Cygon’s Blog

[Warning: rant follows!]

Now that the behemoth is released, I have a Windows Server 2008 trial version going again on my home NAT + File server. I had quite the trouble with Beta3 of Windows Server 2008, but expected the final product to be free of any such problems as I was encountering. Boy was I wrong.

The server is an AMD Athlon 3500+ with 2 GB of RAM (Corsair TwinX), four SATA drives (all WD - 1x 200 GB boot plus 3x 500 GB in a soft RAID 5) and a low-power passively cooled Asus GeForce 8300 card on an Asus NForce 4 mainboard.

I have to let off this rant because I’m so incredibly frustrated with this toy operating system. I’m not a linux guy and wouldn’t even remotely consider using it on my workstation for everyday work, but I’m seriously considering to go through the effort of configuring a complete linux environment just to get my home server running for good.

What the hell am I doing wrong? If what I’m experiencing is the state of things with Windows Server 2008, I can’t imaging anyone seriously using such a system professionally.

Here’s a list of the first 20 days of my Windows Server 2008 trial:

Suicide by Disk Cache

If someone downloads larger amounts of data from this server (> 2 GB), the server seems to start paging out vital parts of the operating system. It gets so bad that I cannot connect via Remote Desktop anymore.

Maybe it’s supposed to be okay paging out everything that’s not actively in use to make space for the disk cache. After all, Windows just has to store useless copies of huge, sequentially read files that aren’t going to be accessed again. That’s worth any sacrifice.

Suicide by Memory Fragmentation

Most BitTorrent clients experience strange freezes and are unresponsive about 90% of their time (literally!). Azureus works and so does Halite (the only x64 BitTorrent client I know of). Having some quite large downloads going (I’m currently downloading all of the MythBusters episodes :p), I leave my BitTorrent client running for days at a time.

Last Monday, I noticed the server wasn’t issuing my workstation a DHCP IP anymore. Attempting to log in to the server was impossible, it took several minutes to go from the password prompt to the welcome screen. I finally hard-resetted the thing (which I don’t like to do since it means a full RAID array resync)

Tuesday, the server was unresponsive again. I had to hard-reset.

Wednesday, the server had the same problem yet again. I had to hard-reset.

Thursday, unsurprisingly, was no change. Another hard-reset.

Friday and over the weekend, I resorted to rebooting the server every morning, noon and evening. That kept it working, but it’s not enough time for the RAID array to fully resync (which means after rebooting, it starts the resync all over again).

What happens is that windows’ memory usage slowly climbs all the time while my BitTorrent client is running. The process itself doesn’t eat up any more memory (assuming the windows task manager would at least show if Halite and Azureus leaked memory).

RAID Array Mess-Up

Today while I was tagging some FLACs I had just encoded (I’m in the process of re-ripping my entire audio collection using EAC), suddenly, the server’s X: partition disappeared (that’s the RAID-5 parition I store my music collection, DVD backups, virtual machines and stuff on).

The whole RAID array was just gone. Windows showed “missing” on 2 out of the 3 drives. I checked their cables tried to reactivate, but only got errors that the device was unavailable.

After rebooting, the BIOS screen showed all drives. Back in windows, a “foreign” RAID array was shown (that’s Windows slang for “inactive RAID array”). I imported it. Whenever I tried to assign a drive letter to the RAID parition, Windows reported that the “function is not supported”.

Another reboot later, my RAID array was running and had its old drive letter assigned again. But it’s resyncing. I don’t know if it’s still resyncing from last week’s happenings or resyncing due to the import. After leaving the disk management console open for 6 hours, there was still no progress indication (normally, after a few minutes, I remember a percentage being shown behind the ‘resyncing’ status).

DNS Failures

I don’t know if my NAT, routing table and DNS server have some configuration error or what else it might be, but sometimes, specific domains don’t resolve anymore through DNS.

The funny part is that, sometimes, they can be resolved on the server, but not on NAT clients. And sometimes, even stranger, they cannot be resolved on the server, but by NAT clients using the very same server.

Flushing the DNS cache on both client and server doesn’t change a thing in this situation.

Virtual Server Outage

On Beta3, I had installed Microsoft Virtual Server to run some build agents for my continuous integration server (TeamCity, now free, I can wholeheartedly recommend!).

After several hours of work getting Virtual Server installed and setting up the build agents, the whole thing was finally running.

For about 3 days. Then the network adapter of Virtual Server broke out of the blue and even reinstalling didn’t change a thing. I discovered several others with this problem and the only solution was to reinstall the whole server.

I’m not going to even try Hyper-V or Virtual Server on Windows Server 2008. I’m so sick of putting hours into this nonsense just to know that all my work will be destroyed again sooner or later.

It all started when my old Plextor PX-712 SA burned DVDs that a friend of mine was unable to read. Several months later, it would not even read plain DVDs anymore (normal pressed DVDs). It was still good for CD ripping, so whenever I wanted to watch a movie, I just ripped it on my other computer, moved the ripped files to a network share and watched it via ethernet.

Wednesday, I decided to restore my drive image because my Vista installation is acting strange. I burned my imaging boot CD to an old CD-R and tried to boot from it. It failed, again and again.

The Plextor drive was really good, but with only 2 years in service, its life expectancy seems quite low. Today, I replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-215D in the hope that Pioneer’s drives might be better (I chose the exact model referencing the AccurateRip Drive Database to find one that would be able to do perfect CD audio rips just like my Plextor drive.

- I cannot set the ripping speed to anything else than 40.0x. Although I know that it’s supposed to be a myth that drives work more accurate at lower speeds, at least for the Plextor drive, that myth held true.

- The drive’s C2 error detection seems to work well. All my CDs are as good as new (since I never use them, I rip them once and put them away), so this may be a moot point.

- Enabling EAC’s “overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out” seems to be a very bad idea for this drive. Whenever I enable that option, I get sync errors and suspicious sectors for the final track of a CD. Changing virtually any setting leads to a different checksum.

- The EAC offset test CD calculates a read offset of +8 (tested 5 times, always the same), but the AccurateRip Drive Database indicates that the read offset is +48. I’m baffled as to what’s going on here.

All in all, the drive seems to be capable of doing accurate CD audio rips and, although I’m wishing that I had bought a Plextor drive again, I think I’ll keep it.

Took another go at the same 10 km route I ran on saturday.

Time: 1:35 with an average heart rate of 161 bpm reaching up to 180 bpm. Killed 2005 kcal on the run alone!

Apparently, my body takes more than 4 days to fully recover from such a trip since I was still feeling the weariness from Saturday’s round. Another thing I can credit to the weight I put on during the past years, I guess.

It took quite a bit of pushing to reach the milestones in the same time, but it was a lot of fun. When I was at the lower end of the valley (directly before a 3 km uphill stretch) my legs were already heavy. I’m somehow growing a taste for this, the harder I have to fight myself, the more I enjoy it. I willed myself up the 3 kms without slowing down and felt proud

Shortly after, at 1:05 my right foot’s levator muscle started hurting and didn’t quite fulfill its task anymore, so my jogging form got a bit awkward. When at 1:35 I finished the route and stopped jogging, I immediately noticed the front muscle on my left thigh was done for, too. Luckily, it regenerated after a few wood-legged steps, so I didn’t have to hobble through town.

I think I’ll do a shorter regenerative run on Sunday. My legs definitely got stronger, since the last attempt, the muscles just weren’t fully restored again!