Server 2008 Notes Part 2
Continuing on from part 1, I’ve been less impressed with Server 2008.
- Random crashes have continued, still haven’t managed to pin down why or how. Almost all of my hardware is on the Windows HCL, the two which aren’t are the Intel ICH8 chipset (which Windows found a driver for anyway), and my Nvidia 8800GT (which I’ve installed the Vista64 driver). It seems to crash less after being up for a while. Since the crashing is hard resets, it’s almost certainly driver / hardware related, but I’m pretty stumped.
- Hyper-V is pretty sucky. Performance is below even VMWare for any OS but Server 2008, and it seemed to make my system less stable too. Server 2008 Performance is very good though. There are promised improvements coming for Vista Business, but they aren’t here yet.
- Using 6gb of RAM instead of 3gb has made no difference to the feel of the system. Or maybe it has, and Server 2008 is just significantly slower than XP32.
- The server manager tool is nifty, especially the performance viewer:
I’m undecided as to whether to keep Server 2008, move to Vista Business x64, or back to XP32. They all seem roughly equally acceptable right now.
Comment (0)Notes on installing Windows Server 2008 on a Desktop
After much pain installing Windows Server 2008 (x64, Enterprise, off the trial ISO from microsoft.com), I thought I’d note a few things here for future reference and the benefit of others:
- On my motherboard (Asus P5B-E (Intel ICH8 chipset)), Windows took a number of attempts to reinstall. Very aggravating! I finally installed it by plugging my boot into an ICH8 socket (as opposed to one controlled by the non ICH8 chip) and setting the ICH8 SATA drive mode to ‘RAID’ in the motherboard. IDE didn’t work and AHCI didn’t either.
- DEP is the devil. I had random crashes until I changed it from opt-out to opt-in. The setting is in the same place as on WinXP.
- This site has lots of useful info on setting up Server 2008 to be a little more usable.
- NVidia Vista64 drivers work fine.
- Opt in to the customer experience program. It has so far direct linked me to the latest ICH8 drivers, I’m hopeful it will prove more useful than the WinXP version.
- My machine still hardlocks instead of shutting down, but it happens after windows has done all its housekeeping and only seems to hurt my pride.
Migrate from SourceForge SVN Repository
Today I had to migrate a project from its SourceForge SVN repository to a new standalone machine. Here’s how I did it:
First, dump the SourceForge repository to your local machine:
mkdir PROJECTNAME
cd PROJECTNAME
#Add –progress and -v for more detail during transfer
rsync -az PROJECTNAME.svn.sourceforge.net::svn/PROJECTNAME/ .
Create the new repository:
svnadmin create /path/to/new/repo
Now you need to convert the SF.net data into a SVN dump file:
svnadmin dump . > ~/PROJECTNAME.dump
Then load the dump file into the new repo:
svnadmin load /path/to/new/repo < ~/PROJECTNAME.dump
You can combine those last two steps into one too:
svnadmin dump . | svnadmin load /path/to/new/repo
Comments (2)Desktop, July 2008
Two people this week asked me what my desktop looks like:
