QA Tech-Tips - UPDATE

Well. . . .

It looks like I'm going to be busy!

I am going to peruse my list of previously saved Tech-Tips and import, (make that read: "brute-force cut-and-paste-and-mangle-and-cram-and-push-and. . . ), them into this blog.

I am going to try (!!) to insert them based on the date they were originally published.  Hopefully that will work.  If it doesn't, there are going to be a WHOLE BUNCH of Tech-Tips published today.  (. . . and tommorow, and the next day, and the day after. . .)

Unfortunately, most of these Tech-Tips are saved in M$ Outlook's Rube Goldberg version of "HTML" which makes importing or copying them into any other HTML based application a Non-Trivial task. . . . . It's doable, but it's a lot like making your way through a thick jungle - you slash-and-cut your way through the thickest web of obscure HTML code imaginable.  So - if the spacing is a bit wierd, or things don't align "just so" - you'll understand why.  As I get better at "this blogging thing", I will try to go back through and clean up what I can.

Update:  I have discovered a very useful tool - especially when you're fighting HTML filled with M$ cruft - called HTML Tidy, located over at SourceForge.  It's a command-line utility that is definitely worth a look.

When I am finished, I hope to have a reasonably comprehensive collection of Tech-Tips here for your viewing pleasure.

Thanks for visiting!

(p.s.)
If you've seen previous versions of these posts - perhaps as e-mails when they were originally distributed - you may notice that they're not exact word-for-word imports.  Since it was necessary for me to go to what were already hysterically great lengths just to get the content IN here, I took the liberty to edit for clarity and/or meaning whenever I felt the articles would be improved therefrom.

Jim

Holiday Edition: The Case of the Vanishing Internet!

Hello everybody!

I hope you all have had (are having!) a wonderful Holiday Season and an Excellent New Year!

This tech-tip discusses a problem that might crop up when a new computer moves into the house. . . .

Here’s the scene:

The Holidays have come-and-gone, and that shiny new laptop, desktop, or wicked game console that you’ve had your eye on has finally shown up under your Christmas Tree. Fancy video, latest and greatest Windows operating system (or maybe even OS/X), the latest Wireless, Gigabit, and Bluetooth – it’s all there. Everything is right with the world except for one teeny-tiny thing. . . .

All of a sudden – for no apparent reason – your connection to the Internet suddenly dies.

You scratch your head, check out a few things, and then reset your router and/or modem (cable or DSL). Once you do that, things are just fine again for a while. But then, without warning, your internet connection vanishes yet again!

This is odd. . . . You never had that problem before, right? Even when the Internet connection dies, you (usually) can still reach any other machine on your network; but the connection to the Internet is just plain-'ole-gone. It might die in a matter of hours, maybe a day or two, but it dies – seemingly at random. And a router (or modem) reset seems to always bring it back.

The issue here is – in all probability – your new computer.

Not that your new computer has anything wrong with it, but it may be causing you network problems because of the new IP addressing protocol – IPv6. This is because many of the newer operating systems come with IPv6 enabled by default. Even good ‘ole Windows XP isn’t immune. The latest round of Service Packs for XP often installs – and enables! – IPv6.

Unfortunately, a lot of the older hardware – routers, modems, etc. – aren’t equipped to handle the new addressing protocol yet, and they choke. It’s not even “older” hardware – new stuff can have the same issues. Even if you’ve installed the latest-and-greatest firmware updates.

Additionally, it’s possible for older, (pre-existing), computers to experience problems with IPv6 causing them to behave strangely, or loose their network connection for no apparent reason.

The solution is equally simple: Go to the network configuration page for each networking adapter your computers use – both Ethernet and Wireless if your computer has both – and disable the IPv6 protocol. Once you’ve checked, (and disabled IPv6 as needed), on all the computers on your network, give your router and/or modem one last reset and your problem should be over. That is, until the next new computer shows up!

Have a Wonderful Holiday Season!

Jim "JR" Harris

Microsoft is not alone when it comes to fouling things up!

Orignially published on 10/29/09 as
"WOW! Did Fedora pooch THAT revision. . . ."

(Shaking my head in wonder. . . .)

I decided - *after* doing a soup-to-nuts backup, and verifying I could bare-metal restore - to upgrade Storage3 (my RAID box) from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11.

I do the download of the update files, let Fedora reboot into the "update" part of the install, and. . . Zippiddy-doo-da! I get as far as "searching for hardware devices" and it goes brain-dead.

So. . . Figuring there might be a real simple workaround, I did a web search, and found Fedora Bug 507411 - which, (in the developer's own reply to the bug!), states:

Reference citation:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507411

=========== begin inserted text ==============
Comment #4 From Dave Lehman 2009-08-14 12:54:42 EDT -------

(In reply to comment #0)

> Description of problem:

> Install fails at "finding storage devices". Last week I tried the install with
> the install DVD when I ran into the anaconda bug, but I had now way to get the
> report out of the install environment. Now I've tried the install with the Live
> CD and "Install to Hard Drive" with the same result. I've attached the anaconda
> bug report.

Fedora 11 does not support the use of partitioned md devices.

We are working on at least not crashing when we find them for F12.  

============  end inserted text  ==============

The user’s reply – immediately after this post – was a model of diplomatic caution.  He refrained – manfully – from making the usual references to both Microsoft, Vista, and their apparent ability to eff-up a wet-dream.

However, he made it abundantly clear that "not support[ing] the use of partitioned md [RAID] devices" was an absolute masterpiece of technological advancement.

WHAT?!  They "[do] not support the use of partitioned md devices". . . . Holy smokes Batman!!

What is even *MORE* a "Holy Smokes, Batman!!" is the "Oh, we want to make it so we don’t crash when we find them – for Fedora *12*"

Don’t "crash"?  Didn’t you guys test the upgrade path with, at least, *simple* RAID devices installed?  I would have expected – from Fedora at least – to have handled the upgrade seamlessly.

Especially in my case since my machine's system drive is most definitely NOT a RAID device. . . .

There were several other comments like this from people who had "md" devices on their F-10 boxes – and when they tried to update to F-11 - they got the classic Zippo (with the Red Hat Emblem)!

The bad news is that I have half an upgrade sitting on my machine – somewhere.

The good news is that it appears to NOT trash the existing install. I guess what I’ll have to do is reboot back into F-10, edit out the F-11 installation startup from Grub, and then manually remove all the artifacts – hopefully they are all in /tmp or such like – where I can get to them without effing up the entire system.

Looks like I’m staying at F-10 for a while!!

Jim

Windows 7 - The Right Stuff? (Part 1)

Originally published on 8/12/09 as

Windows 7 - The Right Stuff? (Part 1)

Today’s topic: Windows 7.

By now everyone knows that Microsoft’s release of Windows Vista was, shall we say, something less than stellar.

It’s slow.  It’s a resource hog.  It takes massive amounts of disk-space to install. It doesn't play well with others.  And – my biggest beef – it’s *WAAAAY* too noisy visually.  Microsoft promised us the Mercedes with a 12 cylinder engine – and we ended up getting a little grey Volkswagen with three flat tires.

With Windows 7, they come a lot closer to their original ideal.  It may not be a 12 cylinder roadster, but it’s certainly not something I’d be ashamed to be seen with.

My System:

My target system is a Compaq Presario FP5000 series laptop, with an AMD-64 X2 processor and two gigs of memory.  It’s not the slowest, smallest system out there, but it’s also not a drool-inspiring ultra-gamer beast either.  IMHO, it represents a close approximation to a "reasonable" machine that would be owned by mere mortals like us that don’t have thousands to spend on their PC’s.

I downloaded (from Microsoft TechNet):

• Windows 7 Ultimate
• Windows 7 Professional
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)

I performed the following installs:

• Windows 7 Professional – all by itself
• Windows 7 Home Premium, Home Premium (x64), and Ultimate as a multi-boot install.

I did not do anything special to optimize the installation or operation of the machines.  I simply let the installers run and, (with the exception of the multi-boot install), accepted the default setup as given.  After each install, I ran Windows Update and allowed any software and/or hardware patches to be installed.

The one "non-default" setting I chose was to setup the Windows Update settings later – and when I *DID* set it up, I set it to simply notify of available downloads.

I installed Avira Anti-Virus, (http://www.free-av.com/), and EasyBCD, (a Vista / Windows 7 boot options editor – http://neosmart.net/), into each of the installs.

The Install Process:

The install for Windows 7 is a typical Windows install, reminiscent of XP, except you don’t get 30 minutes of commercials telling you how wonderful Microsoft and Windows 7 will be for you.

The nice thing about the install is that – even without custom drivers installed – Windows does an excellent job of detecting hardware and configuring sane options.

Another nice point:  On my Compaq laptop, installing either XP or Vista was a multi-multi-step process:

• Install the base OS
• Find and install the drivers for your machine’s specific hardware.
  This is a non-trivial exercise – many drivers are simply NOT available!
• Update
• Install updates to the drivers.
• Re-update.
• Install more updates.
• Re-update again.
• Etc.

These installs can easily take several hours to complete, just to get you to the point where you can begin to configure the machine to your liking.

On Windows 7, the first update after install provides all the drivers that the base install missed – like the Synaptics touchpad drivers, NVIDIA graphics and motherboard drivers, etc., for both the 32 and 64 bit versions. (It should be noted that driver support for the 64 bit versions of Vista was sparse, to say the least.)

Additionally, the updates are *small* - the 32 bit systems took about 90 megs of updates, and the 64 bit system’s update was 105 megs or thereabouts.  Unlike Vista or XP, you don’t have to wait hours and hours for all the updates to download and install.

After a reboot – and a short pause to set things the way I like ‘em – I was ready to go.

Multi-boot Installs:

Windows 7 does one thing that – depending on your point of view – is either a good thing or a bad thing.  The initial install of the first instance of Windows 7 to a clean hard drive creates *TWO* partitions:

• A 100 meg "System" (boot) partition.
• An install partition for the operating system.

The immediate disadvantage of this is that they use up a valuable "primary" partition for the system partition – leaving you with only three additional primary partitions that you can create.  (Actually only two if you exclude the operating system's install partition.)  Additionally, the installer's partition editor that Windows 7 provides was not able to make extended partitions.  This limits you to a maximum of three installed operating systems – unless you want to go through some extra-installation gymnastics – which I did not try.

The advantages of a separate system partition may be a lot more subtle.

The folks at Microsoft, in all probability, decided on a separate "boot" partition to overcome the issues that Vista had with installing multiple instance of itself, or installing it with other operating systems – like XP or Linux.

To be perfectly fair, a "typical" (one OS per box) user won’t even notice the difference.

I do have one gripe:  Though Windows 7 handles multiple installs relatively well – they missed the boat as far as labeling the systems were concerned.  I am quite sure that Microsoft – and its installers – know how to determine the version of a previous OS install, so providing a better label than "Windows 7" for every Windows 7 instance it finds should not be difficult.  They could have - at the very least - have labled them as "64 bit" or "32 bit".  Or maybe used partition-labels, if they existed?

The workaround to this is to manually edit the boot labels using BCDedit from the command line – or download a boot manager program like EasyBCD.

Install Footprint:

After the install, setup and update, a check of the hard disk properties shows that the 32 bit versions weigh in at just less than 10 gigs total disk used, and the one 64 bit version used just a tad over 11 gigs of hard drive space.  Compare this with Vista which used closer to 20 or 30 gigs of space on my machine after install.

Next: Using Windows 7