How to Change Windows 10 Start Menu to Windows 8 Full Start Screen

Windows 10 Full Start Screen

While many people are happy to see the start menu make a return in the latest Windows 10 operating system, there are many others that prefer the Windows 8 full start screen. These people will be happy to know that it’s quite easy to swap so that you still get the full screen start screen experience in Windows 10.

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XenServer Tools Removed by Windows Update

After performing a regular Windows update and restart recently I found that XenServer tools appeared to have been removed. After trying to reinstall the tools I found that the process would hang indefinitely preventing the problem from being resolved.

After contacting Citrix support they advised that this was a known issue caused by Amazon accidentally uploading a set of their WHQL PV tools to Microsoft Windows update which overwrote the existing PV drivers in place, here’s how to fix this.
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10 Simple Bzip2 Examples

Bzip2 Compression Command Examples

Bzip2 is used to compress a file in order to reduce disk space, it is quite popular in Linux and UNIX operating systems for this reason. Bzip2 has been around since the late 1990s and is still widely used today. It may be preferable over gzip as it can produce smaller compressed files, at the cost of additional memory and processing time.

We are going to cover 10 examples of bzip2 here, showing you common tasks that can be completed and just how easy it is to use.

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Performance Difference Between NFS Versions

The Network File System (NFS) protocol has been around since the ’80s which is quite ancient in the realm of technology, and yet is still used widely. How has the performance of NFS changed over the years between the different versions?

Here we are going to compare the performance of NFS versions 2, 3, 4, and 4.1 to get idea of how things have progressed over time, the results are quite surprising.

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11 Simple Gzip Examples

Gzip Compression Command Examples

Gzip is used to compress a file in order to reduce disk space, it is quite popular in Linux and UNIX operating systems for this reason. Gzip has been around since May 1996 and is still widely used today.

We are going to cover 11 examples of gzip here, showing you common tasks that can be completed and just how easy it is to use.

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Windows NFS vs Linux NFS Performance Comparison

Both Windows and Linux operating systems are capable of acting as an NFS (Network File System) server, but which performs better? Here we are going to run various benchmarks on the two to see which performs better.

NFS has been around for a long time in UNIX based variants, and more recently Microsoft has added support within the Windows operating system, let’s find out how they compare.

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Nagios check ZFS zpool status for READ WRITE CKSUM errors

Recently I’ve been creating Icinga (a port of Nagios) health checks for various ZFS pools running on Solaris 11.2 storage servers, I found this great plugin however found it only alerted based on space remaining within the zpool, which while useful was not enough. I was not able to find a good check that would create an alert if any of the READ, WRITE or CKSUM values in ‘zpool status’ changed from zero to anything else, indicating a problem, so wrote my own health check.
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Updating Solaris via Squid Proxy Server

If you have a Solaris server that does not have direct access to the Internet and cannot perform an update, what can you do? Configure a proxy server that has Internet access of course! Here is how it’s done.

In this example we will be using the popular Squid Proxy. While this can also act as a cache we are only concerned with its proxy functionality here. We will also be configuring the Solaris publisher to make use of a proxy server so that updates are downloaded through the proxy.

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How to remove pending updates in Citrix XenServer

A few weeks ago I accidentally attempted to apply a XenServer hotfix intended for XenServer 6.2 to a host running XenServer 6.5. Ever since this accidental mistake, XenCenter has been reporting that there is a new update to apply, which should not be the case. At first I thought it would go away after the next reboot or after the next hotfix had been applied and fix itself up, however this did not happen, here is how to fix it.

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Free up disk space in Citrix XenServer

A Citrix XenServer dom0 currently runs with a 4GB root partition which is pretty small by today’s standards. A small amount of usable storage space can be quite easy to quickly fill. It is therefore important that dom0 has free space in order for it to operate correctly. Here we will cover some different methods that can be used to free up disk space within XenServer.

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