Robocopy throttling

I’ve tried using Robocopy bandwidth throttling switch many times in the past but never seemed to figure it out.  Today I have the need to start a slow copy for many files over a T1 line and went in search of the solution again.  I came across this blog post that gave a formula that works perfectly.

D = (Ba-Bd) / (Ba*Bd) * 512 * 1000

Where D = the /IPG switch value you will enter in Robocopy.
Ba = the available bandwidth of the link in Kbps.
Bd = the desired bandwidth you want to consume in Kbps.

In my case the link is a T1 so I used 1500 for Ba and I wanted to use 200Kbps.  So I ended up with 2218 for the IPG switch and now it’s a nice slow copy that will go overnight.

Linksys WRT1900AC slow internet speed

Here is a strange problem.  Comcast recently doubled my internet speed according to an insert in my bill.  I have performance internet which means I should be getting 25Mbps download speeds.  Doubled I will get 50Mbps!  This is nice.  I follow the instructions to power cycle the modem, then the router and blow off rebooting the PC since I know that is not needed.  A quick speed test and I’m getting a whopping 16Mbps download?

Screen rotation in Windows 7

I learned a new trick today that I want to pass along.  Have you ever had some joker in the office mess with your machine when you’ve stepped away without locking your system?  One of the worst is when someone goes into the video settings and rotates your screen 90 degrees.  You could either rotate your head or turn your mouse sideways or maybe even physically rotate your screen so you can set it back to normal.  But there is an easier way with a keyboard shortcut.  Simply hold down Ctrl and Alt and then push the UP arrow key.  The other arrow keys will rotate your screen left, right, or upside down.  This should stop the joker from pulling this prank.  Better yet, if you have an office joker and he leaves his machine unlocked, just walk by and give him a quick Crtl, Alt arrow of your choice.  Just beware the repercussions, and always use the Windows Key + L when you step away from your computer.

Removing a DPM recovery point

We had a situation where we needed to delete a recovery point.  Of course there is no way to do it using the GUI and Technet has an awesome (useless) explanation on how to do it using powershell

After a little searching I found this blog entry which works perfectly.  In short here are the steps for removing a recovery point.  As some point I may write an interactive script to simplify everything.  I modified the code from the original blog posting to add the array number in front of the output to make things a little easier.

Get a list of protection groups and display them.

$pgList = get-protectiongroup SERVERNAME

$i=0;foreach($pg in $pgList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $pg.friendlyname);$i++}

Get a list of data sources for the protection group you want (replace the x with the number next to the protection group) and display them.

$dsList = get-datasource $pglist[x]

$i=0;foreach($ds in $dsList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $ds.name);$i++}

Next, get a list of recovery points for the data source (replace the x again).

$rpList = get-recoverypoint $dslist[x]

$i=0;foreach($rp in $rpList){write-host (“{0} : {1}” -f $i, $rp.representedpointintime);$i++}

Now we are at the point where we can actually remove the recovery point.

remove-recoverypoint -recoverypoint $rpList[x] -confirm

Thanks again to the original blog poster.