fluggelgleckheimlen

Summary

Windows Server 2016 ReFS driver crashes when trying to mount ReFS 3.4 that disguised ReFS 3.1.

Affect

Windows Server 2016
Tested with KB4483229 applied

Not affect

Windows 10 v1809
Windows Server 2019

How to crash

Boot from Install media of Windows 10 v1809.

Custom Secure Boot configuration while deploying a new Virtual Machine

The Secure Boot configuration is stored in NVRAM. If the NVRAM contains no Secure Boot configuration (a freshly deployed VM, or a VM for which the .nvram file has been deleted from the datastore), the Secure Boot configuration will be reset to the defaults described in the UEFI Specification (the variables named PKDefault, KEKDefault, dbDefault and dbxDefault). You can use advanced VM config options to control those defaults, through which you can pre-populate the Secure Boot configuration before the VM is first powered on.

If you want to deploy the certificates as part of the VM's configuration, copy the DER-encoded certificate into the VM's directory and add the following advanced VM config options:

uefi.secureBoot.dbDefault.file0 = "custom-cert.der"

where "custom-cert.der" is the name of the DER-encoded certificate file within the VM's directory. You can repeat that for file1, file2, file3, etc., to add multiple certificate

About

I faced bandwidth issues between a WG Peer and a WG server. Download bandwidth when downloading from WG Server to WG peer was reduced significantly and upload bandwidth was practically non existent.
I found a few reddit posts that said that we need to choose the right MTU. So I wrote a script to find an optimal MTU.
Ideally I would have liked to have run all possible MTU configurations for both WG Server and WG Peer but for simplicity I choose to fix the WG Server to the original 1420 MTU and tried all MTUs from 1280 to 1500 for the WG Peer.

Testing

On WG server, I started an iperf3 server
On WG peer, I wrote a script that does the following:
- wg-quick down wg0
Edit MTU in the /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf file

Version number is reported by fsutil fsinfo refsinfo, available on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.

ReFS 1.1

Version of formatted by Windows Server 2012.
Version 1.1 is used already in Windows Server 8 Beta. I have never seen version 1.0.
Can use and store alternate data streams, when mount on 8.1/2012 R2 or later.

ReFS 1.2

Version of formatted by Windows 8.1, Windows 10 v1507 to v1607, Windows Server 2012 R2, and when specified ReFSv1 on Windows Server 2016 or later.
Cannot use alternate data streams, when mount on 2012.

Thunderbird 115 introduced a new look. I hate it. Not only does it no longer fit in with KDE Plasma, it lost functionality due to it's new integrated search bar in the title bar.

So I went on a mission to fix it.

To restore the regular title bar:

Go into Settings > General > Language & Appereance and uncheck the Hide system window titlebar

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	<#
	.SYNOPSIS
	No parameters needed. Just execute the script.

	.DESCRIPTION
	This script will shut down all VMs, the ESXi hosts that were running the VMs, the vCenter VM
	and, at the end, the ESXi host that was running the vCener VM.

	Please modify all necessary variables. Make sure that you read the comments!

	#!/usr/bin/env python3
	#
	# Simple Intel x520 EEPROM patcher
	# Modifies the EEPROM to unlock the card for non-intel branded SFP modules.
	#
	# Copyright 2020,2021,2022 Andreas Thienemann <[email protected]>
	#
	# Licensed under the GPLv3
	#
	# Based on research described at https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/patching-intel-x520-eeprom-to-unlock-all-sfp-transceivers.24634/