Knowledgebase

Microsoft Windows

In This Section Installation Error Due to XML Encoding Windows Vista Network AutoTuning Parameters Configuring 32-bit ODBC Drivers on 64-bit Windows Versions Connecting to Microsoft 64-bit SQL Server 2005 using a 32 bit ODBC driver Slow Windows Network Traffic

Installation Error Due to XML Encoding

While installing FairCom DB on Windows, the installation program may report display an alert reporting an "Unspecified XML file encoding." This error may occur while the installer is configuring XML files. It is the result of the encoding used in your system's .NET machine.config file.

The first line of the machine.config file indicates the encoding. An example of UTF-8 is shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

The FairCom installer supports the following encodings:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• ASCII
• ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)

If you are using an encoding other than those listed above, you will need to use a .zip file for installation. The .zip file is available from FairCom.

Windows Vista Network AutoTuning Parameters

The symptoms exist due to the new re-written TCP stack in Windows Vista that aims to take full advantage of hardware advances such as gigabit networking. Among the new feature in Windows Vista TCP/IP is Receive Window Auto-Tuning for TCP connections. TCP AutoTuning enables TCP window scaling by default and automatically tunes the TCP receive window size for each individual connection based on the bandwidth delay product (BDP) and the rate at which the application reads data from the connection, and no longer need to manually change TcpWindowSize registry key value which applies to all connection. Theoretically, with TCP auto-tuning, network connection throughput in Windows Vista should be improved for best performance and efficiency, without any registry tweaks. However, this is not always the case, and may cause some Internet related issues and problems.

A workaround to the above problem is to disable the TCP/IP AutoTuning in Windows Vista. Disabling auto tuning of TCP Windows Size should not cause any negative effects, only that the TCP Window Size will always be the default value without ability for optimization to each connection.

A microsoft TechNet article describing the feature is here:

Microsoft TechNet - Vista Network Performance Improvements

Disable AutoTuning

1. Open an Elevated Command Prompt (see below)
2. Enter the following command to disable auto-tuning

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Enable AutoTuning

If you find disabling auto-tuning doesn’t fix your problem, re-enable it as follows:

1. Open an Elevated Command Prompt
2. Enter the following command to enable auto-tuning

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

AutoTuningStatus

To view the state of your current TCP parameters, use this command:

netsh interface tcp show global

Elevated Command Prompt

1. Click on the Start button.
2. In the search box, type in “cmd” or “Command Prompt” - Do not press Enter.
3. cmd.exe or Command Prompt will show in the search results (depending on what you searched for).
4. Right click cmd.exe (or Command Prompt) in the search results and select “Run as Administrator”.
5. Enter the administrator credentials when prompted.