Another year draws to a close but it's just another month on The OS Quest. There was the usual mix of frustrations and a couple new pieces of hardware. And yea, a few words looking back on the past year. Happy New year! Read the rest »
Changing Time
This season's time change seemed to cause fewer problems than other recent changes. But it still wasn't problem free with my iPhone and some software having minor issues. Read the rest »
Lion Sleeps Through Moving Mice – A Frustrating Enhancement
Lion has brought a frustrating new feature that I like. Since first using Lion I've noticed that moving the mouse doesn't reactivate the screen if it's in power saver mode. Since I first encountered this on MacBooks with trackpads I simply tapped the spacebar to wake the machine. Barely a stretch from the trackpad. But it's a but annoying when using Synergy. Here's how I'm working around this enhancement, Read the rest »
Lion Automatic Termination Frustration
Apple's Automatic Termination feature in Lion hasn't improved the experience for me. At least now I know I wasn't losing my mind. Read the rest »
Dropping Dropbox
Dropbox has been in the news quit a bit lately, first a minor rewording of their policies to clarify that they could access files when needed generated some buzz. Then they screwed up an upgraded and completely remove password protection for about 4 hours. Then they again reworded their policies and tweaked them after a backlash. So it's time to say enough is enough. Read the rest »
Saturday Rants: Recent Pet Peeves
Some recent news stores hit on my pet peeves, AT&T buying T-Mobile, Yahoo saving data for my benefit, Apple tracking (and the reaction), beta hardware and Dropbox privacy. Read the rest »
RAID Rant: RAID is NOT Backup!
With the loss of Drive Extender in WHS and my search through RAID alternatives I’ve noticed a lot of people equate RAID (and RAID like solutions) with backup. RAID is not backup. RAID provides redundancy for one hardware component to improve uptime (and RAID 0 doesn’t even provide that). In the case of Windows Home Server Version 1 the folder duplication feature has the same limitations of RAID 1. Redundancy, not backup. I kept all my WHS v1 files duplicated because it would have been a huge pain to lose one non-duplicated drive in the pool and cause a lot of down time. So I duplicated it all – and still did backups. So why isn't RAID comparable to a backup? Read the rest »
Obvious Lessons Learned
Sometimes I never learn. Ran into two self-inflected speed bumps while rebuilding my Windows Home Server 2011. 1. Read The Messages – I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out why WHS 2011 didn’t like the drivers for the RAID controller. Then I finally read the message and didn’t jump to a conclusion. The problem was it couldn’t find my eSATA connected DVD drive. A switch to USB and all was well. 2. Power is important. Balance a power brick near the power strip’s power switch and it’s sure [...] Read the rest »
Frustrations of a Bad NIC
I’d recently mentioned that the performance of my WHS 2011 box wasn’t up to what I expected, and worse, it was inconsistent. Well, Saturday morning it was absolutely terrible, with constant timeouts when I tried to access files on the server. Read the rest »
OS Quest Trail Log #59: Spring Is Here Edition
This month on the OS Quest has been another light one. Mainly revolving around the upcoming release of Windows Home Server 2011. Read the rest »
