The essence of what I alluded to my post yesterday about the President’s actions with respect to the auto industry was nicely captured by David Brooks in today’s New York Times:

Well, the president certainly acted tough on Monday. In a show of force, he released plans from his Office of People Who Are Much Smarter Than You Are. These plans insert the government into the car business in all sorts of ways. They pick winners (new C.E.O. Fritz Henderson) and losers (Rick Wagoner). They basically send Chrysler off into the sunset. Joe Biden will be doing car commercials within weeks.

This new Office of People Who Are Much Smarter Than You Are will not only run the auto industry, they will also run the energy industry, the financial services industries and the the healthcare industry.

I am somewhat intrigued to see how this will all play out. I am quite confident that, if brought to fruition, the plans for these industries will make Americans generally worse off than they otherwise would have been. What is hard to predict is the magnitude of the suffering induced (so small isn’t even noticed, or so large that people’s standard of living actually drops noticeably) or what the reaction to noticeable suffering might be (a commitment to “cure” still more market failures, or a realization that enough is enough).

My fear is that even if the failure is manifest and people are convinced that enough is enough, the current Republican Party lacks a message that could channel an opportunity into a deeper understanding of the dangers of the fatal conceit evidenced by this administration. My fear is that one set of conceits would be replaced by another.

I found the following passage from President Obama’s remarks on the U.S. auto industry striking:

It's with deep reluctance but also a clear-eyed recognition of the facts that we've determined, after careful review, that Chrysler needs a partner to remain viable.  Recently, Chrysler reached out and found what could be a potential partner -- the international car company Fiat, where the current management team has executed an impressive turnaround.  Fiat is prepared to transfer its cutting-edge technology to Chrysler and, after working closely with my team, has committed to build -- building new fuel-efficient cars and engines right here in the United States.  We've also secured an agreement that will ensure that Chrysler repays taxpayers for any new investments that are made before Fiat is allowed to take a majority ownership stake in Chrysler.

When did the President of the United States start making evaluations about the appropriateness of potential merger partners for private companies, the strength of such merger partners’ management, the value of their technology, their product mix, the best locus of production, and the priority of different tranches of their debt?

I guess at the same time he started picking their CEO’s and having the United States guarantee their warranty terms.

The White House press office cannot even bring itself to quote the concluding sentence in the remarks about GM: “Let me be clear: the United States government has no interest or intention of running GM.”

Sure… as long as GM (and others) do exactly what the administration wants.

Businesses (and citizens) of the United States should consider Gerald Ford’s warning that “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

The introduction to a draft article on the regulation of Credit Default Swaps has an excellent explanation for what went wrong at AIG. It has everything to do with the mispricing of risk associated with mortgage backed securities and little to do with Credit Default Swaps themselves.

HT: Marginal Revolution

I spent some time this afternoon looking around the web for discussion of the Friday evening’s Battlestar Galactica finale and the best I came across is Tim Goodman’s (including the comments!).

A few of my own thoughts that I have not seen elsewhere:

First, to me one of the most interesting aspects of the show has been Gaius Baltar’s theology and its many incarnations. It was nice to see it play such a prominent part in the conclusion of the show. If someone else doesn’t beat me to it, I’d like to trace that evolution.

Second, I read many complaints that the story could have been wrapped up more neatly had the show had a set arc that was followed from the inception of the series through its conclusion. That may be the case, but we would have missed out on many of the great intermediate developments that people have really liked. I have really enjoyed listening to Ron Moore’s podcasts after watching each episode. Among other things, they relate how much of the show has been modified on the fly, usually to make the story better. Those sorts of modifications have enhanced the series as a whole and would not have been possible in a series with a more defined arc.

Third, Ron Moore’s podcasts have made me more more willing to forgive things that seem “unrealistic” because often there will be an acknowledgment of such aspects of the show with an explanation of why they were necessary because of a limitation of the medium, or because they enhanced the story telling, e.g. the helmets have lights on the so you can see the actors’ faces.

Fourth, to me the fact that the story ended 150,000 years ago on Earth makes the ending somewhat bittersweet, despite being ostensibly upbeat. The Star Wars stories took place a long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but you could imagine the stories continuing and progress being made, legacies being carried on etc. In contrast With the Battlestar Galactica ending we now know that all the individuals we grew to care about over the life of the series are gone, and have been gone for 150,000 years. Their only legacy is an impersonal one: that they were instrumental in seeding the earth. That’s not nothing, but it is still a little sad.

Two weeks ago I had Comcast come by to replace the CableCard in one of my Vista Media Center’s CableCard tuners. For a long time, every so often the tuner would fail to record a show because the tuner would not be able to tune any channels. A restart would usually fix the issue.

The situation deteriorated, however, to the point where a restart would not fix the issue, so I called Comcast which did a variety of things including replacing the CableCard, whereupon the tuner worked, but wouldn’t display any pairing information.

When the tuner stopped working several days later, I called Velocity Micro (the maker of the PC) and they sent out a new OCUR tuner. A few days ago I replaced the OCUR tuner. That was a bigger pain than it should have been because I needed to reroute a power cable that had been tucked away under two other cards in the system. That required removing those cards, reinstalling the cards, fiddling with the graphics card to get it to actually go in the slot, accidently displacing a RAM SIMM in the process, and losing and then recovering a couple of screws that hold the cards in place.

After Comcast sent a signal to the card, it worked fine for a couple of days, but today, both OCUR tuners has stopped working and system reboot was necessary.

I hope the I find that the OCUR tuners become more reliable now, but I’ll just have to wait and see.

I had been having incredibly bad stability issues with my the PC in my home office. They were so bad that I gave up on trying to use the PC until the problems were fixed. At times the PC would not even boot and inevitably each session would end with a Blue Screen of Death and a hard stop error. Among those stop errors were 0x00000024, 0x000000D1, 0x0000007A and 0x0000007B and one time the source was identified as NTFS.sys, but they were really all over the board.

Several hours long sessions on the phone with Velocity Micro, they systems manufacturer and hours of memory and hard drive tests failed to reveal a cause. The system was ultimately approved for return to the manufacturer for testing there.

As I was getting ready to send in the system I noticed that there was a 2GB USB memory stick that I had been using for Vista’s ReadyBoost that I had inserted into a USB port on the back of my monitor. I removed and attempted to reformat it because I would no longer be needing it for ReadyBoost while the PC was in the shop. The reformat failed… on several different machines.

I thought perhaps this might be the source of my problems and so far that hypothesis has been born out. I have had no crashes in the approximately four days since I removed the USB key.

What makes having servers located in the unfinished basement tolerable is that most work on them can be done via Remote Desktop session that allows using those PCs remotely, just as if you were sitting in front of them.

After transitioning to Small Business Server 2008, I found that I could get a remote desktop to any PC in the house except the Vista Media Center PC running Vista Ultimate. I discovered that I needed to manually allow Remote Desktop connections in the Firewall settings on the Media Center PC. This had not been necessary on any of the other Vista Business PCs in the house. I wonder if this has something to do with the Media Center PC being dragged into the Servers group in the Group Policy editor (a prerequisite for allowing Media Center Extenders to connect).

Installing J River’s Media Center 13 on the 64-bit installation of Windows 2008 that comes with Small Business Server 2008 was no problem.

However, allowing other devices and PCs to connect to it required some tweaking of the Firewall to add Media Center 13 as an exception to the firewall and also to allow connections over UDP port 1900 (evidently required for identifying UPnP devices) the port the library server runs on (2003 in my case) and the port the UPnP server runs on (2834 in my case).

I noticed that after a restart of Windows 2008, the exception for Media Center 13 needed to be checked again in the Firewall configuration. I am not sure yet whether this an anomaly, or maybe a Group Policy setting resetting that Firewall setting.

Last night I managed to get HomeSeer 2.3 (the application that does home automation tasks like turning on lights and setting thermostats) running on our home’s new Small Business Server 2008 box. Migrating the application from SBS 2003 was simply a matter of:

• Running the HomeSeer installation application
• Copying the Homeseer folder (and subfolders) from the old installation on SBS 2003 to the new HomeSeer installation folder
• Running HomeSeer and doing a File\Open on the Sample.MDB file in the HomeSeer directory to load all my device and event information
• Plugging the PowerLinc USB device into a USB port on the SBS2008 machine
• Changing the Windows 2008 Firewall by going to the Exceptions Tab and selecting “Add Programs” to add the HomeSeer application

I tried running HomeSeer as a service, but no commands seemed to be sent out to devices, although it received and acted on events generated by devices without any problem. These problems may have been caused by something else, but I’m not sure its worth the trouble to find out if it is possible to run as a service on Windows 2008 for two reasons: (i) it is not recommended by HomeSeer; and (ii) I am running J River’s Media Center and that needs to be started manually (so it is no big deal to restart HomeSeer as long as I am already starting Media Center).

After connecting our Media Center PC to Windows Small Business Server 2008’s domain this weekend, yesterday I was distressed to find that usually within minutes after starting and extender session, Media Center would crash hard to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). The information on the screen identified an “RDR_File_System” error, code 27 relating to MrxSMB20.sys.

Searches of the internet suggested disabling MrxSMB20.sys (which make extender sessions impossiible) or that this might be caused by a lack of system memory (which was not the case) or some other driver issue (which turned out not to be the case).

At this writing (and several hours of extender sessions without a crash) the problem appears to have been caused by the Drobo attached to the SBS 2008 box that I use to share photos, music and videos that Media Center has access to. I noticed odd behavior when I tried to access those  network shares on other PCs: the file structure would appear, but no files would be shown. Then I noticed on the server itself, I could see the files but not when I accessed the shares through the network part of Explorer. During a call to Data Robotics tech support, we basically reset the Drobo, swapped in a new USB cable and it seems to be working fine now. But I suspect that the problems will recur.

After our Windows Small Business Server 2008 upgrade this weekend, one of our three present (one is being replaced) Xbox 360s would not connect to our Media Center PC as a Media Center Extender (giving error code –209 in the Media Center application log in the Event Viewer). The other two connected after following Sean Daniel’s advice. The symptoms were very much like those described in this long thread at The Green Button.  After doing two things this evening, the problem was solved: (i) change a static IP address on our network that duplicated that assigned to the Xbox by our DHCP server; and (ii) download an update for the Xbox dashboard by testing the connection to Xbox Live (this is a device that had not connected to Xbox Live in a long time).

I note for the reference of myself and others in the future some additional links of possible steps to solve this problem at the Xbox Forum and the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

I spent most of this past weekend migrating our home server from Windows Small Business Server 2003 to Windows Small Business Server 2008. If I had it to do all over again, I would have migrated to Windows Home Server instead.

As the rest of my family was out of town for the weekend, I had set aside the weekend to do the migration. After doing some reading and preparation in the days ahead I was ready to begin on Friday evening.

I attempted to install SBS 2008 on a new (clean) Dell server connected to our network and to a migration install. I got though the initial install process only to discover that it had produced an error saying that it could not install certain updates. It suggested reformatting and trying the installation again.

Late Saturday morning, I attempted in vain to find definitive information on the source of the error. In looking at the  WSUS on the SBS 2003 machine I noticed that some updates for Windows 2008 had not been approved. Perhaps that was the problem. I approved the updates, restored SBS 2003 from a backup, and attempted another migration installation of SBS2008. This time the installation completed, but noted that some updates had not been installed. The error implied it was ok to proceed after any necessary updates were installed. So I did do.

I then went through the long involved migration process outlined in Microsoft’s migration guide (which is about a 100 page document). Although it was involved, that process proceeded apace and was seemingly all but complete by late afternoon. The only final step involved demoting the old SBS 2003 server from being a domain controller.

Unfortunately, I noticed that there were certain function that weren’t quite functioning (in fact none of the client PC’s could log on to the new server!) correctly and the source of the problems appeared to the by RPC-related errors. Thinking that the problem might be related to remaining SBS 2003 domain controller, I tried demoting it,but was unsuccessful in doing so. Related problems appeared to be preventing transition from the old SBS 2003 machine to the new SBS 2008 server.

I then spent hours searching on the error codes I saw and running various diagnostics in an attempt to fix the problem. All to no avail. DCDIAG.exe identified a number of problems with the setup of the domain, but it wasn’t obvious how to fix them. Presumably these errors were baked into my existing SBS 2003 domain. I had run SBS 2003 Best Practices Analyzer prior to the migration and my SBS 2003 machine had been given clean bill of health, but I probably should have run some additional diagnostics as well.

After a fruitless search for a solution later Saturday night I decided to just to a clean SBS 2008 install, manually move Exchange data to the new server via Outlook clients, and the set up the domain manually. Early Sunday morning (late Saturday night) I completed the install of SBS 2008.

Sunday I awoke midmorning and started to collect Exchange data to move to the new system. This proved more difficult that I had thought (and I probably should have focused more on this issue, but I figured I could always go back to an backup of the SBS 2003 server) and I ended up getting the information from OST files on a number of client PCs. Luckily we had been running Outlook in cached mode! This a few hours. I then commenced connecting client PCs, setting up users, groups, and file shares on the SBS 2008 server.

I was not quite out of the woods yet, however. Sunday afternoon I discovered that the Xbox 360’s we use as Media Center Extenders could no longer connect to the Media Center PC that is part of our domain. A couple of hours of testing and finally a Google search revealed the solution (changing the group policy status of the Media Center PC to that of a server). Two of our three Xboxes could now connect. (A third cannot, but I am not convinced that this issue is SBS 2008 related.)

Early Sunday evening the new SBS 2008 machine had downloaded 23 updated and proceeded to apply them and restart. After the restart, various services were not working resulting in anything that needed access to the domain controller producing an error. At this point, I was considering giving up on SBS and just going to Windows Home Server. Luckily, restarting the NetLogon service and then a half a dozen other dependent services (helpfully identified by the SBS console) fixed those problems and the SBS 2008 has been running fine ever since (except that Sunday evenings scheduled backup needed to be run manually). A few other installations and tweaks and I was done for the evening.

Monday, was a work day, but I managed to correct a problem with Remote Web Workplace access, by some combination or propagating a DNS entry for remote.[domainname].com instead and running the network connection wizard again. I ended up installing Orb and J River Media Center on the Media Center PC (why take chances with these on 64-bit Windows 2008?). I did install my AIS Backup software on Windows 2008 without incident. Finally, I ended up installing several family networked printers on the Vista Media Center PC and then sharing them from there. (Again, I figured why deal with trying to make 32-bit client drivers available on the SBS box when I had a 32-bit Vista box that could serve the same function.)

I three days after starting the migration process it is pretty much complete with a couple of known exceptions: HomeSeer 2 is still running on the old SBS 2003 box, until I figure out what to do with it and I need to configure the Media Center PC so that I can get remote desktop access to it. Everything else (including out media center extenders, network printers, Roku Soundbridges and Ikan have all adjusted well to the new domain. I hope they stay happy for the four-years I hope pass before any more migrations!