My new best friend when doing IT support on Windows XP is:
runas /user:administrator regedit
Unfettered access to regedit on a restricted account without having to log out and log in as administrator. Good for running setup programs too. Obviously you will be prompted for a password.
runas /user:administrator cmd
is pretty cool too.
Filed under: windows
I was going to Twitter this but realized it would need more than two sentences.
I've realized recently that my perception of windows has hardened into a feeling that windows and apps for it are only developed to exploit people. I put this down to two things:
I still wouldn't recommend anyone to move to Linux for anything more than a platform to run firefox. Openoffice for example is definitely not compatible enough if you have to deal commercially with clients who use microsoft word: ooo WILL bugger up the formatting of their word documents.
What conclusion can I draw? It's this, the current state of software is imperfect.
I'm tempted to buy a mac.
I've tried various ways (cygwin, andLinux, vmware, even remote X etc) to get a mixed linux/windows working environment. I think I've almost found the nicest solution, certainly it is looking good so far.
Seamless
A nice mix of linux and windows. How is it done? The host is kubuntu, a desktop environment that I am appreciating more and more. The windows boxes are running in windows 2000 under the open source version of VirtualBox. Why Windows 2000? Well if I only need windows running to be able to tweek access permissions on the file server and check how things look in ie6 then windows 2000 is all I need. Windows 2000 runs blazingly fast, by modern standards it is a bloat-free o/s.
VirtualBox is set up in 'Seamless' mode which means the windows desktop background disappears and the windows windows appear on my kde desktop. Windows 2000 has the virtualbox applications installed and hence I can cut and paste between systems.
For the kind of linux/rails development I am doing at the moment it is much nicer to be running on linux than windows. NetBeans rails integration runs much more smoothly, rspec tests run many times faster, networking is seamless, it's just better all round.
Note that in the DOS box I am looking at my linux home directory, accessed via VirtualBox's shared folder mechanism.
I'm liking VirtualBox more than vmware. When I tried running linux in vmware on windows I found it annoying to have to wait two minutes for the machine state to be saved when I was closing down my pc to go home. VirtualBox under linux is doing it in seconds. Startup time for snapshots is good too.
I've set VirtualBox up with a permutation of networking that lets me log into the windows domain network from Windows 2000 as the VirtualBox instance appears as a pc on our network. By default it appeared behind a NAT translation and windows networking (Netbios and all that ancient stuff) was broken.
Incidently, trying to install windows 2000 on VirtualBox I kept getting end endless reboot loop. The fix for this is in the VirtualBox user manual. Apparently when they wrote the windows 2000 setup program they didn't allow for 2GHz dual core processors and virtual disks so the setup program crashes due to a timing condition. So much has changed in the last eight years.
Filed under: kde linux virtualbox win2k windows
Somebody at work was fiddling with the fuse box and took out all the servers in the IT room. I rebooted them all but our main file server wouldn't boot, the hard disk partition was fried.
I used a knoppix CD (excellent tool for any pc that won't boot from its hard disk) to delete the corrupt partition and then reinstalled Windows 2k server on it. Experience has taught me that there is little point in trying to repair windows installations. Fortunately this file server is set up with two disks, one for the OS and another for the data. This is a nice arrangement as if either disk dies, that's approximately half the work required to get the thing back up. I only had to reinstall Windows.
Things were back online by lunchtime, the only problem being that one of the computers in the building was unable to access the new shared file system: mine! Vista strikes again (this is one reason why I am using Vista, to iron out these sillies). It wouldn't connect to the file share without prompting for user name and password and it wouldn't accept any that I gave (apart from those for a local account on the PC, it wouldn't accept domain account details).
I decided the problem may be that in my haste to get the files online and people working, I omitting to install the latest service packs on the server. I ran the setup for service pack 4 and then remotely rebooted the server from home early this morning while nobody was using it. I connected to it using an ssh tunnel and ultravnc. For reference, the ssh tunnel command was:
ssh -L 5900:192.168.0.54:5900 me@work.com
This is saying, 'connect port 5900 on the pc 192.168.0.54 on the remote network to port 5900 on my local pc'. I connected to a linux server and used this as a relay to connect to the file server. I was able to open ultravnc at 127.0.0.1:5900 and see the windows desktop of the file server. Secure, magical, free. Yes, I could do all this with VPN's, Windows Remote Desktop, Terminal Services or whatever but ssh/vnc is much easier to set up and is immune to random weird Active Directory problems.
I opened 'Computer Management' and 'Shared Folders' and 'Open Files' which gives a nice list of who is using the file server. One user had 'desktop.ini' opened, nothing important so ZAP.
Anyway, the service pack did the trick and when I got to work Vista connected instantly.
Lessons learnt:
I wanted access to the help facility in Vista for reasons I forget now. I like the integrated search thing and I'm getting into the habit of just pressing the windows button and typing my query. I did this and typed 'help' and enter and what did I get? Windows Help? No. I got something called 'fxri'.
fxri turns out to be an interesting Ruby documentation browser with a built in Ruby Interactive Command Prompt. The documentation browser takes a few seconds to load but gives you very fast keyword filtering on search terms. The documentation displayed is a slightly crude monospaced text display (no hyperlinks) but can't beat the speed of access or the fact that there is a command prompt there to try things out immediately. Crude as it is, I think I prefer it to the approach taken by the web based ruby documentation: Frames? Web 0.5 anybody?
fxri gets the 'fx' part of its name from a gui package called Fox that may be worth investigating one day.
I must try typing more random words into the search and seeing what goodies I can find.
One other Vista note, it seems as if Microsoft are trying to disguise the annoyingly long time it takes for Windows to shut down by claiming to install an update every time.
Must say I'm still liking Vista, but still not enough to pay to upgrade my home pc's.
Choice 1:
Choice 2:
Choice 1 gives me a transluscent UI, desktop search and I can keep the pinball game I never play.
Choice 2 gives me less time to play World of Warcraft.
To be honest I have stopped using Google Desktop Sidebar: it kept making itself six inches wide whenever the pc booted and I was tired of resizing it.
Then again, maybe an OS upgrade will stop SVCHOST.EXE crashing every time I shutdown? The PC is about two months old now, that's how long it takes a Windows install to degrade.
I used to be open minded about operating systems but then reality set in.
NB I will inevitably cave and get Vista. Could the Multimedia TV stuff actually work? Streaming to an XBOX 360 sounds cool.
Filed under: windowblinds windows
Interesting tip: setting this in the registry
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks = 1
causes Windows 2000 and later to automatically kill any tasks that haven't shut down after 30 seconds. No more getting into work in the morning to find your pc has been on all night because some stupid app refused to die.
Remember to save those vital Word documents.
Filed under: windows
My new monitor has an abundance of screen space that was begging to be used. When apps are maximised they are just too big, there is ample space to have widgets down the side.
I contemplated the widget options:
I decided it was time to give Google Desktop Search another try. In addition to search it gives me a desktop bar down the right of the screen showing pending email, family photo's etc. It has a number of features that I hadn't tried out before:
I was previously happy with Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search apart from it persistantly failing to stop when I shut down the computer. I'll give google another try but I don't rule out vacillating back.
I don't normally put gui's on my python scripts but I am doing something for a client and cannot rely on them using the command line. All my script needs is the name of a directory to work with.
The following is a distillation of how to show the dialog for browsing for a directory under python and the win32com module.
1 from win32com.shell import shell 2 3 oNeedlesslyComplex = shell.SHBrowseForFolder(0, # parent HWND 4 None, # root PIDL. 5 "Choose directory to convert", # dialog title 6 0, # flags 7 None, # callback function 8 None) # 'data' param for the callback 9 10 if oNeedlesslyComplex[0] == None: 11 pass 12 # cancel pressed 13 14 # 15 # Get selected folder from weird return value. 16 # 17 strPath = shell.SHGetPathFromIDList(oNeedlesslyComplex[0])Toggle Line Numbers
win32com is powerful but little documented.
No, not WoW, something techy for a change, how to migrate a Dell Precision 390 to Raid.
My Dell Precision 390 came with a SAS Raid controller and a pair of 143G disks. However it had been configured with one disk as a plain drive C and the other unconfigured. I had the following options:
I decided on (drum roll) Raid 0. Raid 0 and Raid 1 will give some speed improvements (maybe 10-20%) but I wanted the advantages of 270G of linear disk space. This is my home PC and apart from family photos there is not much 'critical' data on it: I won't lose my job if it went pear shaped.
How to reconfigure it? The OS is on one of the disks that will go into the Raid array which makes things interesting. Here are the steps:
fixmbr fixboot bootscan /rebuildBootscan will prompt you for a name for the partition and boot parameters. Give it a name that shows suitable contempt for Windows and leave the options blank. My Dell came with two partitions, one containing Dell Diagnostics and one containing Windows. When I restored I had zapped the Dell Diagnostics partition as all that stuff is on a CD anyway. However it meant that my restored Windows system didn't boot because the boot.ini file was telling the boot loader that it was on the second partition rather than the first. Hence I needed the bootscan /rebuild to get the restored partition added to the boot.ini. True Image will restore the MBR itself, I just did all this to make sure (it takes ages to boot the recovery console so I did everything I could there to get things working).
[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
For some idea of speed, Firefox nows boots in three seconds. Open Office Write boots in four seconds. It's quick.
I was very impressed with True Image and could be tempted to buy it ($50):
For $50 I could have True Image handling daily backups to my USB disk and still be able to sleep nights with my unreliable Raid 0 array.
I needed a way to stretch The Beast. I was intrieged by the screen shots in Microsoft Flight Simulator X and further investigation found that it has high system requirements (odd for a Microsoft product). I haven't tried a flight simulator for about 15 years and back then realism was restricted to a screen that was half blue and half green. I never got into making a landing and was frustrated by the poor graphics making it hard to tell how far above the ground you were.
The Beast came with an NVidia NVS 285 graphics card which is a high end 2D card for workstations, no good for 3D graphics. After some research ended up buying an XFX 7900GS card: not the best available, a slight compromise. Plugged in, Just Worked.
Downloaded the flight simulator demo (800M file, not without some hassle) and had a play. The games loads up with reasonable speed on The Beast, I've played games that were more frustrating in the past (the original Half-Life springs to mind: I played it on hard and did a LOT of reloading).
First impression was that it was nothing special. Start off trying to drop flour bombs onto targets from a Microlight and it's pretty much impossible to control the thing using mouse as a yoke. Later I altered the sensitivity of the controls, turning them down and reducing the dead band in the middle and it was better but still very hard. It's like those driving games where the slightest touch of the 'wheel' sends you careering into a wall: totally unlike actually driving a car (at least the cars I have driven). Other aircraft were easier to control. Taking off in a Lear Jet was fun.
Being a demo it comes with no manual so it's a bit of a challenge working out how to drive it, a matter of pressing all the buttons to see what happens. You can go into the keyboard setup and look at all the assignments but you can't print them out.
I altered the display settings to make it more of a challenge. I turned up the auto-generated scenery and some of the effects. I turned off the bloom effect which is reputed to slow things down. I started a new flight (don't seem to be able to change settings mid flight) and it was better. Water has realistic reflections and sure enough there are little trees and houses all over the place. These were actually a little naff, all the trees look the same and as you fly along forests in the distance suddently appear, as if they grow out the ground as you approach. There were silly bugs like trees on the side of hills appearing to float with just one edge of the base touching the ground. It could do with more anti-aliasing as the trees were rendered with unrealistic sharpness. The frame rate with this was ok, very slightly juddery when banking but nothing to make me rush out for an SLI setup.
Later in the day I tried a flight and found it was night: it had looked at the clock and decided that because it was evening time I would get a night flight. I gave it a try but apart from being scary flying towards hills in the dark there seemed to be more bugs in the scenery with trees and houses floating in the air (or it may have been showing the ground under the houses/trees in the wrong colour, giving this effect). Does make me appreciate WW2 pilots though.
Overall I wasn't bowled over by it but I have bought a copy of the Delux version from an Amazon marketplate for £24 under what they wanted for it in town. I like the idea of flying around London, New York, Las Vegas etc but the demo only has a few sparse carribean islands. Also the full version has tutorials which would hopefully show me how to use it.
I've read that people set up virtual airlines and play at being pilots, maybe even wearing hats. Not sure I could get into that but this does seem like a nice diversion.
The Beast arrived five days early. Only an hour or so to play with it what with life and all. First impressions:
Happy thus far. Using it to type this. Can you tell the difference?
Have to find something taxing for it to do.
I came across an interesting tool and immediately used it to solve a problem I had solved once before. The problem? I inherited a PC with filezilla installed and a load of ftp accounts set up with passwords I did not know. How to get the passwords?
The tool is the Microsoft User Mode Process Dumper. What is does is it dumps the memory image of a running process to disk where it can be inspected. I used this to dump a running image of filezilla. I ran the image through the 'strings' utility from cygwin to strip out everything but english looking strings and then opened the resulting file in vim. Search through this for the ftp account names and there in all their glory are the passwords. Easy. Took about two minutes, most of this figuring out the command line for userdump which is merely:
userdump 1072
where 1072 was the process ID of filezilla from Task Manager.
This technique would work with any software that loaded all passwords into memory and held them in there in an unencrypted state. The beauty of this is the speed, no messing with debuggers, ploughing through hex memory dumps, get the command line to do the work.
Moral: security is not easy.
At work with have a strict 10M limit on email message sizes and so people have to resort to desperate measures to send rude mpegs:
Came across another option, FolderShare. It runs on however many pc's you want and ensures contents of a shared folder are syncronised between all the pc's. Send files home by copying them to the shared folder and magically they are there when you get home.
Snags? Well all the pc's have to be turned on all the time you are synchronising, there is no central server that is holding the files for you. Still it may be a useful option where you regularly want to exchange files with someone or other, say during working time when both pc's are running.
Filed under: windows
I still want to set up a system what will automatically record tv programs for playback on my pocketpc. For various reasons this is becoming more important: in a nutshell, I can only take so much ITV.
Been trying to setup mythtv on a new pc I have acquired. I have tried various windows PVR packages in the past but none of them were attractive, being flaky and annoying (including meedio which of now available for free as yahoo go). Mythtv was attractive because of it's flexibility.
I installed a clean kubuntu install in the box which went quite smoothly and after some exploration I established that the kernel already supported my hauppauge nova-t usb. I found an application called kaffeine that was already installed which was able to display tv and this essentially Just Worked out-of-the-box, albeit with lip-sync issues (probably because it needs the proprietary nvidia drivers).
Still desiring mythtv, I found an ubuntu repository that has mythtv packages for version 0.18 and installed that. I looked in the ubuntu package readme which says something to the effect that whoever set it up had no experience with mythtv and didn't know what he was doing. Thanks for the warning. I set it up using the mythtv-setup application, started the mythtv backend and tried to start mythweb. I am mainly interested in this as a way of remotely scheduling recordings, I care not about using the myth frontend. Mythweb wouldn't work, it complained about being a different version to the back end. The php code appears to display this error if there are any problems communicating with the back end but I decided I wouldn't mess around getting an old version to work, I would build the latest 0.19. After a few hours of installing dependant packages it built but when I tried running it I got a segmentation error. At this point I gave up with mythtv, I just don't have the time to nurse it into life. mythtv seems bloated and fragile. there is the option of knoppmyth, a dedicated mythtv distribution, but I'm not sure how cutting edge this is, whether it is any good as a general purpose linux distribution or whether the kernel will support my tv card without having to fiddle with compiling it.
I had a brief look at freevo but sourceforge was down (what an advert for oss) but found that freevo used command line tools to do the recording so I am currently investigating that approach: knocking up simple python scripts to do just what I want. I would rather debug these than mythtv (hell is other peoples source code).
Incidentally, I was browsing through some ruby source yesterday and for a few files there I was wondering whether ruby had a comment character.
I'm laying on bed writing this on my pocketpc while listening to the Daily Source Code. I'm using gsplayer to play it while writing, surfing or whatever. It's a simple program, it just plays mp3s but it does it very well, the sound quality is very good.
When I have tried using Windows Media Player, which was bundled with the ipaq, I run into odd problems with running out of memory if I try doing anything else. gsplayer doesn't seem to have these problems because it isn't bloated.
The one thing it is missing is a slider bar to choose a place to resume playback: it only has fast forward and rewind. This makes less than totally convenient to use on a device such as this where playback is likely to be interrupted at any moment. UPDATE: discovered that it does have a slider bar only it's a very plain line that I only noticed when I clicked in it by mistake.
I'm using some cheap philips in-ear headphones (7 pounds). My main purchase criteria for them were:
They sound good to my ear, I'm happy with them.
The ipaq has a built-in speaker which is just about loud enough to listen to stuff if you are no more than three feet away and there is no background noise.
I've been trying out various alternative methods of text entry on my pocketpc. Each different entry method is implemented by a SIP (Soft Input Panel) and Windows Mobile 5 comes with four SIPs built in:
The third party things I have tried are:
Tengo is most fun but the error rate is bad. WordLogic is my next preference, I make fewer errors but it feels like a slow way of writing. I think this is because the keyboard is too small, most errors seem to be due to tapping the wrong letter.
Conclusion: no clear winner. Letter Recogniser is the best of the built in ones, it is probably faster than WordLogic. I do have a soft spot for tengo though.
Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.
I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.
Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.
The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.
Bullet point review:
As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.
I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.
Our company intranet contains many links to documents stored on the company file server. There is no automatic integration, if anyone renames a file on the file server the link from the intranet gets broken and nobody knows until someone else tries to click the link. I have a script to test all the links but I don't run it as habitually as I should.
I had a complaint that a number of links to the sections of a document were not working. For reasons I didn't think to go into at the time the document had been split into seperate pdf files, one per chapter and there was a link to each chapter. The author had renamed some of the files with names that began with a # character and the link from the intranet broke. I tried updating the intranet but it fell over on the # charaters in the links: # has a special meaning in urls, the text after the # denotes and anchor within a page.
I asked the author if it was possible to use a different character. She said that she didn't mind, she only chose # because it caused those files to appear at the top of the list when sorted in Windows Explorer. She wanted the files to list in explorer in the same order that they appear in the document. I studied the file names and decided the #'s weren't necessary, the file names should sort correctly anyway. I tried renaming them on my computer (Windows 2000) and it was fine.
I emailed her and she looked and then complained that they were not in the correct order. I went to her PC (Windows XP) and sure enough the files were not in the correct order. I tried sorting them by name in explorer and no joy. Weird. I opened a command prompt and used DIR and the files were in the correct order.
I looked all through the explorer options and found nothing to effect sort order.
Next google found me this article explaining that Windows XP has a feature designed to try to list files in the correct order where numbers were concerned. The problem I had was not with numbers, it was basically because I expected space characters (ASCII 32) to appear earlier in the list than hyphens (ASCII 45). I tried the registry hack in the article to turn the feature off and the problem went away.
Just watched the new channel 4 series the IT Crowd (loved the funny Goth). If you are wondering why it always takes four hours for an IT person to appear maybe this saga will help you understand.
Filed under: windows
My Dell 500m still loses it's bios settings whenever the power goes down. Ideally, when it came up it would get the current time from a server on the internet. Windows XP has the facility to do this (right click the clock in bottom right, adjust date/time and advanced) but it wasn't working for me.
The problem is that my di624 router's firewall is blocking the NTP port 123. According to this dumbed down explanation you need to open port 123 incoming TCP and route it to the pc in question. This is slightly annoying as I have two other XP pc's I'd like to synchronise and I don't have linux running 24/7 as an NTP server. Can Windows XP home serve time for a subnet or is it deliberately crippled?
More fundamentally, why can't clients just do a simple http request for the current time? It might be out by a few seconds due to propogation but surely that is adequate for >99% of the pc's in the world.
For security reasons the synchronisation will not correct the date, only the time. This can be fixed with a registry hack:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config\MaxPosPhaseCorrection = 4000000 (hex)
and restarting the time service seems to do the trick but is a security hole: someone could get the time server to set a future date on your pc and kill your trial software but I don't think this is anything to lose sleep over.
Filed under: windows
VMWare allows you to create virtual PC's running different operating systems (e.g. various versions of Windows, Linux etc) that run in windows (lower case w) under your main operating system. I've used it for a long time for testing software, especially setup programs as you can install the operating system and then take a snapshot of it's state. You can install other software onto it and mess it about and then roll it back to the snapshot and start again. This way you are always testing against a fixed baseline, a clean operating system install. It's the only reliable way to make sure you haven't forgotten any dll's in your setup program!
I use an old version, VMWare desktop version 3 as it's good enough and there has never been a compelling reason to upgrade it. Well now it seems that VMWare are giving this technology away here.
You can even download ready made virtual machines from here or here and run them in the free VMWare Player. This is one way to play with linux without repartitioning. Ok you could use a live CD but that won't easily allow you to save any changes to disk. With Vmware you can pretty much do whatever you can with the raw operating system, provided it doesn't involve raw, low-level hardware access.
In a lot of ways VMWare was always a technology looking for a problem to solve. It is useful in testing and in centralised servers (e.g. web hosting, clients are free to crash their virtual servers without bringing everyone else down). I think the testing market is limited and Microsoft have muscled in on the virtual server market. Hence these free goodies as appetisers for VMWare's higher end products.
Had a user who got the message "default mail client is not installed correctly" whenever he clicked on a mailto link in internet explorer. When he pressed OK, about a billion IE windows would open up until Windows 98 could take the strain no longer.
In Internet Explorer I clicked on Options/Programs/Reset to defaults and the problem went away.
Conclusion: All Microsoft products are a fragile house of cards.
Filed under: windows
Since plugging Cobian Backup last week I have noticed that it leaves two processes running all the time, committing about 15M of memory, 7M of it for a UI to support a status icon, the rest for the backup service. Since the backup only runs once a day for a minute or so I don't see the point of committing resources all the time: the Windows scheduler service is running all the time anyway, so why run another service to do backups?
I've written a new batch file to do a rolling backup using 7zip, a very nice compression package:
rem rem yet another backup script rem erase "%2\Backup9.7z" move "%2\Backup8.7z" "%2\Backup9.7z" move "%2\Backup7.7z" "%2\Backup8.7z" move "%2\Backup6.7z" "%2\Backup7.7z" move "%2\Backup5.7z" "%2\Backup6.7z" move "%2\Backup4.7z" "%2\Backup5.7z" move "%2\Backup3.7z" "%2\Backup4.7z" move "%2\Backup2.7z" "%2\Backup3.7z" move "%2\Backup.7z" "%2\Backup2.7z" "c:\program files\7-zip\7z" a -r -x@"c:\bin\exclude.txt" "%2\Backup.7z" "%1\*
Exclude.txt is a list of file extensions that should not be backed up.
A wrapper batch file is created to call the above for each backup source:
c:\bin\backup c:\desktop g:\backup\desktop
and this wrapper is run from the Windows scheduler.
I am using 7zip because of the way it allows a source directory to be specified: I'm not sure regular info-zip supports this so cleanly.
7Zip native zip format creates smaller archive files than regular zip (albeit more slowly) and yet salamander still allows me to view them like regular directories so for me there is no practical difference between zip and 7zip. 7zip can be told to create regular zip files is need be.
7Zip supports incremental backups and if my backup files became very large I would consider using it but the external hard disk that I backup to is 80G and has space aplenty so there isn't much to be gained from this.
Found Cobian Backup a nice windows tool for doing automated backups. What is nice about it is that it backs up to zip files so backups are nicely compressed in a non-proprietary format and restoring then does not need any special tools: I can browse the archives from salamander, view them and copy them individually or on mass. It can be set up to do incremental backups every day, a full backup every week and to keep backups of every backup so you have some kind of history.
I am using it simply to archive my work in progress: the computer I am using dies randomly once or twice a week and I don't trust it (it flashes a blue screen and reboots).
I set up the scheduler to do the backup every lunch time, backing up my desktop (where I chuck everything these days) to an external USB hard disk.
The only bugbear I have with it is that it is tedious to get it to exclude files by extension: you have to add them one at a time (click add, enter extension, ok, click add..) and with VC development there are many extensions that can be excluded from backup: my typical list of exclusions is:
It seems to store it's configurations in C:\Program Files\Cobian Backup 7\DB\MainList.lst which is a text file so I edited it in Vim, rebooted Cobian and job done.
Many quality windows freeware tools listed here and here.
Another good source of free stuff is this.
This lists out what files are open by what user on a Windows 2000 server. I once did this in Visual Basic but here is an untainted python version.
1 import win32com.client 2 3 oFso = win32com.client.GetObject( "WinNT://ServerName/LanmanServer") 4 5 for oResource in oFso.resources(): 6 # 7 # this sometimes dies for no obvious reason: this is 8 # COM after all. 9 # 10 try: 11 strUser = oResource.user 12 except: 13 strUser = "" 14 15 if strUser != "" and strUser[-1] != '$': 16 print oResource.user, oResource.PathToggle Line Numbers
Replace 'ServerName' with the name of your server.
This is useful if someone has an excel or access file open on the company intranet and no-one else can open it: we can find the culprit.
How to watch tv anywhere in the house?
1) Capture sound/pictures from tv to a pc and stream them round the house via wifi.
2) walk around house with gorgeous d410 laptop.
3) enjoy.
No more messing around with tv cables in the attic.
Problems:
Was contemplating setting up a vpn between my debian dedicated server and my home windows pc, but how to set it up? Thought about openvpn and found this lengthy article which looked like far too much hastle.
Then I came across mention of hamachi, an easy to set up vpn system. It is closed source but still free. It is a unique system that uses a special hack to get through firewalls in the same way as voice-over-ip.
I installed it on the server first using these instructions which are pretty straightforward. I then installed the windows client which was even easier to install, it starts a wizard up automatically.
Once connected it assigns both ends of the network static ip addresses and the windows client displays the ip addresses of both ends. From windows, just ping the ip address of the server and it worked. Add the windows ip address to the servers webmin access list and I could access webmin from the pc. Hibernate the laptop and unhibernate and it reconnects automatically.
Conclusion: like it says on the box, easy vpn. Now do I trust a closed source system that is begging to be abused by hackers?
Update: should mention that this worked despite the firewalls in my di624 router, Windows XP noddy firewall and the iptables firewall on the server. I don't think it will work if the firewall blocks outgoing UDP packets.
I have realised that I have a full peer-peer tcp/ip network: no more fiddling with ssh tunnels. The server can even push stuff to the client, I'm not tied down to sftp'ing from the server. Next step is to set up samba on the server: I wouldn't want this open to the internet and it can only be tunnelled through ssh if you disable file and printer sharing in windows.
The server could send a WOL packet to my laptop to turn it on and an xml-rpc server on the laptop can do just about anything: record tv, stream webcam, turn the lights on... This was possible before but now it can all be done in an even cooler way.
Update 2: next day after writing this the Hamachi servers went down, taking my vpn, and however many other hamachi vpn's, down with it. Looking at their forum, their servers do seem a slight liability, being subject to DOS attacks and whatnot.
The linux tools don't give much in the line of diagnostic information: if it does ever time out it just says 'Failed', no clue why. Maybe good for security to give no clues but not good for debugging. Had troubles getting three computers on the same network, getting three connected happily at the same time: one or other would be unable to ping it's peers.
In conclusion, I've given up on this, when it works it is nice but I want something that is more reliable and has proven security.
Yesterday I did a google for "peter clive wilkinson" (in quotes) and came across a couple of spam blogs that have stolen my content, including the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
I tried opening the pages but the servers were dead.
Today I did the same search and the old spam blogs have gone but a new one is there.
I won't try to look at the site again as I'm a bit wary of Windows security holes right now and don't want to visit dodgy web sites.
Windows update has installed something or other and is hastling me to reboot my pc. Has it fixed the wmf hole or not? How to tell? I'll install it anyway as I don't like the idea of having gaping security holes on my pc.
Apparently the next generation of processors will have hardware protection against buffer overflow attacks. This might be the only way to protect us from Microsoft's shoddy coding.
For Christmas I also treated myself to a Toshiba 160G external USB hard disk. I decided against Freecom as the one I use at work isn't the greatest quality and I figured a toshiba would be nicer, and I was right, it is a nice little thing, good build quality. So far it has Just Worked and when video editing with my Dell D410 laptop it was certainly fast enough (7200rpm spin speed, faster than the Dell's 5400rpm internal disk).
The video I was working with was 13G long in it's raw .avi format and I only have 20G free in the partition on the laptop, hence I used the external disk. This also had the advantage that I could plug the disk into my desktop system and use that to blow a video CD (Pinnacle Studio doesn't recognise the CD in the laptop). It is running as I type but the rendering is very slow: looks like a frame every five seconds or so. The Dell ran much faster when generating an mpeg to the Toshiba hard disk, maybe five times faster.
I didn't realise how fast the Dell D410 was, or how slow the Desktop is.
I might set up the D410 docking station to use it as a desktop PC and automate backups to the Toshiba which came with some backup software that I haven't played with yet.
Regular readers who are tired of python may be interested to know my latest fad: video. Before Christmas I was looking around PCWorld for a new toy and came across a Packard Bell 'Laptop video editing kit' which appeared to be a bundle of a PCMCIA Firewire adapter and a copy of Pinnacle Studio Version 8 SE video editing software.
I have had some video of my daughters first birthday sitting in the camcorder for a month, waiting for me to do something with it. This package seemed like a good deal at £30. I could have got a PCI version for my main pc but that is limited in slots and the packages were no cheaper. My laptop is more powerful than my desktop so I decided to go with that. My sony camcorder came with a USB 1.1 interface which gave low quality transfers and setting up Firewire had been on my todo list for a while.
By the weirdest coincidence, two days later my Brother gave me a DVD copy of our old family home movies from circa 1962 which blew me away, seeing my late Dad, Grandfathers, old house etc. He also gave me a DV tape which I can read from the camcorder with my new kit.
Family history seems to have more impact on video than still photography so I was inspired to get on with playing with video.
I installed the pcmcia card in my Dell D410 laptop and it Just Worked, no messages to say anything was installed, I had to go into device manager to check. I installed Pinnacle Studio, connected the camcorder and again it Just Worked, I captured two minutes of video and the image quality was very good (the camerawork left something to be desired).
I tried blowing it to a video CD (no DVD writer) but Pinnacle Studio would not recognise the CD Writer in the docking station of the D410: it said '***No disc writer device found! ***'. Maybe it should have looked for a disk writer. Anyway, I fiddled and googled and upgraded the software to the latest version of Pinnacle Studio 8 (the current version is 10, 8 is a couple of years old) but no joy. I'm not sure it matters, it might work on one of my two other CD writers.
Studio looks ok, apart from the CD thing it has only crashed once and I've upgraded it since then. I captured all my baby film and it will use 600M of a video CD, less if I edit out all the footage of the inside of lens caps. It runs fast enough on the D410, rendering is slow, it might take an hour to render the 600M but this may be down to disk speed and I don't have to sit and wait for it.
If I have one criticism of Pinnacle so far it is that the preview window is too small, about 3" diagonal on my 12" screen and it does not seem to be resizable or offer a full screen mode. The video is captured into a 13G avi file that can be played directly in Windows Media Player. Editing appears to be a process of telling Pinnacle what to do with this avi file: the avi file is not chopped about as you edit (literally like editing film) but instead pinnacle builds up a list of what needs doing and does these things as it renders.
I'll stick with blowing Video CDs for now, I can get a DVD writer for £30 but that still seems like a luxury, Video CD is good enough.
Peter's Moblog
