Some handy system utilities

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Most system administrators are used to using utilities from Sysinternals – Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell’s operating system internals site – and last year I blogged about some free network scanning tools from eEye Digital Security (although with some trepidation as for those of us who need to keep systems secure, they are valuable tools, but there are others who may wish to use them for nefarious purposes, which I’m certainly not encouraging).

A couple of days back, I stumbled across Nir Sofer’s NirSoft site which is full of freeware utilities, some of which are quite frankly frighteningly easy to use to obtain information that should remain secret (e.g. the product keys for Windows and Office installations and stored passwords for various common applications).

Of course, I’m supplying this information all with a health warning – although these utilities look useful, I haven’t checked if there are any side effects (e.g. rootkits or trojan horses, although these days all you need is to play a CD to get infected by a rootkit) and the anti-virus software on our corporate firewall is certainly preventing access to some of the utilities – highlighting them as password crackers.

You have been warned!

Why I think copy protection has gone too far

Posted on By Mark Wilson

There’s been much written recently about Sony BMG’s inclusion of a rootkit in some of their copy-protected CDs (for more information, see Mark Russinovich’s SysInternals blog). Indeed, it’s now being reported that our friendly global monopolist (Microsoft, not Sony) is going to remove the rootkit from our PCs via Windows Defender (formerly Windows AntiSpyware).

What I fail to understand is the need for all of this. Last year I had problems with a copy protected CD from BMG that wouldn’t play in my car CD player (actually, it wasn’t technically a CD as it didn’t follow the standards for Compact Discs, but was another 120mm polycarbonate plastic disc masquerading as a CD to prevent illegal copying). BMG offered to replace it if I could supply proof of purchase but I’d already shredded the receipt and anyway, I changed cars a few days later and it worked in the new player.

I buy my CDs for around £8.99 from play.com (or sometimes in the local supermarket). EMI, a major competitor to Sony BMG, is reporting massive rises in digital music sales, but at the same time says traditional CD sales are down. But consider this – most CDs in the UK have around 12 tracks. If, instead of buying a physical CD, I licensed the tracks from iTunes, that would be £9.48, there would be no media or distribution costs (and I’d be restricted as to the number of devices on which I could play them). With analysts predicting that by 2009, 25% of music sales will be online, that sounds like increased profits to me. Sure there will be some piracy eating into that, but it’s not a new problem. In the ’80s, I (like many of my peers) used to record the top 40 on tape because I didn’t have the funds that today’s teenagers do to buy records (for the kids reading this, a record is an old-fashioned term for a music disc – they used to be larger, usually black – but coloured or picture discs were very sought after – and needed a special player with a needle…).

So do we really need all this copy protection? After all, it’s only a matter of time before some hacker finds a way around it. What we need is universal (no pun intended) access to legal music downloads (no Apple iTunes nonsense whereby you can only buy from the store in the country where your credit card is registered). With sensible pricing, sensible licensing, and a reasonable proportion finding its way to the artist (i.e. not the web site owner or the record company) then maybe people will buy more music, especially with all the bad press about security that peer-to-peer file sharing networks get. Stranger things have happened…

x64 finally comes of age

Posted on By Mark Wilson

To be honest, I got a bit confused with the various 64-bit CPUs (like why didn’t Intel and HP’s Itanium take off, but AMD’s AMD64 did and Itanium 2 looks like it will too), but whatever the hardware issues, it seems that x64 software has finally come of age. Paul Thurrott reports in his Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update that, at the IT Forum this week, Microsoft announced that the Longhorn Server wave of products will be 64-bit only (except Longhorn Server itself, which will be available in both 32- and 64-bit flavours). That means that, for example, the next version of Exchange Server (codenamed Exchange 12) will only run on a 64-bit platform. There’s no news yet as to what is happening on the desktop (except that it seems, like Windows XP, Windows Vista will be available in both 32- and 64-bit editions) but it looks like I’d better get saving for a new PC…

Virtual Server 2005 R2 has gone RTM – and it’s not expensive either

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This week is Microsoft’s IT infrastructure conference for EMEA – the IT Forum. Last year I missed it because my wife was heavily pregnant (and my son was born that week). This year, of course, it was his first birthday, so I’m missing it again. Not to worry, because Paul Thurrott is covering the major stories in the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update and John Howard’s blog has much more information.

One of the IT Forum news stories concerns Virtual Server 2005 R2 (formerly SP1). A few weeks back I wrote about Microsoft’s virtualisation roadmap and several news sources are reporting that in his keynote speech, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 has been released to manufacturing. Furthermore, the new pricing model is just $99 for Standard Edition and $199 for Enterprise Edition – it seems that Microsoft really is serious about competing with VMware. At that price for Virtual Server, and with the VMware Player attacking the low end market (although I’ve heard mixed reports about how good it really is at handling Microsoft VMs), it’s hard to see where Virtual PC fits in all of this.

Watch out for long path names on an NTFS volume

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I came across an interesting issue earlier today. Somehow, on my NTFS-formatted external hard disk I had managed to create a file system structure which was too deep.

Whenever I tried to delete a particular folder tree, I received strange errors about files which couldn’t be deleted:

Error Deleting File or Folder

Cannot delete foldername: The file name you specified is not valid or too long. Specify a different file name.

I thought that was strange – after all, I’d managed to create the files in the first place, then I found that if I drilled down to the files that would not delete, there was no right-click option to delete the file. Finally, I found that some folders displayed the following error when I tried to access them:

Can’t access this folder.

Path is too long.

It turned out that the problem folders/files had path names in excess of 255 characters. By renaming some of the top level folders to single character folder names (thus reducing the length of the path), I was able to access the problem files and folders, including deleting the files that I wanted to remove.

A plea for user-friendly firewall messages

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I consider myself to be reasonably technical, but even I struggle with firewall messages like this one:

Example firewall messageThis is a real screenshot from my company-supplied notebook PC. I don’t know what an integrity personal policy alert is, although I can hazard a guess. I certainly don’t know what triggag.exe is, but I can see it is trying a DNS lookup. Should I allow that? I don’t know, but I need to get on with whatever I did that launched that dialog so I click Yes (and probably tell it to remember the answer too).

According to file.net, triggag.exe is part of CA Unicenter Software Delivery but to an end user, this dialog might as well say “to carry on working you must make this dialog go away. Do you want to make this dialog go away?”

As long as the IT industry produces software which outputs messages as cryptic as this (and as long as administrators keep deploying that software), we will never get users to take security seriously.

Here endeth the lesson.

Trying to resolve wireless LAN connectivity issues

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Somewhat ironically, as I scraped the ice off my car window early this morning, I was prompted to blog about the issues which the summer heat had caused on my wireless (802.11b) network earlier this year. In truth, like many planned posts to this blog, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now…

It all started when I tried to make two changes at the same time on my wireless access point (I should know better). After having problems setting up WEP (I got it working, but Windows XP kept on dropping out and re-connecting to the network every few minutes), I tried a firmware upgrade (in the hope that would fix things, or even allow WPA). The firmware upgrade didn’t help and the drop-outs continued, especially with one PC in another room (about 10 metres away but with a few wood/plasterboard walls in between).

At about the same time, we had new next door neighbours on one side, and our neighbour on the other side put a wireless network in his house.

Added to that it seemed that the remote PC would fail to connect whenever the weather was hot…

A lack of WiFi security using WEP/WPA is something I can live with (in the short term – I do use MAC address filtering, but if anyone was that bothered they could monitor traffic, capture a valid address and spoof it), so I set about investigating the other issues, including why hot weather would affect WiFi connectivity! Reading around on the ‘net unearthed a load of advice (but nothing specific about the weather), including the following (mostly from PC World magazine’s article on wireless networks that do more, Netgear’s advice on improving wireless range by tuning equipment, HP’s prevent wireless interference article and Microsoft’s 10 tips for improving your wireless network):

  • Picking the best location. Distance, and the objects in between a computer and a wireless access point (WAP) will all affect performance, as will the height above the floor, distance from a wall and proximity to metal objects (including CDs/DVDs!). The fact that my WAP needs to be connected to both power and wired network meant that I couldn’t put it in the middle of the house, but I did manage to move it along the wall so it was a little bit closer to the remote PC.
  • Change channels. the 2.4GHz spectrum used by 802.11b is particularly susceptible to interference from items such as microwave ovens, 2.4GHz cordless telephones, power lines, Bluetooth devices, light fixtures and of course other 802.11b networks. Whilst the 802.11b band is divided into 11 channels, each 22MHz wide, they overlap one another and only channels 1, 6, and 11 are totally separate. I wondered if the new networks in the neighbourhood were interfering with ours and after installing Network Stumbler (which I found from the Tech FAQ 802.11 software tools page), I found that one neighbour’s WPA-protected router was using channel 1 and that the other side were using channel 11, so I picked channel 6. I’m not sure how 802.11g is affected (both my neighbours were using 802.11g), but one article I read suggested that 802.11a is less likely to experience interference.
  • Boost the signal. I’ve yet to try out the Pringles can antenna idea (or the alternatives from hackaday and Shawn Morton) but 802.11b networks can be boosted by either purchasing an additional antenna, or by just making sure that it is upright (802.11a networks already operate at the maximum permitted signal strength). Other measures include omnidirectional antennas but a new WAP would have been cheaper (and would let me move up to 802.11a/g).
  • There’s also a whole load of discussion about the correct Windows XP wireless configuration. None of that really helped (and it was all working fine until it got hot outside and I upgraded the WAP firmware) but there are two interesting threads at Overclockers and ARS Technica.
  • Think about what else might be interfering with the signal – even something as innocuous as a stack of CDs, as explained by Don Jones’ cleaning up wireless clutter article.

I still haven’t found out if the weather really does affect WiFi connectivity (I guess it could as extreme weather does affect TV and radio reception) but it seems strange we’ve not had a problem in previous years. If anyone has any ideas I’d be glad to hear them.

Visual Studio Express Editions and Coding4Fun

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Visual Studio 2005 Express EditionsEven though I’m no developer, I have been known to knock up the occasional script and once upon a time I could even have considered myself to have programming skills…

…Well maybe now I can start to build them up again as Microsoft are offering the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions for free. More details are available on the Microsoft website (check out the FAQ) but basically, for web developers there is Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition; for database developers there’s SQL Server 2005 Express Edition; and for Windows developers there are Visual Studio Express Editions for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual J#. Microsoft is pitching these as “lightweight, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn tools for the hobbyist, novice, and student developer” but there is nothing stopping them from being used in a corporate environment (aside from the reduced functionality feature sets).

For anyone (like me) who is new to coding, or returning after a break of several years, MSDN has a coding4fun microsite.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition: now available for download

Posted on By Mark Wilson

SQL Server 2005 Express EditionBack in February, I blogged about SQL Server 2005 Express Edition – the successor to the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE). Now that SQL Server 2005 has been launched, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is available for download from the Microsoft website. For further reading, check out my SQL Server 2005 overview and new tools for managing and administering SQL Server 2005 posts.

Dropping out of the smartphone world

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last year I blogged about my entry to the world of mobility, courtesy of a Nokia 6600 connected to Orange. Unfortunately my experience of Orange was not great (poor customer service, coupled with a network which unfortunately doesn’t work very well in my house, even though I live on a hill) and as I suspected, I never used many of the smartphone capabilities of the 6600.

I’ve been out of contract for a while, but have been deciding what to do – should I go for a Windows Mobile 5.0 device (difficult to find on my preferred network – Vodafone), or just accept that I don’t need anything special because I have another mobile for work (a Nokia 6021) and that my personal phone is just a way to a) keep my number and b) mean I can ignore the work phone in the evening and at weekends?

As my new company car arrived last week and I have a fully-fitted car kit for a Nokia 6021, I decided to get myself another 6021 so I have two identical handsets (one for work and one for personal use), both of which can be used legally in the car. Unfortunately, the excellent reseller I used last year (mobilesuk.net) doesn’t deal in pay-monthly Vodafone contracts and I didn’t want to use the Carphone Warehouse or Phones4U as they have their own billing companies (both of which I have used, and both of which offered lousy customer service), so I went direct to Vodafone Retail. Except that I didn’t – and nor should you!

Whilst having difficulty contacting my local Vodafone Retail store, I called Vodafone’s customer services department, who, after I pointed out that not being able to contact a store to enquire about stock before driving over to buy a phone is a pretty poor start to a customer-supplier relationship, eventually told me about Vodafone’s telephone sales team on +44 (0)800 015 8079.

Even though there was no mention of it on the Vodafone website, I managed to get a Nokia 6021 free of charge, connected to Vodafone’s Anytime 75 tariff (for £16/month instead of £20/month), including 75 minutes of cross-network calls, a data bundle (with 100 SMS messages which can also be used for GPRS/WAP/MMS and would normally cost me another £6/month), plus free insurance for 3 months (which I declined), as well as the current stop the clock promotion whereby if you commit to an 18 month contract off peak calls are capped at a 3-minute charge. I reckon that using that lot, my monthly bill should drop by about 40% and I’m back on a network that I can use in the house!

Unfortunately, although Vodafone shipped the handset with next-day delivery (for just £3.95), I can’t use the phone until my number is transferred from Orange next Monday…

So, the moral of that story is do not sign up to Vodafone in a Vodafone store or on the ‘net – call them on +44 (0)800 015 8079 instead.

Finally, the plethora of devices that I carry (2 mobile handsets, a PDA and an iPod Mini, plus a notebook PC when I’m working) means that my Pocket PC is not seeing much use either, so expect to see one used (but mint condition) Nokia 6600 for Orange (boxed) and a used HP iPAQ Pocket PC h2210 (boxed) for sale on eBay soon!