No ProSet tabs after installing Intel drivers for PRO1000/PT Server Adapter

I rebuilt my Windows 7 Professional box this week.  It was time, and installing with SP1 slipstreamed allowed me not to have to load a third party AHCI driver for my 6Gb/s SATA controller.  Everything was fine until I realised my network speed was a little slow.  I hadn't installed Intel's driver and ProSet yet, so I downloaded the most recent.  After installation, the Advanced tab was gone, but no ProSet tabs.  Uninstall the driver, the card would get re detected, Advanced tab would return.  Reinstall Intel driver, Advanced tab gone, no ProSet tabs.  Updated to latest driver from Windows Update.  Same thing.  This went on for a couple of days with slight variations.  Here's what I did to ultimately get the Intel drivers and ProSet installed and working:

1. Uninstall the nic via Device Manager.  Check the "Delete driver" box.
2. Follow this to disable automatic driver installation. (That procedure only works on Win 7 Pro+)
3. Either re-scan for devices in Device Manager, or reboot your system. (I chose to reboot)
4. Once restarted, verify that the nic shows up under "Unknown Devices" as an "Ethernet Controler".
5. Revert the change you made in gpedit so you can install the correct driver now.
6. Install the appropriate version of Intel's drivers/utilities for your card.

You should now have all of the tabs for VLANs, Teaming, Link Speed, and Advanced.

Hope I save someone out there some time.

** ADDENDUM **

I upgraded the Intel drivers recently, and after that I was back to my original issue.  Turns out I also needed to uninstall VirtualBox to get things back to working.  

** ADDENDUM ** ADDENDUM **

Actually, if you do not install Host-Only networking in Virtualbox, the problem doesn't appear.

M.

DKMS for updated e1000e driver

So, since I updated the e1000e driver, I've gotten no more errors in my messages logs.  However, it does seem that every month or two, a kernel update gets pushed to Squeeze, which un-does my driver fix.  When I worked at Dell, and we needed driver to be recompiled for any kernel that got installed, DKMS was the solution.  I rarely have to use cutting edge hardware with, umm, mature operating systems these days (I use old hardware with old operating systems), I hadn't given it much thought.  While DKMS is awesome when someone else does all the upfront work for you, trying to sort it out on one's own is significantly less fun.  I spent several hours over the course of a couple of weeks reading various things, and all of them failing to do what I wanted.  Got back to this week and finally got it sorted out.

1. Dowload appropriate source for the e1000e driver: http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/e1000e%20stable/2.3.2/e1000e-2.3.2.tar.gz
2. Extract archive to /usr/src.
3. Create a dkms.conf in the /usr/src/e1000e-2.3.2 directory with the following contents:
   PACKAGE_NAME="e1000e"
   PACKAGE_VERSION="2.3.2"
   BUILT_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="src"
   BUILT_MODULE_NAME[0]="e1000e"
   DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/"
   AUTOINSTALL="yes"
   MAKE[0]="BUILD_KERNEL=${kernelver} make -C src CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DDISABLE_PM"
   CLEAN[0]="make -C src clean"
   REMAKE_INITRD=yes
4. Now just add the module via dkms:
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 add
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 build
   dkms -m e1000e -v 2.3.2 install
   
   After completion, you should restart the system to verify that the initial ramdisk got rebuilt correctly, and that the correct version of the driver is being used (modinfo e1000e).

Updating e1000e driver in Debian Squeeze

I kept having issues with my onboard Intel NIC on my Debian Squeeze NAS, the all too common:

Detected Hardware Unit Hang:

The version of the driver is significatly old, so I downloaded the newest from Sourceforge and tried to compile it. It failed to compile do to some power management code that is not in the kernel source from Debian.  Eventually I found someone else who'd had the same problem with the igb driver and solved it just by adding a flag to make:  CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DDISABLE_PM

Did the same when building the e1000e driver, compiled smoothly, remade initramfs, rebooted, haven't seen an error since.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in Virtualbox SLOOOOOWWWWWW

I've been trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in Virtualbox 4.2.4 for about a week now.  It would install eventually, but it was slow to do so, and almost unbearable to actually try to use.  Someone mentioned that if you had multiple CPUs configured for the VM, change it to one.  I had only one CPU assigned, so I changed it to two, and restarted my install.  It completed in less than five minutes.  Moral, if your having performance issues installing or using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, make sure you're using more than one CPU.

Linux Mint 14 - Suggestions in Search Bar from Google - Why doesn't this work?

So, I've been demoing various Linux OS' for a few days trying to figure out what to use to replace Ubuntu (12.10).  I didn't like Unity, I just didn't like the approach they were using.  I tried out three or four other distro/versions/respins before I tried out Linux Mint 14 (Cinnamon).  After a couple of hours of playing around with it, I was convinced that it was the right choice for my work flow/environment/etc.  I notice that Firefox doesn't even include Google for use in the Search Bar.  Fine, I follow their procedure and add it.  I look stuff up, I get a lot of Abstracts and papers, and not the results I was looking for.  Turns out I'd installed the Google Scholar search engine instead of the plain Google.  Fine.  Correct that, and now while I can search and they return "correct" results, I'm not getting any "suggestions" as I type my searches in to the Search Bar.  After a few hours (too many) I begin to suspect that its the search provider xml that is installed via the Linux Mint website,  I pull a copy of the search provider off a Windows box, drop it in the searchplugins directory, and magically it all work now.  The big tip off is that the Google icon for the version install by the Linux Mint website used a different icon.

Hope that helps someone.


*EDIT* - You can also download a fresh copy of Firefox and extract the searchplugin xml files from there and copy them over to your profile.

**EDIT** - You can also look through the Google entries at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ to find a search provider that does what you want (I wanted Suggestions).

Zenoss - WMI Counters for Disks

I mentioned previously that I was having an issue with my step-child monitoring system, Zenoss, where the WMI disk counters were not behaving correctly.  The disks would be found when the system was modeled (or re-modeled) but they would always show up "bad counter for..", instead of you know, working.  My original train of thought was related to the zWinUser and zWinPassword properties that were used to collect WMI stats from all of our Windows boxen.  However, I wasn't entirely convinced because we use the same user/password for all of the Windows systems in that domain, and none of the others was exhibiting this behavior.  After some more research and a little bit of actively NOT thinking about the problem, I realized that the all of the other WMI events/stats were being pulled just not disks.  It turns out you can disable perf counters for disks via the registry in W2k3 server, via this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Perfdisk\Performance\Disable Performance Counters

On my server that was acting up, this was set to 1.  I changed the value to 0,  and remodeled the device (its Zenoss, I do it everytime I change something) and all my events cleared themselves.

Pulling zWinUser and zWinPassword out of Zenoss ZopeDB

In my continuing saga of having to maintain a sparsely documented Zenoss instance.  I was trying to troubleshoot some WMI errors (that will be a later post), but I had no idea what the password was for the user we are using to pull this information from our various Windows servers.  And yes, I could have reset the password, but that may open a whole other can of worms that I didn't want to deal with.  So, using zendmd, which I mentioned previously, I used the following to pull zWinUser and zWinPassword:

$ zendmd
Welcome to the Zenoss dmd command shell!
'dmd' is bound to the DataRoot. 'zhelp()' to get a list of commands.
Use TAB-TAB to see a list of zendmd related commands.
Tab completion also works for objects -- hit tab after an object name and '.'
 (eg dmd. + tab-key).
>>> d = dmd.Devices.findDevice('192.168.1.11')
>>> d.zWinUser,d.zWinPassword
('DOMAIN\\user', 'password')
>>>

Good luck and godspeed...