Had to try to install it on my server in Edinburgh and try to see how it would work in a remote scenario :)
The server is a quite old one Fujitsu TX120 Mk I 3GHz Xeon, 8GB, mostly about 50% occupied by my SBS 2011 running in Hyper V on the 2008 Server OS but I thought I should give it a try at least.
Installation worked fine but it was not possible to get to the setup web page as the browser is not updated, think it is some old IE8 on it. But starting Chrome on my Surface and remotely go the setup page remotely worked fine and it was quite quickly setup.
Had to open up the inbound port to let it connect to plex.tv but after that I could see it remotely how it was indexing my movies. Very good!!
Started a movie and it actually manage to stream it to the net player although I started pretty conservative by setting it to 200kb. Took a while before I saw something which was probably the transcoder working ahead a bit.. At least I got a picture and sound to is so I will try to see how high it can manage...
Not optimal setup as the server is placed on my ADSL line (uplink about 1MB) and I really want to utilize my Virgin cable with uplink speeds of about 10MB. But I have been lazy and connected my router to the Virgin modem so I am running a double NAT which effectively blocks most external access to internal computers so I have to put it in bridge mode instead and nothing I can do remotely so it has to wait until I come back.
But after that I can probably just either my old Surface Pro 2 or something else that is reasonably stationary to run the Plex server on as most of my computers probably would be faster than the old Xeon... The advantage using the server is that it is always on anyway...
Or else it will be a good excuse to try out one of the new Intel NUC form factors :)
Ok... sitting in a shared office and working now for a few days.
Have my Plantronics BackBeat Go 2 connected so I can take Skype calls and listen to music etc.
Just walked away to the kitchen area and forgot I had them still on, and it was still connected while I was over there making my coffee??!! Definitely over 10m and with walls and stuff between but it didn't drop out even once! How do they do that? Are there some kind of buffering in the BT headsets nowadays as it would definitely not been able to kept up the reception? Or else the BT on the Surface 3 is so much better than the one you get from a mobile phone which normally cuts out very quick...
Away visting my parents in-law and had to try out some new things.
I decided not to bring my HDMI cable to my Surface Pro 3 but instead try to view movies a bit more wireless to their TV. I brought my Chromecast.
First of all it was the issue of connecting it to their wireless. It was already paired to my wireless at home and it consistently refused to accept connecting to a different WiFi even though password and everything was correct. The Chromecase app on the Surface just hanged. I had to google and find a way to hard reset the dongle by pressing the button on the dongle (I never even noticed) for 25s.
After that the pairing worked perfect and almost instant! Amaze me a bit how Google didn't get a thing like that right...
After that it was the issue of getting the movie over to the Chromecast. I previously tried opening them in Chrome and cast the tab but I was never really happy with the result and it never was able to open anything else than pure mp4 files.
I stumbled over the latest version of Plex and gave it a go by installing it local on the Surface, creating an account and connecting the local server to the account, opening the Web app and then getting a "Cast" icon in the web app which worked to cast to the dongle! Amazing!
Started to watch a movie and it looked perfect but after a while it began to stop about a second and then started to repeat this about every 5-10 seconds, i.e. totally unwatchable.
Tried the settings in the web app and the transcoding settings in the server but nothing really seem to have any effect. Even connected a wired network to my surface to make sure it wasn't a bandwidth issue on their WiFi but the problem persisted.
I finally found the setting on the Chromecast icon in Chrome to change the resolution which was set to the highest! So apparently the bandwidth on their WiFi wasn't enough to stream best quality 720p. But as it worked for about 10-30 minutes after starting to studder it seemed more like a Chromecast bug than a limitation of the network.
I might try to increase it to the medium setting but the low 480p was definitely watchable.
Very impressed by Plex though! Plex + Chromecast is definitely going to be something I will strongly consider replacing my WDTV + NAS setup which I currently use for watching my movies.
Background was that I needed to capture the soap request we sent to a particular web service to trace why it casted a SoapException for certain types of data that we needed to send. The web client was created in c# Studio Express 2010 a while ago.
The first approach was to try to turn on the excellent System.Diagnostics that I used before. To recap:
1. Open up the app.config and add the following block within the system.serviceModel tag: <diagnostics> <messageLogginglogEntireMessage="true" maxMessagesToLog="300" logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true" logMalformedMessages="true" logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true" /> </diagnostics> 2. Turn on the diagnostics for all the listeners, add outside the system.serviceModel tag: <system.diagnostics> <sources> <sourcename="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="All"propagateActivity="true"> <listeners> <addname="xmlTraceListener" /> </listeners> </source> <sourcename="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging" switchValue="All" > <listeners> <addname="xmlTraceListener" /> </listeners> </source> <sourcename="System.IdentityModel"switchValue="All" > <listeners> <addname="xmlTraceListener" /> </listeners> </source> <sourcename="System.Runtime.Serialization"switchValue="All" > <listeners> <addname="xmlTraceListener" /> </listeners> </source> </sources> <sharedListeners> <addname="xmlTraceListener" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" initializeData="ApplicationTrace.svclog" /> </sharedListeners> <traceautoflush="true" /> </system.diagnostics> 3. Do a call and look in the svclog for the messages. No, that did not work at all! After closer examination I realized all the references were added as Web References by some reason so the configuration was not done through the app.config at all. Ok, lets do new Service References! But no, that was not possible as I am not a user on the customer's domain and therefore cannot do the service discovery the normal way through the add Service Reference box as the services requires authentication. Ok, try to add authentication to the url on the form http://username:password@xxx.yyy.com. No that is now disabled in newer Internet Explorers. There was a regedit hack to enable it but it didn't work anyway as I cannot add the username in the form: domain\username as I am not on the same domain! So finally I gave up trying to add the service reference. This might be tricky once they decide to update the wsdl so I might need to remember that when that day comes... But instead I installed Fiddler and it was able to see the packages at once just in the form I needed and I could solve the issue! The issue was an error in the customer's wsdl that didn't specify any default values for strings, but had default values for all int and decimals. As I then tried to send the xml with all fields omitted, threw a Soap exception as the strings were assigned as mandatory in the wsdl. I immediately identified the missing fields in the soap message with the help of Fiddler and could adjust the code to fill the fields with blanks to make the SoapException go away.
I have always had various problems running the Cisco VPN 5 that I have to have installed because a client that we work with requires this.
The rest of the company runs the newer Cisco AnyNet Client and that has never been any issues with but the Cisco VPN Client of version 5.x and older always seems to have problems, especially when upgrading OS to later ones.
The latest issue I had was when I tried to use the MiraCast wireless display on my Surface Pro 3 running 8.1. Everywhere it said it should be possible to go to right side "Devices" then "Project" and it should be possible to see the line "Connect to a different display". First I thought I had an issue with running extended desktop but when I finally got it working on my Surface Pro 2 after uninstalling the Cisco VPN Client I realized that was the one that caused the problem.
Also the Window Music app think it is disconnected as soon as I activate the Cisco VPN, but that only happens when I actually have the tunnel up. For the "Connect to a different display" to disappears it is enough to only have the Cisco VPN Client installed in the system!
By pure coincidence I read a post about an alternative VPN Client that actually could use the Cisco's pcf file which I decided to have a try at. And it works! The client is the Shrew Soft VPN and can be found here:
Install it and choose import and point to the pcf and then you are up and running! There are some switches that could be turned on to remember the vpn user name etc but I haven't seen any issues at all with it so far.
My Surface Pro 3 also seems to be able to go down in sleep mode now which I always think was a problem with the Cisco VPN Client.
I have sometimes felt that I would like to collect some of my research and solution so it will be easier to find for myself and possibly also be of help for others that might stumble on the same problem. Or just general rambling about technical stuff I find.
So I will now start my Developer's blog that will run parallel to my normal personal blog and try to collect as many coding and gadget issue tips as possible for future references!
I currently run Copson IT (www.copsonit.co.uk) which is an IT Consultancy business in Edinburgh, UK.
