the Zen of Communication.

Received this error message from a Dell m600 blade. “The FBD Link To The Following Dimm Failed To Train: DIMM 7″

Quick Answer:  Pull out the dimm pair in question (#7, pull #7 and #8 .. #4, pull out #3 and #4), reboot without the ram, shut down, replace the ram.  That fixed it for us.

Our first troubleshooting went as follows:

Reseated the dimm, rearranged the dimm, ran the memory diagnostics from Dell, nothing.  The BIOS recognized all the memory present, but it was blocking addressing to that bank – dimms 7 and 8, which took our 32gb of ram down to 24.  What was fascinating is within Server 2008 the system properties showed 32gb, but the task manager only showed 24gb total.

Opened a Dell support call – three days, replacement memory, (and ASTOUNDINGLY a replacement motherboard) but NOTHING fixed it.  Found this post – http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19257873.aspx – but the answer from the dell guy was typical and completely unhelpful.

I thought what the hell, pulled the memory in that bank, started up, shut down, replaced it, and rebooted, and we haven’t seen the issue since.  I left the dell diags running memory burn in testing for over 24 hours without a single error.  This seems to have fixed it.

It is possibly the most unhelpful, rarest Dell post error I’ve ever seen.  The complete lack of hits on Google did not help.  Hopefully this will help someone down the road.

I’ve spent an awful lot of hours trying to track down the SNMP MIBs for a Barracuda spam firewall. Searches on the Barracuda website for “MIB” and “SNMP” returned very few results – but I was looking for the MIB files themselves.

It turns out Barracuda has cunningly hidden the MIBs within their devices. Read http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/downloads/Other/OTHER_Barracuda_Spam_&_Virus_Firewall_SNMP.4.pdf

Specifically, under page bloody one:

MIBs
You will need to obtain and import two MIB files to your SNMP monitor:
1. The Barracuda Reference MIB (standard across all Barracuda Networks products)
2. The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall MIB
You can use reference objects included in these MIBs for monitoring either from custom scripts or from
your SNMP monitor. The MIB files are located on the appliance and can be obtained by replacing
YOURBARRACUDA in the following links with the IP address of your Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall:

http://YOURBARRACUDA:8000/Barracuda-SPAM-MIB.txt

http://YOURBARRACUDA:8000/Barracuda-REF-MIB.txt

Isn’t that great? I thought that was great.

Anyway. There it bleedin is.

In most other versions of XP, the instructions at http://www.jakeludington.com/windows_xp/20060219_change_xp_boot_screen.html for changing the boot screen work fine. For XP Embedded (or Embedded Standard 2009, whatever you want to call it), you have to change number 1, not number 5.

Conversely, on the HP Thin Clis, there are two kernels – ntoskrnl.exe and ntkrnlpa.exe . I’m not sure which one made the change, as I edited both of them.

16 color bitmaps look like crap. When is Win7 Embedded coming?

In lieu of not updating for the next few months (50 – 60 hrs working weeks don’t leave lots of time for creative writing), I’m going to start putting up brief outlines of things I’ve run into, and problems I’ve managed to figure out. Hopefully it will be enough for you, dear reader, to follow my train of thought. If not, leave a comment – I’ll respond as soon as I can.

First – Windows Update error 80070490
or 0×80070490
Vista x86 (same will probably be true of XP and Win7, x86 and x64)

stop windows update service
delete c:\windows\softwaredistribution
reboot
start windows update
download and install updates

This worked for me (for a couple of reboots) but the problem seems to have returned. Anyone have any ideas beyond a reinstall/repair install as Msft unhelpfully recommends?

If you’ve been following along, you may have noticed a distinct lack of progress with the MRTG/IIS thread, and the server mod.  That’s because shortly after I finished up the first round, the RAID array on my server took a dive.  Everything’s intact, but the server is limping right now, and I need to migrate to different hardware.  It, of course, is high priority just like everything else in life, and I need more than an hour or two to do it… easy, right?

So, once that’s been done, I can get back to rolling like we do.  Till then, keep tuned in. 

I just performed a long overdue upgrade of WP to the latest rev.  I’ve put it off until now because I’ve spent so long customizing the pages, adding plugin sources to pages, changing layouts, etc, I was rather nervous about an updated install hosing something up that would take days to find and fix a comma out of place (been there, esp. with the PHP mods).  But, I have to admit it was much simpler than I’d anticipated. 

The instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress make things very simple, and point out “don’t do this”.  I followed the guide for both my sites (Zen & Wings), and it worked quite instantly.  I backed up everything first though (including MySQL databases, as the new rev will make some changes) just as a precaution.  The new rev will also run automatic updates, saving me the trouble. 

So there’s a new login page, and a bunch of updated behind the scenes stuff.  If there are any issues, please let me know. 

And while I’m at it, is this site helpful?  Aside from more regular posts, I’m curious if there is anything you’d like to see added, more of, etc. 

Update: Turns out SemiSecure Login doesn’t like WP 2.7.1 .  After logging out, I was locked out again.  If you run into this, just rename the plugin directory to disable it, and then deactivate it.  I’ve replaced it with SemiSecure Login Reimagined which uses RSA keys over OpenSSL, which is much better anyway.

People talk about getting into the stock market… consumer electronics man, that’s where the money is.  What a ‘Super Deal’. 

I realized that for the first time since getting a new computer, I’d not run a deep-deep trace of what was actively running.  I’d run rootkit-revealer, I run virus sweeps, and I  run AdAware and Spybot regularly, but I was finding things like the GoogleUpdater app running, even though a) the entry for it under Startup in MSConfig is disabled, and b) the service in the Services MMC is also disabled.  So I started to get curious.

On a whim, I ran a Google (ironic, huh) for "advanced process manager" or some such query.  First thing that came back was a blogger linking to "ProcessScanner", software created by UniBlue (http://www.processlibrary.com/processscan/) – the folks behind www.processlibrary.com.  This particular blog entry went on about how it will give you detailed this and that about anything on your system, it’s quick, there’s no installation required, etc. etc.

Well allow me to say first hand, that’s all a load of bull.  The download itself was only 900k.  But it’s a full on installer that makes you accept a very lengthy EULA (including details about opening a CD-Rom package?  For a download?), and then installs itself.

Once you’ve signed your life over and installed the app, then you run it.  Not only are there splashy graphics for such a simple app, but then … Well, for a meager "process scanner" this sucker starts to eat up around 20mb of memory.  The icing on the cake is – it phones home!  After running its scan, it will send details of the processes you’re running (probably just exe names and reg key entries, I didn’t run a packetsniff to be certain) back to the UniBlue servers, and presumably fetches details about each one from ProcessLibrary.com, and report the results back to you – what’s good, what’s not, what’s virii, what’s Windows, etc.  I, personally, never allowed it to get that far – My firewall alerted me, and I nixed it.  I’m just not OK with a list of my services/active reg-keys, and processes being dispatched over the internet to an unknown server for someone else to analyze.  But I’m a bit paranoid anyway.

Again, for a meager process scanner?  This app is seriously overkill, and not in a good way.  It’s got no huge or one-of-a-kind features to wow you, and on top of that it’s one great big ad for ProcessLibrary.com .  I’m all for self promotion, but if I wanted shareware-type crap, I’d have gone to C|Net’s download.com . 

So I went hunting again.  And lo and behold, my old friends SysInternals crop up in the results (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx).  Knowing full well they produce 99% gold, I took a look.  Sure enough Process Monitor (ProcMon) was updated in August of ’08 to v1.37.  I downloaded it, and though the zip file was 1.1megs, you extract the file to a directory (in \Program Files or on your desktop, it doesn’t matter) and presto – your application is ready.  No installer, no 20 page contract (though it’s all implied from the SysInternals website, I’m sure), just your tool waiting to be used.  Shut up, Beavis. 

I won’t give you all the details about it, because it’s fairly self explanatory, and the screen-shots on the TechNet link will explain more than I could in 1000 words.  But in case you’ve never used it before – definitely give it a shot.  It’s functionally very similar to a PacketSniffer (like WireShark) in that it will give you a running history of every process, .exe, .dll, thread, and registry entry that’s accessed on your computer, as it’s happening, with timestamp, sequence, process, operation, and path.  Try just running it for one second, literally, and you’ll be amazed at everything your system is doing behind the scenes.  And we wonder why processors get so hot?

Once you run it for a while, you’ll see long long lists of things which you know are supposed to be there (firefox, explorer, outlook, etc.) so you can add filters to hide those entries, so they don’t fill up the few hundred thousand lines you have to gaze upon.  That just leaves … everything else.

Again, if you’ve never tried it before, give it a shot.  It’s quick, it’s free, it’s small, and I’m not paid by Microsoft.  And, I’ve been watching my firewall logs for several minutes and it’s never even so much as checked for an update, or pinged anyone at The Borg – and this is an instance where I’m OK with that.  Now I just need to find that damned GoogleUpdater exe…

Found an interesting little tidbit today.  When opening a folder that contains a Quicktime file (.mov or .qtw), Windows tries to load a handler – WLXQuickTimeControlHost.exe .  Nothing reports exactly what this is supposed to do. What it is doing is bringing the desktop, and often times the system itself, to a grinding halt sometimes using over 50% of available resources.

A quick search on your system, specifying c:\windows\ and c:\program files\ (or your %systemroot% and Program Files directories, respectively) should yield:

C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\WLXQuickTimeControlHost.exe

as the culprit.  While it is rumored that actually uninstalling QuickTime will cure this (sounds like a Microsoft snipe at Apple if ever I’ve heard one), renaming this file to WLXQuickTimeControlHost.exe.nuked or whatnot, so that it’s no longer executable, will bring you an instant performance boost whenever you’re dealing with QuickTime files.  Miracles.