Spend some time today doing updates as that didn’t happens since 2017. Number 11 arrived in that year. Most of the holiday pictures where added however at this moment there is a significant amount of pictures missing from Japanese and Italian destination of 2016/2017. Italy is missing completely still and about half of Japan is done. For this year not many pictures to post unless the backyard is a holiday destination. I for sure am glad I have a backyard to use this year.

Update: Japan 2017 is complete and start of Italy is there, so is number 11.

The redirect to portal.dullaard.nl that was there on the www.dullaard.nl website since 2004 has now been replaced by a Modern UI homepage. This page is so modern it was written with notepad (and nano or vi after it was moved to its Linux based host) and should work with any browser that got released after 1998. On the other hand I’ve not written html pages since that period so thus far didn’t have to learn anything new. It has no CSS, javascript or any of the other features. It’s just a table formatted to remain centered on a screen. It can be squeezed a bit but the table backgrounds disappear on the right hand side which is the only drawback thus far. Maybe look into getting the tables fixed and as such allow for some sidescroll action or otherwise any expansion goes towards the bottom or in between but it will be a vertical scroller if things get added along the way. Anyway take a look at the source and you know what I mean by ahum… modern.

A lot of stuff is still pointing to the old portal pages, those will all be moved in due time to either secondary pages  on their own or pages in one of our blogs.

Update (September 2014): The tables cannot be squeezed any longer they are now a fixed width. Language specific versions for Dutch and Simplified Chinese are added. Sunny still has to check mistakes in the Chinese version so any errors in there are mine at the moment. Some links will revert back to the English version as the language specific version still needs to be created.

Update (July 2015): The above remark on not using JavaScript is no longer valid, it now contains a little bit of JavaScript to make the page clickable per tile rather than just the text itself.

The system that I’ve build last year is running out of memory, so now memory is affordable I’ve upgraded it to 32Gb from the 16Gb it had. This will have to do for another one and a half year.  Microsoft products seem to take up more and more memory, but with this memory I can experiment with all of the System Center products that are out there, which is why it was purchased. And the already existing Virtual Machines can all have a little bit more room as they all ran on low amounts of memory which in some cases even caused startup problems.

As it is standard desktop gear I replace it every three years as it does run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week except when there is a power outage and there is no UPS behind it. On the other hand, I’ve been living in Gouda for over 11 years and the amount of outages can still be counted on a single hand. I guess the next one will have 128Gb of memory and 5*2Tb of storage or a mix of SSD and spinning disks. I’ll see, it isn’t the end of 2014 yet as that’s about the time it will be replaced and the choice for Hyper-V and ESXi will present itself again.

Lack of choice, would have been easier to remain on VM-Ware, now I had to V2V them all over onto a Hyper-V platform. Bought new hardware which supported 16Gb of RAM as the old system was maxed out at 8Gb and I’ve been running out of memory space for a period now making choices what to run and what not to run. As the notification said on the homepage (expires 9th of November) the old server is replaced by a new one. This one runs on a Quadcore 2400S (65W processor) with 16Gb of RAM which in the future can be expanded to 32Gb by replacing all of the DIMMs in the system, this should cover for the coming years. Keeping the price to a minimum came with the consequence it was no longer on any compatibility chart for VM-Ware and indeed the disk subsystem was not recognized, so now we continue on Hyper-V and as far as I know Linux (non Suse) is not really supported but it runs fine (Debian). Another surprise was the power usage. The old one was just below 80 Watts when utilized, this one cuts 20 Watts of it and has one harddrive more (Five 7200RPM WD 2.5″ Laptop drives instead of four in the last one, slowly moved one by one as the VMs moved as well to the new server).

The old server will be configured as a new workstation so the 6 year old HPs I still have can find a new place to live. But before that happens need get a new processor fan, after running over three years 24/7 the bearings are just about to cave in. The system has been a bit noisier than usual the last few months. For the rest it is ready to start its second life.

As this whole thing is actually meant for testing WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) was installed with default settings. Never figured if I would use it longer, but after seeing decided it should replace the previous portal. However a default installation dumps the database files onto the system volume with all the consequences that go with it. In my case the system volume is tiny and as such I normally move data quite fast towards the data drive in order to protect the amount of diskspace on the system volume, however this program didn’t give an option to install the databases somewhere else. If you start looking on the web you see a lot of stories that will tell you how to do it, most of them being run through a command prompt application. If those would work I would have used them but for some reason or another they all ended in an error and as such that rendered them useless. In the end the move was very simple with only downloading one tool which was SQL Server Management Studio Express. After installing this tool you can connect to the database with the same servername as the command line tools did: \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query and then you can simply detach the databases, move them towards another drive and attach them again. Job was done in ten minutes. What more do you want? Do not use the default selections for this tool, you will end up with the same error as the command line tools did. This error says something like : An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server/Instance Specified) (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: -1). Good luck with the solution above anyway…