Dell R610 Memory Configuration Documentation
A situation came up at a client site where a Dell PowerEdge R610 / R710 server was being upgraded to a non-optimal memory configuration. The document Installing and upgrading DDR3 Memory was a short and concise reference for supported configurations.
The following two documents are Dell PowerEdge Technical Guides that also came in handy to when trying to decipher the supported memory configurations.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r610-tech-guidebook.pdf
VirtualBox Error VT-x is not available VERR_VMX_NO_VMX
While setting up a new SuperMicro SuperServer 5018A-FTN4 with an Intel C2758 CPU for a small lab environment an an issue appeared with VirtualBox. It was reporting that the VT-x processor extension wasn’t available when running on Windows Server 2012 R2.
At the time of writing this Google didn’t have any relevant search results for my configuration but I did find an article that suggested disabling the HardwareVirtEx directive in the virtual machines VirtualBox configuration file. This partially worked but was incredibly slow and the VM guest eventually crashed.
According VirtualBox Support Ticket #10694 other programs can also prevent VirtualBox from accessing the VT-x extensions which cause it to report them as not installed.
The solution was to remove the Hyper-V role because it prevented VirtualBox from utilizing the processor’s VT-x extensions even though I didn’t have any active Hyper-V guests running.
Removing an Existing Code Signing Certificate from a EXE
While trying to sign an EXE file with my code signing certificate SignTool kept failing with this error:
SignTool Error: SignedCode::Sign returned error: 0x800700C1
Either the file being signed or one of the DLL specified by /j switch is not a valid Win32 application.
The error was a result of the EXE being already signed.
Someone wrote a tool called delcert.exe which can easily remove existing code signatures. The tool is available for download from the XDA Developers Forum
Memory Issues with Git Pack
When working with large repositories git started to spew memory errors during certain processes. This article had some useful information about the pack.windowMemory and pack.packSizeLimit configuration settings.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4826639/repack-of-git-repository-fails
Blog Bookmarks – Avoiding the Chrome Bookmarks Black hole
As a tech person I scour the web looking for answers to problems and solutions to challenges. I’m continually bookmarking things I find helpful or interesting by clicking on the Chrome Browser’s address bar star to favorite them with the good intentions of finding it again someday. Despite the good intentions when that day comes trying to find the bookmark is like trying to pull information from a black hole.
Searching for favorites in Chrome is horribly inaccurate. The titles don’t match the content on the page that made me bookmark the page. The only time I manage to find bookmarks helpful is when I recently bookmarked something and find it using the recently added bookmarks list but even then I can’t always find it.
This lead me to find historio.us. This service indexes your bookmarks and allows them to be full text searched. It’s a great service but my bookmark list far exceeds the free account which continually tempts me to buy a subscription.
Paid historio.us accounts supposedly offers searching of RSS feeds too. Ever since Google killed Reader (still a little bitter over that) I’ve been making do with feedly which doesn’t offer searching of RSS history. With a historio.us account I could meet two goals with one purchase but needless to say I’m not quite ready to buy an account.
Before making the jump to historio.us I’m going to try posting all of my Bookmarks to the blog. Every time I’m tempted to click my wonderful little bookmark star to save the link I’ll resist the urge and create a blog entry in hopes of finding it again. In addition, it’ll make me a better netizen since the search bots will be able to tell what pages are useful to me.