Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

Process Monitor runs on Windows 2000 SP4 with Update Rollup 1, Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Vista as well as x64 versions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista.

This is getting kind of silly now. If you want the latest and greatest bug-fixed versions of the Volume Shadow Service components, which you should if you are using Backup Exec and other programs that take advantage of the subsystem, you have to request KB hotfixes 910260, 913648, and 923628.

On a good note though, Windows 2003 SP2 beta is wrapping up soon and it will have all those fixes, plus more.

You can read more about the hotfixes for VSS here.

I was searching for a clean way to disable standby today in Windows XP and bumped into an interesting Powerpoint presentation on the ACPI subsystem in Windows XP.

One of the more interesting tidbits mentioned was a 'tweak' that was added to service pack 2, that is disabled by default, which makes the ACPI subsystem a little bit more responsive when you have many devices on sharing the same interrupt as the ACPI interrupt, which I've seen happen on "crowded" systems.

If you want to enable this, do a bitwise OR of 0x00000100 at HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ACPI\Parameters\Attributes

Most systems I've seen do not have a DWORD Attributes key, so you might have to create it.

If you have to create the key, just enter in 0x00000100 for the value since there isn't a pre-existing value to OR.

In Vista and Longhorn, this enhancement is enabled by default, so if you are already running under Vista or Longhorn, no need to apply this.

You can also read up on the massive changes the ACPI subsystem went through in Vista here.

One of the more noteworthy items in that PowerPoint, at least from an end-user perspective, is "native" screen brightness controls for laptops, as long as they have proper ACPI support. Anything that reduces the amount of programs needed to support laptop controls is a good thing in my book. I typically try to run the least amount of OEM cruft I can get away with.

There are a lot of changes since SP1, so it is worth reading the release notes to make sure there haven't been any incompatible changes made and, of course, it is not recommended to use CTPs in a production environment but if past SQL CTPs have been very stable.

You can grab the new binaries here.

The changelog for SQL 2005 SP2, so far, is here.

.NET 3.0 RTM'd too today - it is the week of releases at Microsoft it seems.

Microsoft is finally putting its muscle behind virtual servers and the concept of "Live CDs" even if it is actually "Live hard drives" in a way.

You can find Windows 2003 R2, Exchange 2007, ISA 2006, and SQL 2005, ready to test, right here.

You can read about the program more here.

You can also read the general announcement and where I found out about this here.

Oh, and Vista and Office 2007 are supposed to RTM today but almost all the news sites are already reporting it, so I figured it wasn't worth mentioning.

Stuff like this happens with Beta software though, unfortunately, from time to time.

If you un-install Office Outlook Connector for Live, you will also damage your Windows Live Messenger 8.x install, it seems. I haven't tried it on more than one machine so far but if you install WLM first, then install the Outlook Connector, then uninstall Outlook Connector, your Windows Live Messenger will be non-functional.

I'll be filing a bug when I get some free time tonight.

I'm just happy that there is software out there that gives Office 2000 the ability to open Office 2007 documents!

I haven't seen this firsthand but I can see how it could be a problem and/or happen. Thankfully the workaround is easy enough too. Read about it here.

Long Range ZIP / Lzma RZIP

It seems to combine the best parts of various algorithms for large files. One big downfall is the amount of memory it needs to create the highly compressed archives, but it is needed to be able to get the results it gets.

Very interesting to keep an eye on development though and very handy if you are running tight on disk space and not on RAM. Thankfully you don't need much ram to uncompress the archives.

You can check out the website here.

A good example from the README file:

Uncompressed: 616.99 MB
gzip: 207.97 MB
bzip2 -9: 183.57 MB
lzma -9: 93.18 MB
lrzip -M: 78.88 MB

Impressive.

I'm starting to wonder if the programmers over at Symantec ever profile their programs or look for memory leaks before sending out a new release. My biggest impression of SAV 10 and 10.1 overall has been "bloated Elvis resource usage" and "leaks memory more than a programmer just learning about pointers in C".

You can read the release notes here.

I have to admit their release cycles are a bit scattered too. Some patches are available for public download from their site and other patches are downloadable from their secured site. They don't seem to 'announce' when newer revisions are put online overall either. I typically stumble upon them when deploying SAV on a customer rollout/rebuild.

I still see way too many copies of v10.0.0.398 on Windows servers. Many of the early v10 versions are non-paged pool memory leakers that result in very strange crashes.

My custom license plate recently came in and most non-computer people have no idea what it means. People that deal with SMTP at all should know what it means. Why did I choose to get it?

#1. It was available. The initial motivation was a joke that snowballed into a custom license plate within the span of a few hours. The other custom plates that were attempted were either filtered or already in use.

#2. The old Dodge Neon TV ads, back in the generation 1 era, used to use "Hi." at the end of the commercials. The ads should have said "Hi, you'll need to replace my head gasket every 40,000 miles due to a design flaw!" but I doubt that would fit on the screen or sell many cars. Thankfully that problem is long gone on any recent model.

#3. It is easy to remember when filling out paper work.

#4. I'm a huge nerd.

The reactions from people that know what ELHO means have ranged from "That's pretty sweet" to eye rolls, which is what I expected anyway.

I totally forgot about this until a Google search for somehow popped up a reference to the DOOM FAQ with my name and MSU e-mail address in it.

To quote:
"Aaron Fredrick Tiensivu (tiensivu@student.msu.edu) - Command line parameters"

I remember on the night of the release, most sane people were playing the game to try it out. I was curious and remember trolling through the executable to find any hidden or undocumented command line parameters using 4DOS and a hex editor. I ended up finding quite a few and sent off a quick e-mail to the DOOM FAQ author soon after. It is pretty neat because later versions of the retail DOOM came with a copy of the FAQ right on the CD.

I don't mind listing that e-mail anymore because I doubt that 'student' remaps to 'pilot' anymore and that account has always been a favorite to spammers due to how often I used it back when you didn't need to worry about spam engines searching for e-mail addresses on mailing list posts and websites.

The early days of the original "throbbing" N version of Netscape, the SLS distribution of Linux 0.9x and the heated debates on the benefits and disadvantages of using a.out or ELF format. I honestly didn't care that much back then but some people made quite a fuss over losing a register on the x86 platform and how inefficient the older versions of GCC became due to the ELF format.

My wife had a doctor's appointment this morning and her Motorola E815 switched into EVDO mode. The next time she goes into Grand Rapids, she is going to try to figure out which tower is the cutoff point for EVDO if it is still active.

There is a Verizon tower near our house and I am really hoping a truck stops by and puts some new panels and electronics on it this month. If by chance anyone at Verizon reads this, you will have a couple new data plans for sure out of that upgrade alone. I know our population density isn't the greatest, but we are by a lake that has some very upscale homes on it that lack any type of broadband access.

We are in the no mans land of being just west of Kent county, just east of Muskegon county, and right in the little "spike" of Ottawa county. Lots of people on Crockery Lake are wanting broadband access. We don't have DSL available. We don't have wireless ISPs available even though we are in Ottawa county which is supposed to be getting wireless internet county wide. We have analog cable through Charter that is just on the border of cable modem access to the east. Anyone I talk to at Charter has no idea when our neighborhood is going to be rebuilt.

I hate to admit but having an IT job in this region isn't much fun when you have to RDP into servers from home and you can watch the screen repaint with 8-bit color depth on 1xRTT. If I am lucky, I can connect into a Citrix box that has 16-color support enabled. Heck, I'd be fine with monochrome support as long as I could get my work done.

So, if any type of broadband wheeler-dealer sees this, you could make a killing in this region. If I had the capital and balls to put a T1 line into my house and run a WISP, I would, but I don't have the funds or the balls to do it.

Heck, I own 2.5 acres of land where my current house is - I'd be willing to rent my land and put up a tower if it brought EVDO to the area. I'd actually be more inclined to put up a WiMax tower but I'm still uncertain how much penetration they are going to get in the market.

I've also heard that Alltel is testing out EVDO 850 in the area on the towers they gained from the AT+T Wireless deal. They are converting the old GSM towers over to CDMA/EVDO. Of course, what I hear and what is really going on could be two different things. All I know is that Alltel has a big presence in northern Kent county and elsewhere.

Not to be confused with normal Windows Clustering but this is quite a setup to drool over.

Although the KB 907639 is pretty HPC/CCS 2003 specific, people that want to bind RIS (remote installation services) onto a specific NIC might want to grab the update listed there. There are also a few other addition that might come in handy for normal servers, but many of them are geared towards deploying 'slaves' in a CCS environment.

Anyone catch the Foo Fighters reference?

Commonly referred to as Desktop Aurora or Aurora Desktop, this long forgotten early Vista eye candy can be "hacked up" to work in the newer builds. It is not quite like the earlier builds but it sure it nice being able to run screen savers as your background. It was one of the things I always loved about xscreensaver under unix.

Read more about it here and make sure to grab a copy of the AnimatedDesktop.zip program to automate the process for you.

You can also get it to work under XP although I haven't tried it personally. If you want to see some eye candy inside Vista without grabbing any files or programs, just open up a 'Run' prompt and type 'winsat aurora', hit [Enter] and enjoy.

The AnimatedDesktop.zip method is much more elegant though.

I guess Minesweeper was an unpopular game outside of the US due to problems with land mines. Apparently, this short lived version of Minesweeper, called Mimesweeper, caused an even bigger uproar.

It is too bad people are so easily offended these days or maybe I have a twisted sense of humor.
Read about Mimesweeper and other goodies left out of Vista, here.