Toshiba Kira Ultrabook vs older Satellite Z830 Review

I love Toshiba notebooks. I have used them as my own notebook of choice for almost 16 years. I dallied with a Sony light weight notebook for a while but ended up back with Toshiba.

Now my new toy was purchased for one key reason, disk space. My current Satellite Ultrabook is only 18 months old but it has a small 128G SSD storage device and I need more space. The new Kira is a 256G equivalent SSD and it also adds another 2G of RAM in its total of 8G above the earlier model.

So on to my likes and gripes after 1 day of hardly using it while I started installing software applications.

Aside from the Windows 8 which I will sledge elsewhere, my first gripe is that the Function keys are disabled by default in favour of the settings keys. To use the function keys you must use the Fn + the Fx key combination. Ok, so I can live with that, but it is disconcerting when you hit F5 by accident and disable the glidepad mouse!

The likes list is somewhat longer, the major difference is in the screen hinge which is far more robust and positive in its feel and action on the Kira. The case has more alloy and less plastic and feels more solid. Of course, this adds around 200g to the weight of the unit at 1.3Kg being heavier than the Z830 at 1.1Kg. However on your lap it makes little difference and on a desk or table no difference at all.

The keyboard retains the island key and back lighting style that I loved on the Z830. The units are very close in physical dimensions but the width of the keyboard varies considerably narrower at 267mm vs 195mm on the Z830. The depth of them remains almost the same with only 3mm difference as the top row Fn keys are shallower. Yet the QWERTY keys are the same dimensions, the width difference is in the other keys with a narrower space bar and repositioned and smaller PgUp / PgDn keys. The latter were always my biggest gripe with the Sony notebook I had, as the PgUp / PgDn required a Fn key combination to work.

The Synaptics pointing device or glidepad control mouse seems far more sensitive on the Kira than the one on the Z830 but that could be the difference between brand new and 18 months of daily scratching and bashing.

Both ultrabooks are i7 Intel CPU’s and the Kira has a heftier sound card with inbuilt Harman / Kardon speakers. Not sure if it will make that much difference to me as I am not into watching videos on the computer.

Overall, day 1 with the Kira has been okay. I’ll update this in a week or two when I have finished configuring and have it in daily use.

 

 

 

DeltaCopy, Rsync, Cygwin and Windows to Linux backups

I wrote a while back regarding Rsync backups from Windows servers to Linux using DeltaCopy.

It’s all been working ok but I’ve had some files failing with a “file has vanished’ message.

At first I tried searching for a solution based on the failures being any file with a special accent character.

The log email that I get sent by DeltaCopy contained something like this:

[text]
Profile datafiles failed to execute.
Execution log
————-
sending incremental file list
file has vanished: "/cygdrive/D/datfiles/A standard Windows type file?.jpg"
file has vanished: "/cygdrive/D/datfiles/Another file with two questionmarks ??.docx
….
[/text]

Investigating the Windows server the files did exist and they were not “in use” during the backup. However, some (note: not all)  some, files had special non-standard English characters in the file names. So characters with umlauts etc, like È, É, Ê  were giving issues alongside some punctuation characters that appeared normal but I suspect have been prepared from a non-English keyboard or system with a different character set.

So assuming that the character set was the issue I went searching.

I had narrowed it to the Cygwin toolkit rather than Rsync itself and came across this old message thread that included a link to a modified cygwin1.dll as http://www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/  except that the link was broken. So I chased a modified cygwin1.dll and found what appears to be the updated link at http://www.oki-osk.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/.

Downloading the compiled library file cygwin1-dll-20-11-18.tar.bz2 and extracting it to my Windows server using 7-Zip I renamed the old dll as cygwin1.dll.orig and copied the modified cygwin1.dll into the DeltaCopy directory.

Then I re-ran a data file backup that had given me “file vanished” errors and it seemed to work. But the next time it ran, it gave errors again.

So I delved deeper and found that the version of Rsync that is distributed with DeltaCopy is quite old, replacing the Rsync toolkit that supports DeltaCopy was the next thing to try and it worked a treat. I will document that process shortly.

 

 

Turning off WordPress redirects index.php to index.html on Cpanel Apache

I spent a bit of time today trying to research why Apache on Cpanel insisted on redirecting from index.php when it was entered as an explicit URL to the default index.html page in the website home directory.

As it turned out, while I am searching for “cpanel apache redirects” I should have been asking “Why does WordPress redirect…” and that change of question led me to this WordPress forum thread that addressed the actual issue.

Now normally I would not repeat the information here, but just in case that link disappears, I do want to be able to get to it again, so here it is.

The issue actually is not Apache or Cpanel driven, but is an issue with WordPress and the way that it redirects all requests to the home page for the site. Hence despite me trying to access index.php, WordPress was redirecting to index.html, and that prevented me from seeing the new WP site.

Ultimately the purpose of this was to allow for WordPress to be installed alongside an existing page based site and deploy for final user acceptance before switching off the old site and moving to WordPress as the new site.

The trick is simply a manually installed plugin that can be removed after final commissioning to production.

1. Open your site with an FTP program or SSH depending on you preference

2. Navigate to yoursite_folder/wp-content/plugins/

3. Create a new folder for the plugin – call it disable-canonical-redirects – or dcr for short

4. Change to that folder

5. Create a new index.php file and include (copy and paste or re-type) this PHP code into that file:

[text]
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Disable Canonical URL Redirection
Description: Disables the "Canonical URL Redirect" features of WordPress 2.3 and above.
Version: 1.0
Author: Mark Jaquith
Author URI: http://markjaquith.com/
*/

remove_filter(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);
?>
[/text]

5. Visit your WordPress Admin backend and activate this new plugin

6. All is now good to go and access index.html by default or index.php for WordPress explicitly.

Many thanks to Mark and others in that discussion thread.

 

Windows SBS 2008 and WSUS 3.0 Wizard Object Moved Error

I have done battle with an SBS Server in recent weeks. Some of it was simple fixes, while getting WSUS working and updates generally has been challenging.

The server had not been patched for almost 18 months and the reason was that WSUS was not working and there were some group policies that apparently were disabling connections even for the server.

I have not fully resolved this but one of the key items was this Microsoft TechNet Thread on WSUS Configuration Wizard where I learn that there is a mandated update KB2734608 which resolved the connection issue.

Now that the server is patched and updated, I’ll delve into what the workstations need to get their dose of Windows medicine.