Steve's Blog

One of the things you’ll notice quickly is that by default, Windows Vista will not map samba shares – nor can you use Samba as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller). This is due to the default security policy of Windows Vista only using NTLMv2 for authentication – something Samba doesn’t support as yet.

To fix this, run (Win+R) “secpol.msc”

Navicate to Local Policies -> Security Options

Change the value of the policy “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level” from “NTVLM2 responses only” to “LM and NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”

This should now allow Windows Vista to both map network drives based on Samba servers, and use Samba as a PDC.

I’ve been looking at replacing my home desktop system with something a little newer. Gone are the days of AGP, DDR400 and HyperThreading. These days it’s all about the number of cores and PCI Express. The Mac Pros are a very tempting machine – being Intel based, you can still run Windows XP on there if required for all those important programs (such as Half Life and CounterStrike ).

This is until you look under the hood a little. The majority of the hardware is fairly generic – until you get to the memory subsystem. Apple have chosen to go with FB-DIMM memory while the rest of the generic industry has gone with straight DDR RAM. This means that on average, the memory latency involved with the Mac Pro system can slow them down on CPU intensive things (like Half Life etc) by a whopping 10%. Add this to the expensive base price of the Mac Pro compared to generic hardware and things get a little dissapointing.

I am certainly hoping that Apple look at addressing this (no pun intended ) and looks at removing the FB-DIMM based RAM on the Mac Pro and instantly giving their lineup a 10%+ speed gain – bringing it inline with the rest of the industry. Something I doubt will happen however

Here’s your chance to once again be part of the select group that makes Windows Live Messenger better. We’ve added new features and we need your help to make sure they’re perfect. The new features include:

You can download from here. As always, Ahmed has wasted no time and has the ad remover for this version here.

When you throw them all together, you have a nice virtualised VoIP server with excellent support for up to 4 FXO or 4 FXS modules per card! Although this seems quite simple, giving direct hardware access to a virtualised machine is not the most simple thing to do. This being the case, I’ve documented how to do it over here.

Let me know if there’s more that should be added!