In 2005 I bought a 1999 Subaru Forester. I had previously owned a 1997 Subaru Impreza Outback, and while it was a fun car, it had awful transmission problems – I think we ended up getting it replaced. After the Impreza I vowed never to get another Subaru. The AWD is great in the snow (at the time I had bought the Impreza I was living in Albany, which is snowy enough that AWD makes sense) but it was just too expensive to maintain. Despite my vow, I somehow ended up buying the ’99 Forester in 2005. This was a pretty versatile car – decent on gas, big enough (but not too big), and AWD for the snow – and I got a decent price for it. It was pretty good for a while, I think we got about 2 good years out of it before it really went downhill. The transmission went and I kicked myself for having bought another Subaru. I brought it to my mechanic and he basically said it would cost more to fix it than the car was worth, so I ended up driving it for 3 more years with a blown 1st gear and with it burning oil.
Continue reading “2010 Hyundai Sonata – 1 year later”
TP-Link TL-WR841ND v7 802.11n router, wireless dies after a few days
I mentioned in a previous post that I got the TP-Link TL-WR841ND 802.11n wifi router and it solved the speed problems I was noticing with wifi connections since going from FiOS to Cablevision. This seems to be the case still, however I’ve now had another problem with the TP router. Basically, wireless becomes unusable and the web UI becomes inaccessible. The SSID still shows up but I can’t get an IP address. When accessing it from the wired LAN via a browser, the connection times out – apparently whatever’s going on inside the router is also crashing its internal webserver.
Power-cycling the router resolved the issue both times it occurred (most recently tonight), but twice is two times too many. Tonight I downloaded and installed DD-WRT v24-sp2 and configured it. It only took a few minutes – I was pretty impressed with dd-wrt – though I was surprised not to see SNMP monitoring included. Not sure if I missed it in the UI but I assumed it would be under “Services,” and I didn’t see it there. I tried snmpwalk against the router and it returned nothing, so it’s not on by default.
Anyway, hopefully dd-wrt will give me better luck than the native TP-Link firmware. It seems to be a good router hardware wise, but crashing every few days negates that.
Update: April 19, 2011: I’ve had DD-WRT running for a few weeks now on the TP-Link router and it’s been great. No reboots required. For some reason DD-WRT doesn’t seem to have SNMP available, at least not through the web UI, but other than that it’s far better than the default TP-Link software.
Autodiscover mysteriously stopped working (Exchange 2010)
I had Autodiscover working for months but recently it just stopped. I’m not sure why, but it may be related to removing the last Exchange 2003 servers from service recently. Maybe some setting got wiped from AD when I uninstalled Exchange 2003 (as per the procedure Microsoft gives). Basically what was happening was that the email address field was being autopopulated by the user’s UPN rather than their email address. Since we have a single label domain, the UPN isn’t a valid email address, and autodiscovery fails.
Anyway, I ran Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory and it looks like the autodiscover URL isn’t set. Pretty sure I set this at some point.
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -server exch2010fe1 | fl InternalUrl,ExternalUrl InternalUrl : ExternalUrl : [PS] C:\Windows\system32>
I just piped this to Set-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory to correct the problem:
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -server exch2010fe1 | Set-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -ExternalUrl 'https://webmail.example.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml' -InternalUrl 'https://webmail.example.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml' [PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -server exch2010fe1 | fl InternalUrl,ExternalUrl InternalUrl : https://webmail.example.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml ExternalUrl : https://webmail.example.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml [PS] C:\Windows\system32>
After resetting the InternalURL and ExternalURL, autodiscover works again (we have SRV records that tell Outlook to look at webmail.example.com for the Autodiscover service).
Hooray!
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