Home Server Projects

I spent some time reading the news on Yahoo tonight and a story that caught my attention concerned a Arizona state prisoner who died in the OUTDOOR "cell" (really a cage) made out of chain link fencing on 4 sides and on the top. No shade. She was left in the "holding cell" for over 4 hours in 108 degree F heat with no shade.

I'm sorry for her and its inconsequential what her crime was except that she didn't deserve a make-shift death sentence.

Now what really disgusted me on top of that was that Yahoo's idiot savant "content-analysis" software dropped at least 3 ads on the page for chain link fencing vendors.

Some time ago in the "stone-Age" of television and radio, program managers and news departments would prevent airing advertising for airline companies when there was an aircraft disaster in the news. It was considered good taste.

The difference is now there are no human's involved. just computers with what I call "idiot-savant" programs that are real smart at making connections based on vocabulary but idiots when it comes to analysis of content.

Google, and the other search engines do the same thing and I've seen some really idiot results of the programming for content words but not meaning.

You want to make Web 2.0 (or 3.0) work well for people? Program some heuristic content analysis in your advertising. Maybe you won't totally disgust your audience.

Microsoft needs to do something truly pro-active to rid the Internet of Windows zombies. The programming design of Windows from the beginning has been flawed. Consider the resulting bot-net zombies to be car-jacked vehicles on the “Information highway”. Now consider the manipulative digital sociopathic “car-jackers” that control the botnets as practicing a true form of piracy. Bot-net piracy is potentially more economically damaging than anything the movie industry in Hollywood and the RIAA could conceive of.

Beyond the easy to appreciate theft of massive distributed CPU cycles while riding on millions of users' computers, the bot-nets also consume tremendous chunks of Internet bandwidth with their email spam, malware and server crashing behavior. Overall the cost to the entire Internet consumer market probably exceed all the payouts to date made to the Somali pirates.

Microsoft Windows project managers over the years obviously have focused their programming staff on goals other than operating system security. Microsoft owns the software on 90% of the desktops, probably approaching 50% of all the various servers and an untold percentage of all the applications running behind the pathetic software firewalls on various forms of Windows. Yet outside of Windows Updates and/or Microsoft Updates, there is no real mechanism for even an informed user to be able to repair his/her system after becoming Internet roadkill and a menace to all the other Internet users.

Outside of shackling the typical user's computer with third-party anti-malware software, there is no real security product that addresses the real issue of the operating system, the code itself. In this regard, most Internet users truly have been shafted by their vendor - Microsoft. Users should be able to buy an off-the-shelf computer with an operating system product that is secure and able to fend off intrusion or at the very least report to Microsoft that it has been infected. Why bother to put in Remote Assistance with a Microsoft logon user if it doesn't do anything useful?

The typical Windows user who has had his/her hardware compromised can't really be considered the cause of the bot-nets. The typical Windows user hasn't a freaking clue that his system has been snatched by a pirate and is running as a part of a DDOS or has begun vomiting email spam. Worse, the user even if aware doesn't know what to do to fix the infestation.

Even if the user were inclined and technically savvy-enough to do everything possible to prevent the home system from being subverted, most users are thwarted from regaining control of their system outside of wiping the drive and re-installing the exact same (or worse - an earlier service pack) version of the operating system!

What is really scary is that these same Microsoft programmers and project managers in congregate are writing operating system code that either starts or ends up as code in server applications. One day this same code will begin floating around on the vaporous flotillas of real and virtual “cloud” servers. What's to keep the digital-sociopaths from planting their Jolly Roger on those systems as well?

Putting Windows Defender into Visaster is good but its still an reactive, “after-the-fact” add-on, not an intrinsic and secure means of actively preventing the operating system from getting snagged in the first place by a pirate.

The solution is easy. Outlaw the EULA. Do not allow Microsoft to duck its responsibility for the chaos they have indirectly created on the Internet. Force Microsoft to operate a free service to wipe its operating systems on Internet connected desktops clean.

If Microsoft wants to get into “Web 2.0 cloud services”, a truly wonderful and extremely useful service would be a “Wipe-Clean Windows” website. The user connects up and the system is scoured clean remotely. If Microsoft doesn't want to operate the site then for a fee paid by Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and Zone Labs might. A few years or decades spent paying for wiping clean millions of computers will provide the economic incentive Microsoft seems to need to get the job done right.

Think of it as getting rid of the Tribbles as on Star Trek! Even the Linux users on the Internet would approve of that!

Windows 7 RC surprised me today with some computational behavior that was totally unexpected. You know sometimes I really hate giving bananas to the code monkeys at Redmond. But when the monkeys do it right, you gotta give them the whole bunch.

I was doing about three things at once as usual. I've been building/debugging a special Windows XP Embedded image that depends on a bunch of code and requires a lot of time consuming processes that leave me with my hands and mind free simultaneously for chunks of time. The old adage about free hands and the devil etc., in any case I was also punching at the Windows 7 RC installed on a DELL 755. It has 2GB of RAM, a Celeron CPU running about 2.2GHz. Not an especially impressive system but typical of our rental fleet.

I had installed Win7RC on it a week or two ago. I knew what the answer would be but I tried using Intel's VT reporting utility on the Celeron. I wasn't surprised when it reported that the Celeron was non-VT. Duh. (I only did it because every now and then I have found surprises inside the box. Like a Pentium Core2 Duo mounted inside a DELL that had a Celeron sticker on the outside. A real Cracker Jack surprise.)

I installed Sun's virtual box software on the Celeron running Win7RC. Everything was going great. It installed fine, then it was time to install Windows XP Pro SP3 in the VM. It got all the way to “6” minutes left to install. A message popped up on the screen telling me I had run out of hard drive space! What? I was installing XP Pro onto an “expando-matic” virtual drive. Well after looking at it for a minute or two, I realized I had run out of REAL hard drive space on the C drive. I had 64 Megabytes of empty space left (that didn't used to sound like a tiny drive space).

One of the really annoying things with Sun's Virtual Box is that it likes to install the first time into the User's profile, usually on C. I didn't even think about that. I had the REAL drive partitioned into 2 sections, C was 25GB and D was 55GB. What to do?

I put the VM into pause mode and closed the virtual box application. Wiped all the junk off the D drive I didn't need, all of it except the DELL drivers folder. I discovered that installing the Win 7 RC on top of the Win Beta left this big folder on C named Windows.old. Well I didn't need that. That saved me about 6 GB or so of space. I'm not really sure because I never could get Win7 to finish indexing the damn thing, no swap space.

I started deleting folders from inside the Windows.old folder piece-meal since it turns out the idiotic index service sits there and tries to keep track of all the folders being deleted. Once I got enough room to copy the DELL driver folder to C, with some spare room, I did it.

Then the original driver folder on D gets deleted. I go into Drive Manager via MMC and delete the D partition. Click on C and use the extend (or the REAL expando-matic) command in Drive Manager to make the C drive about 20 GB bigger. Finished deleting all the crap folders in Windows.old and then re-established the D drive.

Started Virtual Box. Un-paused the installation of Windows XP Pro SP3. Viola!!! It finished without burping or crashing. Everything was back to where it was supposed to be! Freaking amazing.

Now why am I giving the monkeys bananas? Windows 7 RC did NOT crash once during the entire procedure, it did not require I turn it off, it only “whited-out” Explorer once for about 3 or 4 minutes and it came back all by itself. It dealt with the lack of swap space, it dealt with the lack of hard drive space and it kept running. XP Pro would have crashed. Vista would have come to a complete dead stop with no apparent reason. It operates almost as stable as Debian Linux 4.0.

I am impressed with Windows 7 RC.