Jaa


Talk To The Mouse 'Cos The Keyboard Ain't Listening

So it's true. Senility had obviously settled in and my addled brain can no longer maintain even the simplest items of information such as a two-fingered keyboard combination. It seems that in future I'll be wandering aimlessly around my server room dribbling helplessly onto the network switches, muttering profanities in response to the strange symbols appearing on the monitors, and talking into the mouse.

What's brought me to this late stage of realization? Could it be because my habitual dabs at AltGr (the right-hand Alt key) and Delete no longer bring up the login page in my Hyper-V hosted machines? For some weeks I've been confounded by the fact my ailing brain seemed to remember that this always worked before, but now it doesn't. Even poking around in Hyper-V Manager and the properties of the VMs didn't reveal anything useful.

In fact, things got so bad that I actually had to look up the Hyper-V key combinations on TechNet after I got fed up restoring down the VM's window and clicking the Ctrl-Alt-Delete icon in the top menu bar. It seems that what you need is Ctrl-Alt-End, but how could I have forgotten that when most days I'm administering the servers?

However, after some Binging it turns out that I might have a few more months before I finally turn into a doddering and disoriented wreck. According to the Virtual PC and Virtual Server help pages, the equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Delete in a virtual machine is HOSTKEY and Delete. Of course, it took ages more to find out that the default HOSTKEY is AltGr (you can change it), which was obviously maintained in Hyper-V. Probably so that the world's systems admins wouldn't all decide to retire in the same week.

As far as I can tell, some recent update must have removed this backwards compatibility - though I can't find any mention of it on the web. Maybe it's just me...? Did I break something...?