Tonight I decided to try out the Migration Assistant. For some unknown reason I’ve never used it in the past when I’ve upgraded my mac. After using it though, all I can say is wow! Why haven’t I used this tool before? What is so amazing to me in contrast to Windows machines is how well it works and how easy it is to use. Also as far as I can tell so far it appears to have transfered everything just the way I told it to. This includes all my files, custom settings, and even applications. Although it technically should be possible to transfer appliations between Windows machines, in most cases it isn’t even an option. Whenever I have moved from one Windows machine to another I end up having to reinstall all the applications. The only thing that really moves well on Windows is files such as documents and other application data. The applications themselves though don’t like to be moved.

With Migration Assistant, the fact that applications can be moved is huge for me since reinstalling all my applications usually takes at least an entire day if not more. Whats more, its really something that isn’t fun and frankly shouldn’t be necessary to redo every time I move to a new computer.

So far I’m completely sold on Migration Assistant. It has definitely made this the least painful upgrade I’ve ever experienced. I’ll have to see if I’m still as impressed after making sure everything really does work over the next week or two.

All I had to do to fix the problem was disable IPv6 and comment out the localhost ::1 line in my hosts file. This took a significant amount of troubleshooting to figure out though. I thought there was some type of problem with PHPUnit or php itself. Luckily I was finally able to solve the problem.

It seems like a really bad idea for Microsoft to enable IPv6 by default and additionally put it higher in the resolution order than IPv4 addresses. Based on the number of active IPv6 networks this can’t be a good default decision. Supporting IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn’t be the default method of resolving addresses. Windows should have knowledge that you are connected to an IPv4 network and disable or lower the priority of IPv6 accordingly.

The closest I came to any type of solution was by following the discussion at Bill Evjen’s Blog. Even after tinkering though the best pseudo solution I came up with was running XP inside of a VM. It isn’t really a solution, but it gets me by for the few things I absolutely need the VPN for. Hopefully these types of issues will get resolved over time. Unfortunately, I’m pretty certain this isn’t the last issue I’ll run into with 64 bit Vista.

While we were logged into our Hamachi network we were able to ping each other and followed all the troubleshooting instructions given by the Hamachi site. This was despite the fact that starcraft is one of the games that is supposed to “just work” with Hamachi. None of us were able to see games that anyone else created. After tinkering around with this for probably about a half-hour my friend orb360 found a solution. The steps to get Starcraft and probably many other older applications working with Hamachi are below. These instructions are Windows specific. Although the method should probably work on other platforms.

The main tip is to make Hamachi the first network interface that Windows tries to use. On other platformsthe goal would be the same. Only the way you accomplish it would be different.

1. Go into control panel then click on “network connections”

2. Click the “advanced” link in the menu

3. Click “advanced settings”

4. Change the order so it looks something like this

5. Reboot Windows

After taking these steps Hamachi and Starcraft played nice together.

The steps are basically as follows

1. open up task scheduler
2. put in %systemroot%\system32\defrag.exe %homedrive% as the command
3. select a time for defrag to run every night.

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