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Upon arriving at work yesterday morning, I was greeted by a blue screen with a KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR message and a STOP: 0X00000077 code.  As I rebooted the box, I received an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME with STOP: 0XC0000185.  Some quick research on another computer showed that these codes were indicative of a bad hard drive.   And Dell Diagnostics returned error code 0142 with status byte 78 when it checked the hard drive.  I called Dell with error and I should have my replacement hard drive today.  Ironically the previous day, I cleaned up my box, placing all my essential files onto my share on the san.  There were a few older backups and software installations that I didn’t save, but I can always redownload the software.  It has been very annoying and counter productive the last two days to use an older underpowered workstation that I found under a desk.  It is frustrating not to have all the tools I normally use frequently not installed.  This situation has made me think harder about experimenting with VDI.  Having a virtual desktop stored on our san would be very helpful.  I could install the tools I typically use and set it up just the way I want to without have to worry about hardware failure.  This has been the first drive fail on a workstation I have used that was no longer usable at all.  I attempted to read the drive with a Knoppix cd and was unsuccessful.  Makes me wish I could have RAID on my workstation similar to the servers I manage.  That way I could avoid having to resetup my work environment.

Yesterday I found a fix to a problem I have been having with my Symantec antivirus server.  For a while now, every time I tried to unlock the server group in System Center I received this message:  “Error: Can’t communicate with the Server Goup. Verify Network Connectivity and that machines are operating within the Group! If problem persists, try clearing the Server Group cache and re-discovering all Server Groups.” after a brief timeout.  I ignored it for a while since I didn’t really need to do anything to the group and the server was running fine otherwise.  But yesterday I found this forum thread and this article from Symantec describing a fix to the problem.  Apparently there is a registry DWORD value at “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Intel\LanDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\ScSComms\LocalData” called “LoginCaCertIssueSerialNum”.  This is a counter that increments each time the group is unlocked.  Once the value exceeds 256, the group becomes unable to be unlocked.  Setting the value back to 1 fixed the problem immediatly for me.  I found this right after I had opened a case with Symantec, and a tech called me right after I fixed the problem on my own.  Of course he had the same solution, but I asked him why this is set up like this and he had no answer.  According to Symantec’s article this is fixed in version 10.0.2, and my server is just behind that.  It needs to be upgraded anyway.  I have seen so many strange bugs in Symantec software, but they aren’t the only ones with issues.

I had to make a small change to the network of a QA box I manage.  So I logged in, via remote desktop using a domain admin account and went to the open the network connection.  Which was missing.  An ipconfig confirmed that I did have a network address, and of course it was working since I was accessing the machine remotely.  Very puzzling.  A reboot did not solve the problem either.  Since it is working, I’m not gonna mess with it.  I took this screenshot to document the problem.

Continue reading ‘The Missing Network’

After my previous observation of Endpoint’s memory usage, I came across a disk space issue.  On both test Windows 2003 clients, I found that the space on C: was completely gone.  Using some space analysis tools I found that on both servers, c:\program files\common files\Symantec shared\virusdefs contained several gigs of temp files.  Some research on Symantec’s forum’s showed me that this was a common problem.  I also found on this blog that this should be fixed in MR2.  I have not checked my version number, but I am assuming that I don’t have MR2 installed.  I haven’t yet had a chance to install and test, but have instead removed Endpoint from one of the test servers, and my own desktop where I was testing.  Performance on my machine instantly improved.  My machine is a brand new Dell, with dual core and 2gb of ram.  If it can slow that down so drastically, I am definitly not going to drag older machine’s down with Endpoint.  Hopefully MR2 improves these problems.

Over the past week I have been playing with Symantec Endpoint in preparation for a migration from Symantec Client Security 10.  Endpoint is basically the next version of Symantec’s anti-virus with a firewall and antispyware combined.  The management server seemed to have way more features than the previous version, however the interface is not any more intuitive than before.  Now, I’ve always noticed that symantec’s products are huge resource hogs, so I was surprised to notice that the size of rtvscan.exe had only a fraction of the mem usage of previous versions.  However on further investigation on several test machines I found that the usage was actually rediculously higher.  I’ve compiled a chart showing the differences in the usage.  I had four test machines running on VMware virtual machines.  Two windows xp clients, and two windows 2003 servers, one as a client, and the other as a management server.  Both Endpoint, and Client Security 10 memory usage is shown.

All the test machines has a fully updated system with nothing running but the Symantec program, wiht the exception of the Symantec 10 server which was also running several smaller inhouse apps.  The management program uses java, (another pig) which explains the high use of memory when the management app is open.  I attempted to do PCmark benchmarks, however it didnt like the virtual machines.

This is an horrible misuse of memory.  The program’s size on disk is less than all that.  Several posts by developers on symantec’s forums mentioned that they tried to reduce the memory footprint.  Not sure how they thought they were doing that.  I am hesitant to start rolling this out, because I know that all my users will start complaining about their machines slowing down.  I am running the endpoint client on my machine, however its a brand new Dell and has plenty of resources to spare.  I just need to install it on a Vista machine for the ultimate bloat experience.

This list of 100 things you don’t want to here your System Administrator say comes from PacketStorm Unix Humor. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve said several of these lines before.
1. Uh-oh…..
2. Shit!!
3. What the hell!?
4. Go get your backup tape. (You do have a backup tape?)
5. That’s SOOOOO bizarre.
6. Wow!! Look at this…..
7. Hey!! The suns don’t do this.
8. Terminated??!
9. What software license?
10. Well, it’s doing something…..

Continue reading ‘Things You Don’t Want to Hear Your SysAdmin say’

I have finally created a JavaScript version of my C# password generator. The javascript version located here will generate multiple random passwords containing upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Just hit the generate button to get your passwords. Remember your passwords and keep them in a safe place.

I have several ideas to extend the functionality of this tool, and I will work on them when I get time over the next few months. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

Well tonight I reinstalled Windows XP on my computer. However I put the 32-bit version on instead of 64-bit which I had on before. I was having too many driver problems, and found I didn’t get any benefits from x64.

The install went smoothly, however I found out that Windows XP before sp1 does not support hard drives more than 130gb. But once I installed sp2, it recognized the rest of the hard drive. I just had to use Partition Magic to combine the partitions.

I would have liked to kept Windows XP x64, but it still has too many driver problems and program incompatibilities to be viable for a typical desktop setup.

While building a new web server today I decided to see if there was a way to create Virtual Directories in IIS 6 from the command line. I had a bunch to create and wanted to script the creation for the next time I build a web server. I came across two vbscripts that are installed into c:\windows\system32 with IIS. This is the Microsoft article for the scripts. Continue reading ‘Create IIS6 Web Sites and Virtual Directories from the Command Line’

Winternals Software announced today that they have been bought by Microsoft. They were bought so that Microsoft could hire the two founders of the company, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. These two guys are talented Windows programmers who should add a lot to the Windows development team. They are well known for Sysinternals, the system tools that are extremely helpful in troubleshooting windows. Microsoft is also aquiring all these tools in the deal. I think that this is an excellent move by Microsoft. They get two excellent developers, and all the great support tools. I know Microsoft likes to use the Sysinternals tools, because every time I am on a support call with them they have me download and use one of the tools. It would be great if Microsoft could bundle these tools into Windows, or the windows support tools pack. This would make it much easier to use these tools.

However part of the reason that the Sysinternals tools were so great were because they were third party tools. Now that they are owned by Microsoft, more people will be more distrustful of the tools. But I think that it is a good move overall. Perhaps some other developers in Microsoft will be able to add helpful features to the tools. I definitly do not think that Microsoft will charge for these tools, since there support department uses them so much.