Air Canada is testing WIFI Service

Air Canada is currently testing WIFI service provided by Gogo Internet Service. The service is available on a per flight basis for 9.95(Laptop) and 7.95(Smartphone)

Initially, the system will be available only in the continental United States via Aircell, which has built a high-speed mobile network for commercial and business aviation.

Air Canada plans to extend the system to other North American routes with a Canadian air-to-ground network.

The airline also released last month a free BlackBerry application that lets travellers track flight information, such as schedule changes.

I personally would pay the premium to be able to read online material, keep in touch with all my Black Berry Messenger Friends, receive emails, etc. So i hope that they implement this soon, as I am scheduled to take a long flight over the ocean in March!

Check out the full article here.

How to get your Free Windows 7 Upgrade

Well like many users around the world, you bough a PC with Vista on it, for me Vista worked fine, but I am an expert in my field, so yeah I would say most people were frustrated with Windows Vista, the saving grace is, as many people have already experienced, Windows 7. So you bought this PC with promises of getting a free Windows 7 Upgrade, now how do you get that copy of Windows 7? I have included an insert and link from a CNET article that will tell you just that, see below.

From the period of June 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010, many major PC makers are offering free upgrades to Windows 7 for those who buy a Vista-powered laptop or desktop. The deals are all essentially the same, and, as expected, have some exceptions and asterisks.

Be warned, if you bought a PC with Vista Home Basic, you will not be eligible for the upgrade. See the small chart just below.

• Windows Vista Home Premium → Windows 7 Home Premium

• Windows Vista Business → Windows 7 Professional

• Windows Vista Ultimate → Windows 7 Ultimate

Follow this link for the rest of the article.

-NS

Internet Explorer 9

Well its about time the Microsoft is putting some new and useful things into IE9, instead of waiting for Google Chrome or Firefox to implement some cool new feature, then just copy it… here is a statement from Dean Hachamovitch.

“This is a direct improvement to everybody’s usage of the Web on a daily basis,” Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky’s speech. “Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC’s graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better.”

A couple of interesting improvements are frame rates when resizing text, Bing Maps(frame rate jumps from 5-8fps to almost 60fps) Java scripting has been improved also. How did they do this? They are using something called Direct2D which lets IE9 use hardware acceleration for web graphics, much in the same was as 3D games harness the GPU.

I guess Microsoft finally realized that they have to pour some resources back into Internet Explorer considering that Mozilla Firefox has 25% of the browser share and IE slipping to around 63%. They definitely don’t want to slip below 60% that would look ugly.

Check out the video, its quite interesting. accelerated

-NS

Intel’s New Plans

Intel Nehalem-EX 6-core processor

Intel announced yesterday that it will be unveiling its six core processor, called Nehalem-EX, in the first half of 2010. The newest Intel chip will be targeted towards High Performance Computing (HPC) segment and will reportedly optimize server performance.

With the announcement of this new processor one can hope that it will drive the prices down of the previously released Core i5 and Core i7 Processors. I myself am still using a Core 2 Duo E4300 clocked at 2750Mhz(original clock speed 2200Mhz). I know, I know, I’m a bad person for overclocking, but to keep up with technology explosions I had to push my hardware to the limit. Next up for me is definitely a Core i5. So to Intel, keep announcing more cores and faster clock speeds, its only going to make it more affordable for me to make my next upgrade.

Also announced is that Hyper-threading is back on the new Core i5 and Core i7 Processors, Intel says that it was the smart thing to do, more instructions per clock cycle without using extra power.

-NS

Nvidia calling out Intel on their “tactics”

More news on Nvidia and Intel, or should I say Intel vs Nvidia.

Nvidia is the world’s leading supplier of “discrete,” or standalone, graphics chips but takes a distant second place in overall market share to Intel, which supplies “integrated” graphics built into the chipsets that accompany all of its processors. Mercury Research estimates the total market for graphics chips, including integrated graphics, at almost $10 billion in 2009.

I think the competition is good, I mean what else can Nvidia do but take their prices down for their “stand-alone” video cards… I currently am using a Geforce 8800GT and love it, I know it has its limitations, so I am always looking for the next best thing. AMD or Nvidia, personally I like them both, whomever gives me the best bang for my dollar wins!

Full story here.

-NS

HP buys 3Com

Here’s some news that I am a little late on reporting, I guess better late than never. HP hopes to help 3Com become a better competitor to Cisco, Cisco currently is the networking leader.

“Hewlett-Packard Co. announced Wednesday it will purchase networking company 3Com for $2.7 billion, and also preannounced higher fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and raised its outlook for fiscal 2010.”

Check out the full story here.

-NS

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Management

Found this story while surfing the net, seems that the management software for Red Hat’s virtualization software needs to be run from a Windows Server, they say that they will have a Linux version ready around 2010, but at the time of this story and for a little while anyways, you will need some sort of Windows box to managed the virtual environment. Read the insert below and then check out the full story.

“As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat’s new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers.

You’d be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft’s Windows Server.

That’s no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system.”

Here is the link to the full article.

-NS

Add System Restore to Server 2003

Download the file http://www.windowsreference.com/files/AddSystemRestore.zip and extract it

Double click on AddSystemRestoreEntries.reg (This will add some values to the registry). Click on Yes to continue

Then insert a Windows XP CD to your CDROM drive. Right click on sr.inf and click on install

Reboot the computer

Now you can find the System Restore utility from START–>All Programs–>Accessories–> System Tools –> System Restore

vSwitch and vSwif Problems

What happens when you cannot connect to the service console anymore, and even if you had a backup service console and it wasn’t working either, well i happened to me. When I attempted to attach a vmnic to a vSwitch, I got an error message, no matter what I tried I could not get it reconnected. Last ditch effort is to recreate the vswif interface. Below are the steps I took. I had to do the first 4 steps twice, as i had to vSwitches.

Note: On your system the vswif, vmnic, vSwitch numbers and network settings are different.

1.Run the following command to list the name of the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif -l

2.Run the following command to delete the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif –del vswif0

3.Run the following command to list the name of the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -l

4.Run the following command to delete the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -d vSwitch0

5.Run the following command to create the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch0

6.Run the following commands to create default port groups for vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -A “VM Network” vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswitch -A “Service Console” vSwitch0

7.Run the following command to create the vswif adapter:

esxcfg-vswif –add –portgroup “Service Console” –ip=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn –netmask=255.255.255.0 vswif0

8.Run the following command to verify that the settings in the network file are correct:

cat /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
GATEWAYDEV=vswif0
HOSTNAME=host.domain.com
GATEWAY=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn

9.Run the following commands to list all of the network adapters and associate a vmnic which has a link status of up:

esxcfg-nics -l
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch0

10.Run the following command to verify that the vmnic is associated with the vSwitch:

esxcfg-vswitch -l

11.Ping an IP address to check for network connectivity. If the ping fails remove the previous vmnic from the vSwitch and try another adapter that has a link status of up.

12.Once you have verified connectivity, you can then connect to Virtual Infrastructure client of the affected ESX Server, you may or may not have a bit a work ahead of you at this point, depending on iSCSI, etc…

Good Luck

-NS

How to Properly kill a VM

We all know that you can use the command “ps -ef |grep (vmconfig filename.vmx)” to find the PID for a VM, but I get confused as to which number that comes up is actually the PID… I found a new command that works much better. See below.

The Definitive way to Kill a PID process

The steps below are based on the fact that you already tried to use “vmware-cmd vmname.vmx stop; stop hard”

1.)    A final solution is to kill the PID (process ID). Issue the following command: “ps auxfww | grep <vmname>” to locate the correct PID (BTW: this cannot be done via *ESXTOP*). The first number to appear in the output is your PID. The PID can be used to terminate the process by issuing kill -9 PID.

2.)    Run vmware-cmd <vmname>.vmx getstate to see if it is now “off”, as it should be.

3.)    You can now go back into Virtual Infrastructure Client and start the machine.

-NS