I came across an interesting one in the last few days. This system was a Windows XP system with current updates – SP3, IE 8…. and among other things there was a complaint of very sluggish behavior. I updated the antimalware software installed and ran scans. Malware Bytes antimalware actually found and removed two suspect files, but that didn’t seem to sole the sluggishness. The web browser (internet explorer) would take what seemed like a minute or so to respond to any action. One thing I discovered is that Internet explorer 8 can behave VERY slowly if there are a lot of sites in the restricted zone. (Spybot S&D immunization puts lot’s of sites in restricted zones.) So, I found a way to remove them all and retry and things seemed quicker, but… after running for 15-20 minutes the system really started to become unresponsive and so I had to start looking for another cause…. services.exe was running at 99% cpu or 100% cpu from time to time and the memory footprint was growing – the high mark I saw was 350MB of memory in use for it (!)

The first hint I had was a site claiming that if the event logs get to be too large it could cause services.exe to respond this way – taking up 98% or 99% cpu and more and more memory. So, after attempting to skim the logfiles for any helpfull info, I cleared them and restarted to wait and see what would happen next. It wasn’t long before the same behavior came back.

So, I searched quite a bit online (the even log items didn’t seem to give ANY clues) and found many discussions about the same issue. Most were a bit old (2-3 years), but in one discussion someone mentioned that they disabled the windows firewall and internet connection sharing service and their problem went away. So, I gave this a try and waited….. services.exe remained well behaved for a couple hours.

Not wanting to leave the system without the firewall, I tried resetting the windows firewall to it’s default settings and restarted it as a service. I let the system reboot and sit for a couple hours without the issue recurring. So, hopefully this reset of the windows firewall settings has solved the problem on this machine!

Side notes: Internet Explorer really shouldn’t respond differently if there is 1 site in restricted zones or 5000 – I mean really – Microsoft should address this problem. I do read that apparently there are features in IE 8 that should make spybot’s immunization unnecessary. Also, re: the firewall being the culprit here, it’s not wise to run a windows machine connected directly to the internet without a firewall of some sort. If this problem seems to affect you and resetting the firewall to it’s defaults doesn’t resolve it, you might consider looking at the free software firewalls that are available, or consider a hardware firewall (router) between your machine and the internet.

Utility to remove all sites from restricted zone is available here.

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import, support for the new Microsoft XML docx style file formats (read only). Writer can show several pages at once in the zoomed out view (with editor notes in the margin). Calc can support 4 times the number of columns and has new collaboration features.

Sounds as though it’s a good all around improvement. The speed is about the same as the last version in the 2.x series in their comparison.

Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?

Companies using WSUS that want to avoid the auto rollout will need to disable the auto-approval of Update Rollup Packages.

Ultimately, the reason for the forced update is enhanced security. Internet Explorer 7 is more secure than it’s predecessor. So why would people want to decline the update? I know many find the new user interface a bit disorienting, but there is a more significant reason some have avoided IE7. The most crucial reason I’ve seen people avoid it is compatibility problems with their software. At one point some versions of Quickbooks did not get along well with Internet Explorer 7 for example. It’s always good to find a “test system” to test such updates on. (Especially if you’re making upgrades to a business critical machine.)

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….

X-Plane supports some cool plugins like this flight verification plugin that can generate a file readable by google earth for post flight analysis.

Here’s a manual for flying helicopters in x-plane

xplanefreeware.net Forums are one good resource for info and downloads for x-plane.

x-plane.org is another great resource (the main community following of x-plane seems to gather here.) Their forums especially are useful.)

And of course, the main site for X-Plane.

Oh, and The Xplane scenery blog is a good spot to watch for inside development info.

A refresher on nav-aids and instrument landings can be found here.

I’ve run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

I thought a toolbar was the cause so I disabled all toolbars and still got the problem (even through a reboot). I worked around in part by setting the windows update address to be the homepage, then opening the browser, but there were still some problems. Anyway, here’s what I discovered IE 7 had been installed before the repair install and you’re “supposed” to uninstall ie7 before performang a repair install of windows now. Given that I couldn’t boot into windows this was an impossibility. (blue screened and wouldn’t enter normal/safe mode.) There is a way to manually uninstall from the recovery console. There are details in this knowledge base article, but c:\windows\ie7\spuninst is the folder to look in. Unfortunately if you have already done the repair install this isn’t an option, so downloading a copy of ie7 is necessary (they do allow a standalone download now). I copied it via usb memory stick and installed ie7 over ie6 and was able to fix the main browser problem.

But that wasn’t all folks! No, there was more fun ahead. No, the IE icon was not showing in the start menu, but more importantly updates wouldn’t install either via the web or through the automatic update scheduler. The ie icon was easy….

A good tip via the techrepublic… At registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\DefaultIcon
you should have C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-32528

I seem to recall seeing this on another system that had reverted to IE 6… Anyway.

The update issue was apparently caused by Microsoft’s stealth update of windows update components a few months back. Yes, the one that they have really tried to downplay… Anyway apparently the two fixes are to download an older version of the windows update components and reinstall those, or do some dll registering….

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

Yuck… but it worked… except there were 4 updates that kept downloading and running – to those I just downloaded them manually and installed one at a time with the command prompt NAME_OF_UPDATE_FILE.exe /o

the /o option I think is for overwrite. (As each update then needed a reboot.) But I’m not certain – after 4-6 times of seeing the same 4 updates I was ready to try anything. (I did remove the Softwaredistribution folder under c:\windows and c:\windows\system32)

If you’re interested the procedure for this is….
(viathis forum thread

(start… run… cmd)
1. proxycfg -d (to clear proxy cache)
2. net stop wuauserv (to stop Automatic updates service)

Using Windows Explorer
3. Delete all files and folders in
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution (your windows folder may vary)

Again using command prompt
4. net start wuauserv (to start Automatic updates service)

Anyway.. filed for future reference.

I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0×00000050″ The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.

The last thing the owner described happening was a storm that knocked out the internet connection (but not power) and in attempting to regain the internet connection they rebooted and were welcomed with this blue screen on reboot. (Just after the copyright Microsoft screen with the green scrolling animation.) Startup Repair didn’t solve the problem, starting in the various safe mode options led to the same error. I verified there were NO other hard drives attached to the system and at times pulled all peripherals (including the keyboard and mouse.) Most boot attempts were made with ethernet cable/ps2 mouse/ps2 keyboard/vga monitor/1/8″ speaker, but some boots were attempted with ethernet/mouse/keyboard disconnected which made no difference.

So after a while of trying various attempts to boot or repair or reload the last known good configuration I booted up an XP based livecd and copied the data to a USB key and prepared for the system restore. Well, bios came up pressed f11 to launch the system restore and…. SAME $$!$!$! error. “It’s worse”… call HP (1 month old system…) Somewhere along the line here I pulled one of the two memory sticks and tested with each, no difference. HP basically sold us a recovery cd (thanks HP.)

Well, the recovery cd arrived and !surprise! it booted to the same bluescreen – hello HP again… (I heard an AWFUL lot of “hmm”’s on the other end as I explained the case history and he read the previous notes. It looked as though we were heading for a bench repair on the machine, but he had a suggestion that seemed a little far out… one person complaining of this problem online had it suggested to them that they might have a virus… “well if it’s a virus, then removing the hard drive ought to allow the recovery cd to at least boot (unless it’s a REALLY clever virus)..” Ok – So I pulled the drive and low and behold the recovery cd booted…

New drive arrived and today the recovery cd installed everything to the new drive in ~2 hours.

All in all this was VERY odd… the drive passed ALL S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics that were run on it, it’s filesystem apparently was in good enough shape for a winxp boot cd to be able to browse and copy files from it. But something must have gone sideways that Vista didn’t like.

CLFS is related to Common Logging…

System specs:

HP Pavilion a6000n PC

AMD 64×2 dual core 4200+
1GB memory
250GB Sata drive
multi dvd burner

I’d love to know what had gone sideways and if there had been ANY way to recover (outside of WIPING the disc).

I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.

For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

One of my LONG standing frustrations with Windows is the lack of useful command line tools (including the ability to email from the command interface which, to me, is CRUCIAL when scripting.) But on studying the smartmontools documentation I found reference to blat blat is a simple command line emailer for windows. You install it to the path (Windows\system32 is a good choice), then from the cli can install it to use a default mail server and sending address and then you’re in business. All that’s needed then for your windows boxes to email smartmontools distress calls is to edit the smartd configuration file to do routine tests, add the -m option and address to mail to (you can also have a message box popup too).. Then install and start the smartd service and you’ll hopefully have a bit earlier warning on those hard drive failures.

Sometimes drives fail quickly, but if you can have a 12 hour heads up that might be the difference between a quick and easy drive cloning and a long and tedious rebuild.