Computers: February 2004 Archives

I managed to slay the twin dragons of Windows XP and productivity today, by getting my new Dell installed with a fresh copy of XP, activated by the key printed on the box. To Michael K.H. Au-Yeung, wherever you are, I take my hat off to you. I couldn't have done it without you.

And while I was at it today, I managed to get pathetically little "real" work done. Even better!

-Andy.

I'm pretty sure that my first Dell, that I bought back in '95, was assembled in the USA. I'm not claiming that all of which the computer was comprised were made in the USA. I'm just saying that final assembly was done in the US -- at least, that's what I remember.

While sticking my head inside the case of the machine that I got today, I noticed that a lot of components were made in China. Components like the case, power supply, cables, motherboard. And I got to thinkin' -- I bet this thing was assembled in China, based almost entirely on Chinese-built parts.

And then I thought about how times had changed.

And then I got one last whiff of the "new computer smell", and got to playing with my new toy.

-Andy.

So, I got my new machine at work today.

Let me just take a moment to digress -- finally! I have been waiting to get a new machine for like, ever. The other two people on my team got new machines last year (like around Octoberish) -- but did I get any love? Not by a long shot. But now I am in possession of a 3Ghz P4 with a cool Gig of ram (up from a PIII 866 that I just got up to 512Mb like, 6 weeks ago). Man, am I ever excited.

It's too bad that Windows XP decided to give me the old "once again".

The problem, in a nutshell, is that this Dell came from the factory with the stock corporate image on it. But for various reasons, I got it into my head that I didn't want said image on my desktop. So, I figured that I could just use my Windows XP CD to perform a fresh install, but use the Product Key that is on my new Dell in order to perform all of the activation procedures that appear to be a "necessary evil" these days.

But of course, Microsoft is on to me. They saw me coming from a country mile. It appears as if Microsoft is mastering several different "Windows XP Professional" CD images, with specific differences between OEM and Retail. So a Retail XP CD won't accept Product Keys that are for the OEM version, and vice-versa.

Luckily for me, I didn't get onto BitTorrent today, and I most-certainly did NOT download a Windows XP "8-in-1" ISO image. Which is all a very good thing, because it means that I won't be wasting my entire day fighting this battle tomorrow...

-Andy.

I ordered an iSight from Amazon last week Friday. My dad ordered one from the same company, on the same day.

He got his today. Amazon is projecting that I'll get mine by the middle of next week.

Bitches.

-Andy.

So, it was another really long day at work today. I spent the vast majority of it bashing my head against a problem that one of our NT SA's was having. Without getting mired in the boring details -- he was trying to image a server using ghost, and dump the resulting Gigs 'n Gigs of data onto one of our Samba servers.

Everything with his boot disk seemed fine, but when ghost got started, it died right away saying "not enough space on device for image headers", or some such crap. I checked to make sure I could create a file on the shared drive, and that the drive had plenty of space (check and check).

So, I thought that maybe it was a problem with some sort of file size limit, or something. I set out to find a copy of dd for DOS (so that I could run dd if=/dev/zero of=some_large_file.junk bs=1024 count=1048576). Basically, I wanted to see if I could write out a gig+ file in one crack. Of course, I couldn't find anything that ran in plain old DOS.

So, I set out to write a batch file that did much the same thing.

Much remembering, cursing, fighting, and debugging later, I finally had a script that reasonably approached what I wanted. I took it down to the server room, mentally preparing myself for a long wait as the computer wrote zero's to my test file. However, I was surprised when my batch file started printing an "out of disk space" error right after I started it. How big of a file did it write before the disk space errors started?

2,857 bytes.

Yes, that is it. A little more than 2Kb. Cripes. Did the shared volume have well over 2Kb free? Oh hell yes it did.

To make a long story even longer, after much debugging of boot disks, samba (even debug level 10 was now help), and voodoo later, I still don't know what's wrong. I came up with a work-around for NT guy (solution: use an NT box as the server), but I still don't know what's up with Samba.

Fast forward to this evening/morning, after all of the cards (and there were a lot of cards played) have finished. Kevin and I took on round 2 of his mission to be able to get at his code from the VPN. The sysadmins where he works have wisely configured the Samba server that he needs to disallow IP addresses associated with the VPN. Why? Because they want Kevin to learn about SSH tunneling and such so that he'll devise a work-around.

We beat up on windows enough that I got to the point where I was tunneling NetBIOS-in-TCP/IP-in-SSH in my test environment. But, once again -- I noticed some more strange Samba behavior. When I tried to connect through the tunnel, anything that allows a connection from guest works, but shares that require my username/password don't work! Argh!

I give up. Somehow, I just know that this is all Microsoft's fault...

-Andy.