Some Notes on the Machines

Some great info and tools at the page below, and scroll down to the bottom for the jackpot:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/hpsupportassistant/pc-diags.html

It may ask for a CSO Number and an Agent ID. Use “1234” (no quotes) for both.

Vivaldi is looking very good so far, Windows Mac and Linux:

http://vivaldi.com

It is possibly the only browser for 32-bit Linux which will do Netflix and other DRM’d video. To do this, you need the ffmpeg codecs package and also widevine. For Netflix, you also need to start it like this (use vivaldi-snapshot if that’s what you have):

vivaldi-stable --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36'

Vivaldi does not yet have built-in synchronization of bookmarks et cetera, but one can use the excellent EverSync to take good care of this, it also works amongst Firefox, Chrome, IE, Android, iOS, and even Windows phones.

Something very like a best practices analyzer / BPA for Office, 32-bit and 64-bit, versions 2007 and newer, both MSI and click-to-run:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36852

Something new:

https://www.netspotapp.com/netspot-windows.html

Some very interesting data:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/networking/technologies/network-subsystem/net-sub-performance-tuning-nics

Sometimes it will happen that the Default profile is corrupt. This will make it impossible to log in on a PC as a new user, the system will be unable to create a new user profile. Here is a solution:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/fix-user-profile-service-failed-logon-new-user-profile-error-windows-7/

This has been happening on long-installed machines for quite a while. But in the last week, four different sets of Windows 7 64-bit install media, over seven different reloads, have had Windows Update get stuck, or freeze, while searching for Windows updates, eating 100% of one CPU core. Several changes in reload pattern were attempted, some of which included WSUSoffline, without success. Profoundly expert help provided the following. Before deliberately attempting Windows Update, we are to install these, in this order:

1. Servicing stack update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1: September 20, 2016:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3177467

2. July 2016 update rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3172605

3. September 2016 update rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3185278

Windows Update may get stuck again, searching for new updates, the first time any of the above is attempted. If this occurs, each time, we do this:

1. In TASKMGR, terminate process wusa.exe
2. Restart service wuauserv
3. Try the install again.

The second time we do each install (after the termination and service restart), the popup for searching for Windows updates comes up for 3-10 seconds, and then we are asked whether we want to install. We then say yes, and it installs. Then we move to the next one of the three!

Increasingly, nslookup is not installed by default in major Linux distros. On Arch-based and Debian-based distros, it’s in package dnsutils,

Here are settings useful to maximize performance of a hardware network interface. Virtual guests benefit by these being applied to their virtual host, only. Not all of these exist on every NIC. There are also many settings which should not be touched, or should be touched only when the toucher knows what they are doing! The below have always helped when this writer has found them available to try. Do be warned, the NIC will go offline for 2-10 seconds after you Apply most of these.

1. Install the most current drivers for NICs and also motherboard chipset. In at least one case, the server vendor had only an outdated and unreliable driver available for download, the one which worked well for years came from Intel’s web site.
2. “DMA Coalescing” on.
3. “Enable PME” off.
4. “Energy Efficient Ethernet” off.
5. “Green Ethernet” off.
6. “Gigabit Lite” off.
7. “Adaptive Inter-Frame Spacing” on.
8. All offloading on.
9. “Interrupt Moderation” on.
10. “Interrupt Moderation Rate” should be “Adaptive”.
11. “Scaling”, should be “on” or “Enabled”.
12. “Receive Side Scaling” on.
13. “Receive Side Scaling Queues” to maximum.
14. There are cache settings on all server-class NICs, separate for send and receive. They are usually called “Receive Buffers” and “Transmit Buffers”, or “Receive Descriptors” and “Transmit Descriptors”. Set them to the maximum. For current Intel server NICs the defaults are usually 256 or 512, and the maximums are 2048; for a few other kinds, one or the other is 5000 or more; for others it is much less. Each descriptor takes 2K of RAM, which in today’s multigigabyte world is well worthwhile. Some older Broadcom gigabit NICs will yellow-flag if they are set to 2048; for these, set receive to 750, transmit to 1500.
15. In the NIC’s “Power Management” tab, turn everything off. This may have to be abridged if Wake-On-LAN is used. Some NICs, notably some Realtek, will automatically turn power management back on at boot; this needs to be fixed through group policy.
16. In SBS 2008, only one NIC (or one NIC team) is permitted to represent the server on the network. If there are two active NICs, you will have to turn one off, or crashes and unpredictable behavior will result sooner or later.

When this happens to OWA, do this in Exchange PowerShell:

Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory "EXCHANGESERVERNAME\owa (default web site)"
New-OwaVirtualDirectory

This came from here:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/f9c0ca61-2e64-4a75-81ae-5c7c119a96fb/owa-2010-users-cant-attach-files?forum=exchange2010