Tech Spot

Wow - one of the largest banks in the world -- JP Morgan Chase -- has a website outage in the prime U.S. business hours of the day. The company I work for is substantially smaller, but we use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that hosts a friendly maintenance page whenever our "origin" web server farm goes down for planned maintenance or an unplanned outage.  In addition, some top-tier DNS providers also have the capability to re-route web traffic to a fail-over/DR site to maintain up-time.  Even if this is a DDoS attack, there are some technologies (including those in the aforementioned CDN) that can discard velocity attempts based on IP, geographic region, browser user-agents, etc.  If it's a botnet, well certainly then the traffic can be a lot harder to discern from legit traffic. I'd be happy to consult with them for a tiny fraction of any lost revenue or negative dollar impact of this outage to help them improve their web architecture.  Ha!

I had an issue where a Windows 2003 to 2008 upgrade (non-R2 since R2 does not provide an upgrade path from 2003) kept freezing at the graphical startup screen (black background with green scrolling status bar).  I was sure that it was an issue with choosing the OS type, but I tried both 2008 32-bit and 64-bit, and no dice.  Various forum posts on the VMware Communities didn't help, but the one thread below gave me an idea.  I changed the number of vCPU to 1 and then restarted (note the OS selector was set back to 2003 32-bit).  This worked, and got me back into the second part of the 2008 upgrade! http://communities.vmware.com/message/922147 The other thing which may have helped to resolve the "STOP:0x0000008E." BSoD was to manually edit the .vmx file with the following setting: piix4pm.smooth_acpi_timer = TRUE http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1897287

Skype 5.5 is quite possibly one of the most infuriating software releases ever.  As a monthly paying customer, I am quite disappointed.  Here are a list of my issues: Update reminders are too frequent and furious (clicking 'Not Now' is taken literally.. because a few seconds later it is no longer "now" and it asks you to update AGAIN). Volume slider has been moved inside the connection guide (why?!  there is PLENTY of space in the call window to leave it there). Dial tones (DTMF) are buggy.  If you frequently dial in to conference calls or bridge lines, you will probably have to keep trying or key in the tones slowly (very slowly). Solution: Downgrade to Skype 4.2.  I have been using it for a few days now and the dial tone situation is much improved.  I also have squelched the reminders (Tools > Options > Advanced > When a new version of Skype is available... [uncheck Automatically download, uncheck Notify me]). Skype 4.2 download link from OldApps .