Category Archives: Tech

Win 2008 R2 and signed drivers

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After replacing yet another failed disk in my raid array this weekend, I replaced the Windows Vista installation on it with Windows Server 2008 R2, released last week.

I overlooked one important factor before installing Server 2008 R2 on it – I did not have signed drivers for my HighPoint 1740 raid controller. I had assumed, and wrongly so, that the drivers which had worked on Vista x64 would continue to do so in Server 2008 R2 (Win 2008 R2 is only available in x64 flavors), which is only partially the case.

On all x64 versions of Windows, drivers have to be digitally signed. I guess the logic behind this is for reasons and stability and compatibility. You could however, still force an install of a non-signed driver. The result however, could be some annoyance.

Afte the installation of the raid drivers, Windows refused to start and instead, booted into a recovery state. It was only then that I discover that although most drivers that worked under Vista/Server 2008 will work on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, the signature is only valid for the particular version of the operating system they’re signed for.

To get around this, driver signature enforcement would have be disabled at each start up. The way this is done is to hit F5 right after the BIOS POST screen and before Windows start, and then hit F8 to bring up the advance options, and select disable driver signature enforcement. Troublesome.

There is yet another alternative, which I have not explored. The Windows Driver Kit provides a way to self-sign drivers for testing purposes. The MSDN article on how to go about doing this is here. I’ll have to look into it when I more time at my disposal.

High-tech manual labor

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I had the opportunity of doing some work in a HR-like department recently which handles the manpower administration for a military unit. It is one of those rare places in the military where you get see technology, in the form of computers systems and networks, being employed.

A particular subset of the work there involves generating reports for soldiers being released from service. The system involved doing data entry from a couple of different documents into a web-based form, and the downloading the completed report in a word document, and then opening the document and doing a lot of formatting, before finally printing it out. Then do the similar for maybe about a hundred over documents. In other words, it’s a laborious job, and one that would likely qualify for an entry on thedailywtf.com.

When the process was being explained and shown to me, voices in my head sighed. Coming from a sysadmin/programming background, one important thing you learn is to automate whatever you can, especially repetitive tasks such as this. This was a prime candidate for scripting action, and an area where Visual Studio’s integration with MS Office could be set to good use. It’s a pity that the computer was locked down rather tightly without any chance of doing so though.

Sad.

Windows 7 initial impressions

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There’s no denying that I’m a geek. I took leave today just so I could be there to install Windows 7 when it is released on TechNet.

Windows 7′s installation is largely similar to Vista’s. It has been ages since I last did an installation of Vista, so I can’t say for sure if it was any faster. Things went without a hitch until I reached desktop and tried to copy over my Everquest 2 installation off a network share. Windows locked up right away. I did a hard reset and tried a couple of times but fail was still the result. Unsure if it was an issue with the network transfer or writing to disk itself, I tried copying for another source. Thumbdrive and DVD copies went through okay, it had to be the network.

The NIC that I’m using is an Atheros Gbe onboard controller. I had the driver for it downloaded, but it wouldn’t install probably due a version check. To my knowledge, Windows Vista drivers are forward compatible with Windows 7. At this point, I thought I’d give Windows Update a shot. Despite Windows 7 being so new, maybe Microsoft did already start addressing issues that slipped through the earlier RC.

Looks like my faith wasn’t misplaced, an updated driver was there which rectified the issue. It would have been nicer if it had been included with the Windows install itself, which would have made for a better out-of-the-box experience. Overall, I was still pretty pleased.

Asides from the network driver, I have not run across any other issues yet. The UI changes would take me awhile to get used to, but it’s definitely a nice touch. I’ve already begun using some of the new features, such as aggregating multiple folders using libraries. More on that later. Right now, I’m gaming away in EQ2, doing Kurn’s Tower x1 on my new Windows 7 installation.

I am such a Microsoft fanboy

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Windows 7 was officially RTM’d and released to OEM’s on July 24, but consumers won’t get their hands on it until October 22. However, certain other special groups are able to eat it earlier, such as MSDN and Technet subscribers, who will get it on August 6.

I couldn’t wait, so I forked out cash for a TechNet subscription, which ended up costing me in the area of SGD$500 after a 15% discount. All in all, it isn’t a bad deal, considering I’ll have access to numerous other Microsoft products to play with, such as Windows Server 2008. Being an aspiring system administrator (once I finish my army term), it works out great to have a bundle of software to tinker around during my (admittedly) free time.

Oh, I posted this from Internet Explorer just to top it off.

Saved by RAID 5

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Raid 5 rebuilding

I was greeted by a stream of loud and high pitched beeping from my server when I returned home on Friday. Panic set in that very moment, but it didn’t last. Within seconds, I had ascertained the source of the problem, and although it was worrisome one, it wasn’t the end of the world, at least not quite yet.

My first thought was “Doh! Server’s overheating!” but cooler minds prevailed. If the server had indeed overheated, it would have shut itself down instead of beeping madly, and it was still responsive. Well, I thought, the only other thing in the server that had an embedded beeper aside from the motherboard was the RAID controller card, so it had to be that. I have a RAID 5 array, consisting of four hard disks set up on the server, and a quick check showed that the status of the array was ‘critical’, with one drive failing.

In a RAID 5 array, a number of similar capacity drives are used, with the equivalent of one of the drive’s capacity being used for storing parity bits. Thus, a RAID 5 array can sustain the loss of one drive before data is irrecoverably lost.

So what did I do? I ran out the next day, bought myself a new 500 GB drive for SGD$87, replaced the failing drive, and a disaster that would have involved a very painful loss of data was averted. Since my RAID controller (a rather dated Highpoint RAID 1740) supported online rebuilding, no downtime was incurred at all.

Lesson to be taken from this: Data is precious and you never know when a drive could fail on you. If your entire life resides digitally on your computer, make sure you have a backup plan.

Google Chrome: Initial thoughts

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Chrome, Google’s very own web browser just dropped on us a couple of moments ago. I’m glad my insomnia tonight has kept me up enough to give me a chance to lay my fingers on this shiny new geek toy moments after it came out of the Google oven.

As with every new product, my first response was of awe. Looking at the about:memory page of Chrome, it feels as it this was more than just a web browser but an entire OS within an OS.

The ability to shift tabs across browser windows without having the reload the page is a huge plus to my workflow as I tend to organize them quite a bit during browsing sessions, especially after hours of wikipedia-ing.

Of note is Chrome’s tab highlighting in forms. Jeff Atwood once brought this problem up in his post, Where the Heck is My Focus?. With Chrome, even the blind, or in my case, the color blind, can tell where the focus is at.

Speed. WebKit combined with the V8 Javascript VM makes pages load snappy.

Having painting enough smiles on the browser, I’ll have to point out some not-so-happy parts next.

Over the past years, I’ve became so entrenched in Firefox that it almost feels like a volunteer lock-in. Firefox has all the extensions I need to get a day going, such as AdBlock, DownThemAll, and more recently, Weave. Also, I haven’t found a way to add a keyword to search fields, which I rely on tremendously in Firefox. (Edit: Found it) Adding on, it seems that metadata from Firefox 3′s bookmarks/history such as tags do not get imported into Chrome. Having spent a huge amount of time tagging my bookmarks properly, it makes me hard to live without them tags.

Chrome’s future is still uncertain. There is no doubt that the innovations present are groundbreaking, but it would be tough for Google to compete with Mozilla, which already has a well entrenched market share, and of course, Internet Explorer. It is unlikely that Chrome replace Firefox 3 as my default browser in the near future, but I’ll try to do as much work as possible on it to familiarize myself.

Windows and removable or remote media

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We’ve come a long way in the history of Windows since Windows 95 and despite the hostility of a huge number towards Vista, there has been remarkable improvements and innovations made. However, beneath the fresh coat of paint, some of the old cracks in the wall are still occasionally visible. I was reminded, just not too many minutes ago, that Windows Vista is not all that different from Windows 95. What on earth am I talking about?

Thirteen years into the evolution of Windows, attempting to access a damaged/dirty CD still has the chance to bring down the entire explorer.exe process. The same can happen when trying to access a network resource over Explorer that has an unstable link or loses connectivity halfway. It has been thirteen years, THIRTEEN YEARS for crying out loud! Why can’t we handle I/O errors gracefully?

To give Microsoft some credit, at least we are no longer thrown a blue screen when the floppy drive is inaccessible.

RDP-ing to the console session

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Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol has a feature that gives it a huge advantage over most traditional remote desktop software such as VNC (UltraVNC, RealVNC etc.): the redirection of sound from the remote to the local machine. That is to say, I would be able to play a music file on the remote computer and have the sound playback from the local computer’s speakers, instead of it being outputted on the speakers of the remote computer.

Typically however, when a RDP connection is established, it creates a new session by default instead of showing what’s display on the remote desktop currently. So although you were logged into the remote computer, you weren’t able to carry on the work you left off previously remotely. This has been the main reason that previously made me use UltraVNC over Microsoft RDP. However, I was ignorant of the fact that Microsoft RDP is able to do the same, until I stumbled across this KB entry. The reason is that this feature is not obvious right out of the box, it’s not shown on the GUI of the client anywhere. It can only be accessed via a command line, with the following command:

mstsc -v:servername /F -console

That’s the best of both worlds in one. I don’t think I’ll ever look back to VNC again, at least not on a Windows system. Maybe when everyone is sporting 10 Gbps LAN connections, we’ll have enough bandwidth to redirect 3D graphics too.