{"id":380,"date":"2011-11-30T13:35:38","date_gmt":"2011-11-30T21:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=380"},"modified":"2011-11-30T13:35:38","modified_gmt":"2011-11-30T21:35:38","slug":"a-bit-of-trouble-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/a-bit-of-trouble-shooting\/","title":{"rendered":"A bit of trouble shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"

I posted a few months ago regarding my move to using a virtual machine<\/a> as my \u201cmail\u201d machine. I\u2019m still a huge fan of that approach, but in my new job (the really cool one working on the Xbox team!), I\u2019m running Win7 rather than server as my main machine. I looked into using an internal hosted VM server solution, but since the solutions I found are used primarily for testing, performance wasn\u2019t quite what I wanted (or what I was used to).<\/p>\n

Let me outline the problem. I don\u2019t look at email or twitter or my rss feed all of the time \u2013 in fact, most of my electronic communication time occurs when I\u2019m compiling \/ building (I could use that time to have a sword-fight<\/a>, but I find it better to at least pretend <\/em>I\u2019m productive). I love to group the \u201cnon-essential\u201d stuff together, and when I\u2019m waiting on a build, it\u2019s the perfect time to write email, documents, tweet (or sometimes blog).<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a>The problem is, that when I\u2019m compiling, my 12 cores <\/strong>are pretty busy. This makes reading email, or doing pretty much anything else that would like more than a few time slices of cpu power sort of suck.<\/p>\n

I have two computers (a desktop and a laptop), so I have an option of using my laptop for those tasks while the compiler elves are taking over my computer, but given the choice of using a 24\u201d monitor and a full size ergonomic keyboard over a 13\u201d monitor and compressed keyboard, which would you choose? To be fair, I adore my laptop (Lenovo X200s) \u2013 but I adore it because it\u2019s small and I can use it anywhere (including on an airline tray table while the monster man in front of me leans his seat all the way back for 8 hours straight). But it\u2019s not a computer I like to write large documents or presentations on.<\/p>\n

The solution, as many have already guessed, is to connect to my laptop via terminal server and use it from my desktop machine. The overhead of TS is small enough, that I barely notice a perf problem even at peak memory and cpu usage. The TS session even stretches my desktop to 1920×1080, so it\u2019s a pretty sweet setup. All that is good (and somewhat obvious), but few things in life ever go without a hitch.<\/p>\n

Despite how much I wanted<\/em> to love the setup, I noticed that my connection would drop frequently \u2013 and then it would take a minute until I could reconnect. I powered through it for a day or two (I tell myself that I was subconsciously gathering clues). Then finally, I found the clue that led me in right direction. I listen to music on Zune quite a bit while I work (I configured terminal server to play audio on the server machine (my laptop), so I select songs from the TS session on my desktop, and listen through headphones connected to my laptop). So\u2026I noticed that whenever my computer disconnected, I lost audio a few seconds later. The first few times this happened, I (ignorantly) assumed that because <\/em>I lost the TS connection, I also lost the audio. Then it hit me that since the audio is playing on my laptop, I should never lose audio\u2026unless the network connection was lost.<\/p>\n

Losing the TS connection and losing audio were both symptoms of the same root cause (lost network connection) \u2013 the only thing left to figure out was why two computers on the same subnet were losing their connection.<\/p>\n

I took a look at power management settings to ensure that my laptop wasn\u2019t suspending, but all was good. My next step was to look at my adapter settings to see if the network adapter was powering down for some reason. Sure enough, there was a setting named \u201cSystem Idle Power Saver\u201d that was enabled. I disabled the setting, and I\u2019ve only had one dropped connection all week.<\/p>\n

This example may sound more like yak-shaving than testing, but I\u2019ve always liked the trouble shooting aspect of testing. Going beyond \u201chere\u2019s a problem\u201d, to \u201chere\u2019s what (probably) caused the problem\u201d is, in my opinion) an important skill for testers.<\/p>\n

Oops \u2013 my build is done \u2013 time to get this posted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I posted a few months ago regarding my move to using a virtual machine as my \u201cmail\u201d machine. I\u2019m still a huge fan of that approach, but in my new job (the really cool one working on the Xbox team!), I\u2019m running Win7 rather than server as my main machine. I looked into using an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}