(R) 82945G Express Chipset Family) machines off the shelf and installed the OS.

Right off the bat I realize I am going to have to make some major changes to my policies to fit this OS. I notice the on board audio does not work and do some digging around find these hoops have to be jumped through to get the sound card to work. To enable the sound card go to Device Manager right click on the audio device and select Update Driver. After a lengthy time it will pull down and install the drivers for this card. This card is also in other machine we have in our environment which included; Dell OptiPlex 170L, Dell OptiPlex 745, Dell OptiPlex GX520, Dell OptiPlex GX620 and Dell OptiPlex SX270. Should be able to get these added to the Windows deployment for future installs.

Microsoft is trying to make the OS more secure but unfortunately they have chosen to do it in a very obtrusive, annoying way. Everytime you make any kind of change, including removing a shortcut from the desktop you are bombarded with multiple windows asking if this is what you really want to do. You can disable this User Account Control to make it less annoying, but it destroys the perceived or real security it provides.

Started to install all the applications that we use in our environment and notice that on the exact same hardware I have been running XP on, there is a hugh performance decrease. This machine is powerful enough for a standard desktop in a manufacturing environment running XP but under Vista I feel as though I have swapped out a strong machine with something from the early Pent III days and about half the memory. I didn’t do any scientific time studies on how long it took to work an app, I just felt the slow down and noticed hard drive was constantly swapping.

Found most of our applications work fine but have some show stoppers. Our logon auditing software, OCS Inventory NG, would fail to run the ocslogon.exe when run from a logon script. I did not try to install the OCS service as this is not how we use the application nor do we want to install a service on every single machine in the environment. We use PDFCreator to create cheap easy pdf files and it currently does not work in Vista. Our customer service department would kill me if I took that tool away from them. We also use VNC as a remote management tool on everyone of our workstations and there are major issues with VNC and Vista. This means we would have to come up with a new way of managing the workstations. Remote desktop really does not work well here. If someone is on the machine already, remote desktop would kill their session off. Considering we are a round the clock manufacturer, this would be very difficult to find when a machine was not in use. Remote assistance would not really work either as someone is not always at the workstation, they open a trouble ticket and then head back to the production floor. This is why we have always used VNC even though XP had these services to us.

The most perplexing non-working software is you can no longer install Microsoft Exchange tools on your workstation. This means for people like me managing multiple Exchange server you have to pull up a remote desktop of one of your Exchange servers in order to manage your mail environments. This is very annoying to me as I do all my work from my workstation and manage all aspect of the network from one station. It is troubling when MS won’t even get their own software to work together.

There are so many extras that MS has added into this OS that I am trying to disable or make unavailable. Our XP workstation we have sitting in the production basically has a start button and a list of application they can use. We have XP so locked down and stripped of everything that you would be hard pressed to know which version of Windows we are running. Vista has all kinds of eye candy that is completely unnecessary in a manufacturing environment. All I need is a stable platform, to run a handful of selected applications quickly, without requiring me to spend much time managing the environment. At the end of the day, the workstation OS should be the least of my worries and take the least amount of my time. There is nothing important in a workstation OS beyond providing a platform to my line of business applications. Maybe since MS has made tons of versions of Vista they should make one for manufactures like me that has none of the stupid frills and just give me a stable, fast, secure OS.

After about a week of working with this machine, I went back to my XP workstation. For me, Vista just isn’t worth it, or ready for business. XP will be our platform for the foreseeable future.

We have a Catalyst 6513 switch in our core with many blades and hundreds of ethernet cables plugged into the switch. It is impossible to figure out where a particular device is plugged into the switch, right? Nope, it is a simple to track down where you are plugged in at.

On the network device get it’s MAC address then shell into your switch. Enter the command:

show mac-address-table address 0000.0000.0000

Change the 0000.0000.0000 to the MAC address of your device then enter.

What you get back is information from your Primary Supervisor blade and also from your Stand By Supervisor blade telling you that your device is located on which blade/port.

My boss had his MacBook Pro connected to the corporate network and was transferring a few gigs of data between one of our servers and his laptop. It was connected via the built in Gigabit ethernet port yet it was taking entirely too long. He was connected into the core switch a Cisco Catalyst 6513 with Gig blades. Transfers between a Windows box and the servers was not showing the same slowness that the Mac was experiencing. We had this same problem with Tiger and now we are running Leopard and seeing the same issue. On the Mac you can correct the problem by going to System Preferences and opening the Network module. Select the Built-In Ethernet connection and click the Advance button. Select the Ethernet tab change the Configure drop-down to Manual set the speed to match your switch capabilities in our case 1000baseT and set the Duplex to Full-Duplex. It appears that by default Mac will set the duplex for Full-Duplex, Flow Control if you have the network set for automatically. Once those settings were set data transfers were flying.

At this point we began to wonder why we were not seeing the same issue with our Dell Windows workstations. On the MacBook Pro it has BootCamp with a Windows Vista partition installed so we booted into Vista on the MacBook Pro and tried the data transfers again. While Vista transfers are no where near as fast as XP or OS X, it was not as slow as OS X when flow control is enabled. So this pretty much points to the way OS X drivers are setup.

Connecting to the Cisco Catalyst 6513 and doing a sho int on interface the MacBook Pro was connected to showed input flow-control is off, output flow-control is off where we have Windows boxes placed and on OS X stations when we have manually set the ethernet settings. A stock install of OS X connect to the same port shows input flow-control is off, output flow-control is on and data transfers are painfully slow, more than doubling the time required to transfer the same 2.69 GB iso file from the same NAS device.

Since we are getting more Mac devices in our environment, and we don’t feel like changing all the settings on each workstation we set out to find a way to make sure this can be altered on the Cisco gear. What we found is that this only effects workstations connected to our core 6513 since our distribution switches are Catalyst 3750 and output flow-control is unsupported on those devices. On the 6513 all that needs to be done is to change the port settings with flowcontrol send off and this will resolve all OS X issues with line speed.

Turning off flow control on the switch should not cause any ill effects on performance if your network uses high level protocol like TCP as it already has a built in mechanism to control data flow rates and this basically duplicates the control gaining you nothing, in theory. When you turn off flow control you will get a momentary disconnect to what ever is connected to that port so not a good idea to do this on all ports during operation hours.