Monday, October 31. 2005
I figured it out with a combination of TaskInfo, Task Manager and RegMon. Essentially whenever a "desktop event" happens, like an MSN "online alert" or Trillian announcing someone logging in or logging out, the nhk.exe / dellmmkb.exe process will start leaking handles.
Over the weekend, my system decided to start getting flakey once I had 400k+ handles open, all by the dellmmkb.exe process.
Right now, after a few hours of use, it is already at 5000 entries.
So, until they fix this buggy app, it's getting uninstalled. I'll miss the OSD but I'd rather have a stable and working laptop.
Especially when you are using Squid as a transparent proxy. As time goes on, squid becomes more and more HTTP 1.1 compliant but until that time, your best course of action to prevent problems with WSUS is to set the WSUS server to only do 'foreground downloads'. You lose the ability of the WSUS server doing HTTP range-requests, but you also don't end up with a saturated pipe because your server and clients are constantly downloading updates over and over again.
Case in point: Before the WSUS client came out and the older versions of BITS clients were on the XP machines behind a Squid server, they kept trying to grab updates and failing, which ended up saturating the internet connection at the office this took place. Sure, you can set GPOs for BITS to only download a certain amount during certain hours but you would still end up with the same result.
Bottom line: If you are using Squid with BITS/WSUS, make sure all your clients have the BITS 2.0 clients - which you should have by default if you are using WSUS. If your WSUS server is behind the proxy too, make sure to download the WSUS Debug Tool from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/updateservices/downloads/default.mspx
and tell it to do Foreground downloads only.
If you don't want to bother with the debug util, you can also go into the WSUS SQL tables and modify table tbConfigurationC, and set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground to 1. The debug tool makes it a no brainer though.
As a side note, once I had all the client machines behind the WSUS server for updates, I ended up changing the BITS GPO to basically go "full blast" during off-business hours since the machines were no longer downloading any content from the internet but from the local server. That kind of traffic I'd rather have go as fast as possible if I can help it. Sometimes BITS tends to 'trickle' too much on the default settings.
Query the WMI property Win32_BaseBoard (I believe that's the right one) and check to see if it's made by "Microsoft". Until Microsoft moves into the motherboard business, it is a quick and dirty way of doing it.
It seems like the next versions of Virtual Server and/or VMWare should have some official way of doing this - even a simple 'isVM.vbs' or something provided.
Saturday, October 29. 2005
So far it has done this to me twice and I'm waiting to have it leak on me again. I do believe the DellTouch programs are made by Netropia. I could be wrong.
Either way, after about 24 hours uptime, my XP SP2 box was acting a bit weird. I noticed in Task Manager that instead of having around 15k handles open, there were over 400k handles open! I traced it to DELLMMKB.EXE.
It is a bit overkill for SP2 since the HID Input service normally handles the volume knobs and other extra buttons on these keyboards, but I do like the OSD that DELLMMKB.EXE provides.
If it keeps leaking, it's going bye bye.
Friday, October 28. 2005
Worth looking into and implementing - I bumped into this when I was trolling the new KB articles for Exchange information and waiting for a tape to restore.
Instead of copying and pasting, I will just provide the link to how to do it - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907458
Don't confuse "Access-based" with Microsoft Access. Totally different concept. 
I'm hoping the "gotchas" with reset ACLs will get resolved with Longhorn/Vista.
One of the main selling points of SP2 was the fact that you can force clients into cached mode. I'm (guessing?) that it is done with a GPO or some option buried somewhere in System Manager I simply can't find. I will look through the SP2 docs again but other people are having the same problem finding it.. It's not essential for my rollout but it sure would be handy to know. Anyone know?
Answered! Thanks to anonymous user JC:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/5/fb5c54af-fe5c-48e9-be97-f9e8207325ab/Ex_2003_SP2_RelNotes.htm
under the section "Enabling or Disabling MAPI Access per User"
Thursday, October 27. 2005
What chain/company tends to buy huge lots of electronics/etc but isn't necessarily known for computer stuff? Walmart. If you go to Best Buy, of course you are going to only see the latest models just because Best Bi tends to move product.
Case in point, the Walmart I went to today on Alpine had a ton of v2 and v3 GS models, whereas the Best Buy had all the newest revisions of both models.
So, if you want the "good" versions, check out Walmart.
I think it is actually kind of scummy how the newest version of the GS is just the previous version of the G, except for the GS price. Sure, with the default firmware, it has the same functionality. SpeedBooster is just a codec gimmick anyway that you can load onto a G if you want.
It's just too bad they are going the VxWorks route. I rather like having a lot of custom software at my disposal because these little boxes make great Snort collectors/etc.
I don't know which one I'm looking forward to the most. Most likely SQL 2005 since the last version was before 2000 with SQL 2000. VS 2005 is very nice but I'm still a bit puzzled with all the name changes of the different suites. We've got MSDN subscriptions, action packs, and MS certified partner licenses I believe. Worst case scenario I can always use the Express versions for my quick hacks at home and use the company ones when I'm at work. I like that type of seperation anyway.
Wednesday, October 26. 2005
I almost found out the hard way. Long story on that one.
For the longest time, I had been running the Sveasoft firmware on a Buffalo WBR-G54 although it was an older version specially hacked to support it.
Essentially, the wireless portion IDs itself slightly different than the original Linksys WRT in the source code so long ago you had to add the Buffalo specific tags to find the wireless portion.
Anyway, I attempted to put Alchemy 1.1 on the Buffalo the other day since it natively supports it. For some reason, it looks like I might have bricked it. I can't even get it to respond doing the ARP/TFTP trick that you could use previously. I'll most likely have to pop it open and short the pins to invalidate the flash code.
In the meantime, I picked up a v2.0 WRT54GS and put Alchemy 1.1 on it. It was the lone v2.0 in a batch of v4.0s. Word to the wise, avoid the WRT54G V5 because it is running VXWorks now. You will want to grab the WRT54GS V4 if you want to put custom Linux on it. It seems that some V4s have 16MB of flash and some have 32MB. Right now it seems rather random, so I took the 'known good' v2.0 home with me.
Here is the cheatsheet for versions and serials, taken from linksysinfo.org:
CDF0 = WRT54G v1.0
CDF1 = WRT54G v1.0
CDF2 = WRT54G v1.1
CDF3 = WRT54G v1.1
CDF5 = WRT54G v2.0
CDF7 = WRT54G v2.2
CDF8 = WRT54G v3.0
CDF9 = WRT54G v3.1
CDFA = WRT54G v4.0
CGN0 = WRT54GS v1.0
CGN1 = WRT54GS v1.0
CGN2 = WRT54GS v1.1
CGN3 = WRT54GS v2.0
CGN4 = WRT54GS v2.1
CGN5 = WRT54GS v3.0
CGN6 = WRT54GS v4.0
The store had a ton of the CDFA models and CGN6 models. I think this one was left only because it came as a kit with a USB adapter. I have 30 days to return it so if I bump into one without the USB adapter, I might do so.
WRT54G v3.1 is the last "good" WRT54G and WRT54GS V4 is actually a WRT54G v3.1 rebadged. Confused yet? You should be. It is hard to keep track of.
The one good thing of these newer models is that it is one chip instead of 3 chips and they are rumoured to have stronger WLAN but call me old fashion, sometimes all-in-one solutions aren't as good as individual components.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but it is only a matter of time until I have Snort / Kismet / OpenVPN on this "old school" GS model. I'd still like USB onboard but those seem to only come on the ASUS models. I could run my cell phone off it then, so I still might go that route.
http://www.gridconnect.com/xport.html
It is essentially the size of a RJ-45 port AND runs an embedded OS.
Nice!
Now I understand why Peachtree 2006 requires the console aka session 0... it's still using the BTrieve aka Pervasive aka "Oh god, the horror" backend.
A sad day indeed.
Good news: Grandma's stomach cancer seems to be localized only to her stomach so far.
Bad news: She's going to have to have 90% of her stomach removed.
Stomach cancer typically doesn't respond to chemo (the best way to describe it is that it just gives a big middle finger to chemo and keeps replicating), so the fact that it has spread yet is very good news.
Overall this is better news than the initial shock of it all. She's a trooper. She'll do fine.
It better work this time.
Actually, this is more of a comment on how slow the 'wsusutil import' function works. Exporting the metadata from the SQL backend to flat files works great and fast. The import however, on a dual Xeon 3G machine with 12GB of RAM, took hours. Now, to be fair to WSUS, it was crippled with the MSDE backend, but I'm curious if SQL 2000 (or especially 2005 - I wish it would RTM, like, a few weeks ago) would give it a nice kick in the pants.
I don't like the idea of eating up a SQL license for a WSUS server, though, either.
Monday, October 24. 2005
Someone beat me to it. I've been sick of having hard drive failures on my little Thinkpad that I use to do most of the house's packet routing and shaping. I've been working on getting a 44-pin laptop IDE to CompactFlash adapter that will actually fit correctly in the bay of the Thinkpad 600E.
http://www.cflinux.hu/
My original thought was Fedora Core 4, stripped down, and mounted r/w only sparsely but it looks like this distro is made specifically for Compact Flash.
|
