Troubleshooting

Happy Thursday!  My education in computer repair has devolved into my unorganized mucking about in Windows 8 trying to accomplish who knows what, breaking it, fixing it somehow, breaking something else in the process, going on walks, reading about the Windows 8 tablet Surface, trying to remember how to use Server 2008, and writing a board game.

The newer Microsoft server OSs come with a virtualization program called Hyper-V.  This is where you run Hyper-V, create a virtual machine (compared to a physical machine), install an OS on it, and that's about it.  Among its many uses, a lot of people right now are running virtual Windows 8 preview versions to get a hang of the OS without having to dedicate any hardware to it.  WHAT I DID WAS INSTALL WINDOWS 8 ON TWO COMPUTERS AND RUN HYPER-V ON ONE AND LOAD SERVER 2008 ON THE VIRTUAL MACHINE AND THEN JOIN THE PHYSICAL COMPUTERS TO THE DOMAIN.

Most of the problems I've run into while doing this have to do with my shady network.  Most of the time it shows up as "unidentified network" and doesn't allow me to change its name or location even though there's no reason why it shouldn't.  On top of that, when the non-Hyper-V machine has the wireless adapter in, it can't be bothered to network correctly.  So I finally got everything to work just fine by loading the domain controller before turning that one on, and keeping the wireless NIC out.  Then the network showed up as its proper self, Ivyfriends.local.

(The computers are called Ivywood and Ivybridge, the VM is called IvyVM, the virtual server is called Ivyserver, and the domain is Ivyfriends.local.)

BUT as far as I can tell, if Ivywood sees itself as a part of Ivyfriends.local, NONE OF THE APPS WORK.  Haha, as bugs go, this is pretty hardcore.  I fixed it by dismantling the VM, power cycling both machines, letting it connect to the wireless, and when the LAN connection was back to "unidentified network," the apps worked again.

I also spent the morning creating domain accounts and trying to see if I could set them up as roaming and copy the Windows 8 style account to other accounts.  Turns out if you set up your default account on the server, that desktop configuration will be able to be copied to other roaming accounts when you sign into them from the other computer.  But anything you do in the Windows 8 Start screen isn't going to translate into the roaming profile. 

So that was my day.

Also in Borderlands we punched dirt and blew up creepers in a mine.

-Steph