Sometimes you just can't catch a break... About two weeks ago my server's motherboard went bad. That's no fun, but www.lhotka.net is running in a virtual machine (VM) on Virtual Server, so it was relatively easy to get it back running on my desktop workstation. Not ideal, but a temporary workaround. And since I was heading to Las Vegas for MIX 08 I didn't need the desktop anyway. Last weekend my good friend (and hardware guru) Rick came over and we confirmed it was the motherboard, and purchased replacement parts. A shiny new Q6600 CPU and a motherboard to match. Now my physical server is a quad core machine, and that's very cool. Though I am running Windows Server 2003 64 bit and Virtual Server 2005 R2 as the host, so the VM still can't use more than one CPU :( Still, each core of the new CPU is much faster than the previous single-core CPU. On Monday I got the VM copied off my desktop and onto the new server. All seemed to be working, which made me happy. And I blissfully flew off to LA to spend the week with a client. Only to find out that there's a problem! The VM uses a virtual network adapter that is attached to the host's real network adapter. For some reason the VM periodically sees the network adapter become "unplugged". Which of course it is not. The physical NIC is working fine, but the VM is losing it. Manually disabling/enabling the virtual NIC fixes the problem, but this happens every few hours (so if you've noticed www.lhotka.net offline a lot the past few days this is why). Also, my System event log was (and is) filling up with "The netcard driver failed the query for OID_GEN_LINK_SPEED", related to the QoS service. Googling turned up a few people who've had the same problem. But no serious answers. Apparently people solved the problem but never posted their solution in any coherent manner. More googling, and then more... Eventually I found some tidbits of info here and there. Things to try: Disable the QoS service on the virtual NIC (had no effect for the original poster or me - though it does stop the event log entries) Remove the virtual NIC and restart the VM so it redetects the NIC (didn't work for the original poster, nor for me) On the host, uncheck the virtual server support on the real NIC, reboot the host, re-check the virtual server support on the real NIC, reboot the host (I don't know if it helped the original poster, but it didn't help me) I noticed that the host didn't have the Windows Firewall turned on, so today I turned it
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