Home Server Projects
I've always been interested in installing servers for home use. The ability to customize Linux based servers to the degree that surpasses what is economically available from any other source makes Linux the obvious choice. Linux also offers the home user more latitude in that it will support practically any other desktop operating system with basic services.
Wednesday 25 June 2008, 5:05 AM
Sick Puppy Redo
I generally follow a dispassionate investigative process when trying to discern what happened when a project goes bad. Although its a low priority item, it gets done simply because I'd like to learn what I may have done wrong and hopefully not do that again. The Sick Puppy incident is of course the “event” I'm looking into right now.
Its really bad when your own words come back to haunt you. I started thinking about the fact that all the way back to Win NT 4.0 SP2, you could take any subsequent SP and jump from 2 to 4 say or 1 to 6 and not lose anything. The one thing I didn't try was to take the original XP Pro volume license CDROM image @ SP1 and slip-stream Service Pack 3 into it. That would be the final option to make sure I exhausted all possibilities of success.
Yes I really do want our image of XP Pro to work properly with SP3 on it. It would eliminate a lot of issues in the future assuming there is any future for XP Pro. I have a feeling that enough big volume purchasers of MicroSoft operating system software will drag their heels long enough to buy me some time. I've already seen that there are some cracks in the monolith's feet allowing XP (basic, simple whatever they are calling it) to be used on the low-powered notebooks etc.
So I'm going to try that and if that craters like all of the attempts before then it will finally be buried.
(BTW—Has anyone else noticed that Microsoft or MicroSoft comes up as incorrect spelling in StarOffice 8 Writer? Cracks me up every time I see that. I haven't updated my dictionary for that non-word just for laughs! Microsoft is getting it back for their refusal to allow WordPerfect to be allowed as a legitimate word in Word's dictionary.)
Sunday 22 June 2008, 1:49 AM
Summer is still on Strike. Well I guess its still Spring in Texas.
Was going to the nearby (actually nearest) grocery store to pick up hamburger meat for my almost famous gringo tacos. (Its one of my 5 recipes deemed fit for family consumption.) I had just starting pulling into the parking lot and I had 2 strikes of lightning hit the asphalt about 100 feet away about 5 seconds apart. Sometimes its real easy to hear from the Supreme Being. The basic message was get your car turned around and get back home, at least as I understood it. The EMP pulse was enough to make the ignition system hiccup and the car stalled. I've got an automatic transmission otherwise I would have assumed that it was my left foot slipping off the clutch. Since the 2 strikes were heading toward me, I assumed #3 was to hit the top of my car. A quick ninety degree turn and luckily no third strike. That's about as close as I want to get.
The sound was slightly attenuated but still loud enough for me to clearly hear it. The sound of the 2 strikes was like ripping metal sheets terminated with a very loud concussion grenade immediately on its tail. No more than a couple of seconds each one. I'll never forget the sound, better than anything in a Star Wars movie.
The grocery store is only a mile away. The lightning started after I got into the car and started driving. It was ugly overhead and windy but no rain yet and little lightning at a distance.
So how do I know that its still Spring? The bad weather was coming from the north and the rain was freaking cold! Summer storms come from off the Gulf of Mexico and the monsoon rains are warm or hot. So even though the daytime temps have been in the nineties for the last 3 to 4 weeks, its still not hot enough to turn the storms around the other way.
Now just 45 minutes later, the sun has come back out, the humidity is probably 110% and the temp is 85 and rising and its 7:30PM local time. Welcome to Texas' Gulf Coast. Back to our other news.....
Saturday 21 June 2008, 1:54 PM
XP SP3 is Sick Puppy 3, Stupid Patchwork 3, Stupendous Pain-in-the-A__ 3
Microsoft, I admit defeat. I'm giving up on trying to install Service Pack 3. You guys won. I will NOT however recommend to management that we need to go to Vista. You can take that to the bank.
Worker droid status in the Zombie armies of the Internet is the ultimate fate of all of the 500 to 600 desktop Windows XP computers we use in the oilfield rental fleet. Be prepared to be spam and Trojan targeted all of you other Internet travelers. My overload refuses to buy seats of Anti-virus or any other Anti-malware software for use on the rental systems due to cost.
It should not require all of the effort I and others in the company have had to expend to make a volume license image of XP Pro work with SP3. The latest defeat is on the system that surprised me by installing SP3 without any hiccups or complaints and started running. I left this Sick Puppy running and connected to the Internet indirectly through 3 layers of routers, an external corporate firewall and one internal one. So yes it was running Windows Update, set to download, notify but not auto-install the updates.
I came into work. Checked on Sick Puppy and he had a security update for Net 1.1 set for install and another one seemingly generic to XP. Yes I should have noted the KB numbers to report here but really, why bother? I have had more trouble with Sick Puppy than I like to admit and I know its only a matter of time before another broken piece of software labeled as a "security patch" will be downloaded and not install properly.
So I've given up. To build the image we will deploy into the rental fleet, we'll take our XP SP1 volume license image with the slip-streamed SP2 files on it and update that with the required 99+ "security patches". That image will get Ghosted and will become the basis for image renewals when the desktop systems come in for maintenance. The system I've designed and have been writing the software for will do the entire process automated to the extent that we can hire monkeys to do the work of re-imaging computers, a requirement not only in our industry but hundreds, maybe thousands of others.
Computers used in the oilfield, particularly rental machines, are NOT treated nice. So when they've been out hopefully making money for our company on a daily rental basis, they get treated about as well as a Guantanamo Bay inmate. Some of them (the special purpose drill-floor computers) even get "waterboarded", power washed with a pressurized firehose even though we tell them it will cost them 20 to 30,000 dollars to pay for a damaged machine.
When these poor, unfortunate digital drones come back to the field offices to be refreshed for their next work stint, they get their hard drive wiped and re-imaged with a hopefully functional OS image with our company's proprietary application software. Hence the need for a volume licensed image that basically replaces the OEM image on the systems we bought from our neighbors in Round Rock. We run some tests on the system to verify it still works and then it gets installed on the next job site.
I considered SP3 as a way to save time in the image creation stage but whatever time savings is long gone and lost. It didn't used to be that way. Installing a Service Pack was a safe and tested way to bring a basic imaged system up to a known specification on security patches. I can't trust Service Packs from Microsoft any more and that's really sad.
Our new application software was written in Java and it runs just fine on Linux. All I needed was an excuse and now I have it. We probably won't wait for Windows 7. We weren't going to use Vista for damn sure.
Wednesday 18 June 2008, 7:43 PM
Finally my last words on XP SP3, (yeah right, you hope so!)
BTW this is being entered into the blog using FireFox 3, I managed to get one of the 24-hr downloads, but sadly not on this machine.
Well we finally figured out the magic cookie for SP3.
Assuming that you're an IT/IS guy and you spent a lot of time building slipstream install images for your company's computers, this is how you have to use the SP3 ISO.
1) First test to be sure that your Windows XP Pro image has all the things you want in them and that they worked like you needed them to.
2) I didn't test applying SP3 onto SP1 images. If you believe Microsoft and all that previous drek about only SP2 can be security upgraded, then SP2 HAS to be on the system first.
3) We slip-streamed SP2 onto a volume licensed SP1 install CDROM image of Windows XP Pro. We tested that after installing it to make sure that in general everything made it so far.
4) Take the imaging system and connect it to WIndows UPDATE, using IE6. Yes you have to expose it to the nasty filth on the Internet. When the asp function gets done, it will tell you that to continue you have to upgrade your system to install any updates to the OS. It will attempt to install an Active X object that turns out to be the WGA, the Windows Greatest Aggravation and it will decide whether or not your computer is legit.
5) The other component is the nasty update that they made to the client portion of the Windows Update on your computer that got them (MS) into rancorous trouble with annoying people like me. We wanted to know when somebody in Redmond decided to screw around with our boxes like they owned them!
6) Once they've done their duty and reported "Ain't no pirates here Boss!", disconnect with the Redmond mothership and stick that CD/DVDROM iso in the drive and hit autoplay.inf if that's been turned off by the BOFH. (If you haven't done that, why the hell not? Do you want your Windoze computer to turn into a Zombie?)
7) Click on the install button and go get some coffee and another doughnut if there are any left.
8) Come back and click "Finished". Ce fini!
9) Let it re-boot and Ghost that sucker before somebody can come along and mess it up!
10) Now for the bad news. It totally un-installs IE7 (at least it did on our image).
It requires that you do a complete re-install of IE7.
11) It kills a lot of the special settings we had made in HK_Local_Machine.
12) It re-sets the User profiles and causes a lot of re-setting to be made of the user interface (Explorer)
13) It forces new settings to be made of Windows Automatic Update and the Firewall.
All of the major stuff seems to be fine. If something major comes up I'll update but only if I have to.
Tuesday 17 June 2008, 1:44 AM
"♬ Service Pack 3 Done give me the Blues♬♬"
I stupidly went at it again. This time I installed all the idiotic updates and security patches to bring the SP2 machine that wouldn't update to SP3 to SP2 up-to-date. In other words I took the RED PILL. (Cue the slow-motion, ripply video effects a la Matrix, or was it the BLUE Pill, who knows!)
Everything was cool, it worked fine as far as I could test it this morning. I was gonna trash it any way. Its a testbox with a volume license CD install on it. So what the hell. I went ahead and installed SP3 with Windows Update on-line on top of all that crap. Went off to a couple of meetings,came back, Lo and behold I have a working SP3 box. Way too freaking weird!
What made the difference? AND why should putting all those SP2+ updates make any difference to a Service Pack install? I seem to remember that Service Packs for the OS have been traditionally designed to be a complete install unto themselves, with NO prior dependencies outside of a VIRGIN OS install. I have no clear idea but I do have a guess I'll share.
I''ll bet you a box of donuts that the combination of the WGA crap and a late update to Windows Installer is what kills SP3 as a complete install.
SP2 didn't require WGA to work right. But she ain't virgin anymore, she's got WGA crap on her.
I base that idea on the fact that WGA has been shoved down onto my box every freaking Patch Tuesday for the last 6 to 7 months. And in that time Windows Installer has been updated at least twice. I'm going to have to test that idea out but I think I'm on to something and the reason the Gorilla has been relatively quiet about it is that very few people download the entire SP3 ISO. But the IT/IS people do! Because they want to control when and how all the hundreds or thousands of desktops under their care get updated.
My guess is that we haven't heard the end of it yet. The Big Boys HP and DELL and the big end-users are talking very intently with MS right now since they are likely to get the most customer support hits. Of the three failures I've experienced, 2 were on DELLs and one was on an HP!
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