Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

I purchased a 3-user Norton Internet Security 2007 a few months ago and hadn’t gotten around to trying to installing it. Part of the reason for putting it off is because something often goes wrong and makes e-mail and internet applications unusable for a while.

This evening I’ve discovered that this version apparently doesn’t like PCAnywhere installed on the system. So it asks you to manually remove PCAnywhere 10.5 (another Symantec product). They helpfully guide you to a page on the Symantec website describing their remedy, which is to download and run another utility that removes all previous versions of assorted Symantec products such as AntiVirus, Internet Security, PCAnywhere etc.

Unfortunately, that utility also complains that it can’t uninstall PCAnywhere and wants you to do it from the Windows Add/Remove Software dialog.

Which doesn’t actually have a “remove” button to uninstall PCAnywhere.

Which requires digging up the original PCAnywhere CD-ROM, to run its setup utility, which also allows you to remove the program. I save the various host profiles first, then successfully complete the uninstallation process.

Unfortunately, both Norton Internet Security 2007 and the Norton Removal tool still think PCAnywhere is installed. And Norton Internet Security 2006 is semi-broken now, so e-mail isn’t working any more.

I run regedit, and search for keys related to PCAnywhere. I delete most of the ones I find, although for some reason there are a couple under \HKLM\Software\Symantec\ that can’t be deleted, even though I’m logged in as administrator.

At this point I’ve blown more than an hour debugging Symantec’s installer, and have nothing to show for it other than screwing up my e-mail config and removing PCAnywhere from my system. Now I rummage around some more to find the Norton Internet Security 2006 CD-ROM and attempt to re-install that to try to fix the existing application.

There’s no “Repair Installation” option on NIS 2006, but I try the “Modify Installation” option and e-mail seems to be working again.

I suspect the problem lies with the registry keys that can’t be deleted, but don’t have the time to research it at the moment. This is on a fully patched Windows XP SP2 system, it may be fussy about permissions for registry changes. I deleted several other keys without any complaints though, so it’s just a few that are sticking.

I feel like I should send.an invoice for technical consulting to Symantec after I get this sorted out. It’s a fairly miserable process, and I seem to go through some variant of this every year.

We recently added Comcast internet service at our home. We already have PacBell DSL service here, which we’ve had since 1999 or so when the service was originally launched in the Bay Area. I’ve migrated the non-work subnet onto the Comcast cable internet service, while my office network remains on the DSL service.

I ran the Broadband Reports network speed test a few times for a quick comparison of the delivered bandwidth:

The PacBell DSL service is rated at 1.5mbits down, 384kbits up, tested at 1317 down, 324 up:

The Comcast cable service is rated at 4mbits, 384kbits up, tested at 4620 down, 356 up:

DSL and cable modem access technology have different characteristics, in particular the DSL connection speed is determined by the modem, while the cable modem speed is partly determined by shared traffic on the subscriber’s branch of the cable network. Comcast’s 4mbps product will allow burst traffic at up 6mbps, so you can see higher than rated bandwidth if traffic is light. In contrast, DSL performance tends to be pretty stable.

My preference would have been to change the existing 1.5mbps/384kbps DSL connection to the 6mbps/768kbps service that’s available elsewhere from PacBell/SBC, but I apparently can’t get it in Palo Alto today. The Palo Alto fiber loop runs down Bryant a few hundred yards away, but there’s no convenient ISP for connecting there yet. I haven’t been too excited about getting the Comcast service, as the cable TV service here goes out fairly regularly, in contrast to my DSL line which basically stays up, other than power failures. The higher speed is nice for watching internet video, but I need my VPN and data services to be more stable than what Comcast is providing today. Still looking for a better alternative.

I’ve been getting comment and trackback spam lately which links to nonexistent domains named with apparently random alphanumeric strings. Here are a few examples:

• zbnmktun.com
• youxrkab.com
• nalvynnj.com
• mmpuyrmg.com
• f4hurycdhn.com
• 6gvboi8prk.com
• puhkruw526.com

I’m not sure what the objective is, since the domains don’t appear to be registered. Perhaps the idea is to run a spam campaign and see what sticks? Or trying to throw off text statistics used by anti-spam filters?

Jeremy Zawodny reports good results running Ubuntu Linux on his Thinkpad T43P.

I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 “live” CD and ran the installer. I then rebooted the notebook and found that it detected my wireless interface just fine. The screen was properly detected at 1600×1200, the sound worked, and the TrackPad worked fine.

Then came the real test. I decided to exercise the power management features. Suspend to disk (hibernate) and suspend to RAM (suspend) worked. In both cases, it worked as well as in Windows (better in some ways) and nearly as good as a Powerbook.

I cannot overstate how important this is: Ubuntu is the first real “desktop” Linux I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of polish to it, most of the “right” things have been hidden from non-Linux geeks, and it just works.

I’ve been reading positive reviews of Ubuntu on notebooks for a while, and actually have a partition on my Thinkpad reserved for running Linux from when I originally set up the system last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to chase down power management and driver problems, which has kept me away from doing anything with it. Sounds like the current Ubuntu works pretty well for notebooks, or at least Thinkpads.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a number of disk drives that have either been swapped out of computers in active use, or that have been pulled from systems being completely decommissioned and stripped for parts. I normally either donate or resell used hardware as it turns up, since most of my equipment ends up in good condition. Disk drives are a particular problem though, and I only pass them along after they’ve been completely erased, to avoid accidentally leaking personal or business data.

In the past, the only way to wipe the drives once they’re removed was to open up a chassis, hook the drive up to the IDE or SCSI interface so you could run the disk erase utility of your choice. I also used to have a bulk degausser for erasing magnetic tape which is probably still in the garage somewhere, but I’m not sure it would work on today’s hard drives anyway.

I recently realized that you can use the DIY external hard drive enclosures to temporarily connect old IDE drives to a live computer over USB or Firewire, greatly simplifying the mechanics. No more opening up a live system or setting up a dedicated system for the sole purpose of wiping out old hard drives. At the moment, you can get a generic USB hard drive enclosure from Amazon for about $20.00.

Once the drive is connected, you can use any disk erase utility to wipe out the previous contents of the disk. At the moment, I like Eraser, which is free, and makes GPL’ed source code available. The important point is to not only format your old drive, but to overwrite the previous contents of the disk. Formatting the disk will only clear the file directory entries, and leaves the underlying data intact until overwritten with something else.

As an aside, there is also a handy (but dangerous) open source utility called Darik’s Boot and Nuke aka DBAN. DBAN is included with the Eraser download, so you don’t need to get it separately. It which creates a bootable disk that will search for all connected hard drives and erase them. It should be obvious, but if you download this, be sure to CLEARLY LABEL YOUR DISK and don’t leave it in a bootable disk drive by accident.

In the past few days I have erased several 3.5 inch IDE drives using the external drive enclosure with Eraser, but I also have several 2.5 inch notebook drives which will require a different connector before I can wipe those as well.

The past few days I’ve been setting up a clean install of Windows XP on a generic PC. Aside from figuring out the mysterious installation failure which turned out to be due to smudges on the retail media, it’s been taking a while to get a basic load of software together.

This system is eventually getting shipped to my Dad, who only has dialup access. It’s also hard to do remote access over dialup and its impractical to download hundreds of megabytes of installation packages, so I’m trying to get everything installed before shipping, as proactive “family tech support”. He doesn’t spend a lot of time online, and mostly just checks e-mail and uses Microsoft Word from time to time.

Here’s the software set I’m installing:

• Windows XP
• All current patches from Windows Update
• All current driver patches for the system hardware
• Microsoft Office
• All current patches from Office Update
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Flash and Shockwave players
• Apple Quicktime
• Firefox
• AVG Antivirus

The hardware is a generic “Great Quality” computer from Fry’s Electronics. It originally came with ThizLinux installed, which allows them to sell the hardware without charging for Windows. I originally got the system to run some lightweight networking code on CentOS, so that worked out well for me. Presumably, many people end up running bootleg copies of Windows on the generic hardware, as it actually comes with a CD of Windows drivers for the video, audio, LAN, and modem hardware.

It’s been interesting installing from retail media. I haven’t done this in a long time, as I usually (re)install from recovery media generated from a preloaded system (e.g. my Thinkpad) or from bulk licensed media such as MSDN or a site/volume license. The retail CD has a shiny hologram on it and comes in a glossy cardboard foldout, presumably to make you feel like you’re getting you’re money’s worth. Too bad the CD itself was barely readable, due to scuff marks from the packaging.

There are an amazing number of Windows patches on first install. The first pass turned up 48 patches. There were more which turned up after the first set was complete, but I didn’t keep track. The Microsoft Office updates also turned up a few large packages. The system wouldn’t reboot cleanly after installing some of the Office updates the first time, which required reverting to the pre-install restore point and trying again. I have mixed feelings about it successfully installing after a few more tries. All things being equal, you’d think that the subsequent installation attempts should also fail, or the first one should have succeeded.

Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, and Quicktime are all commonly used on many consumer-oriented sites, and are many megabytes of download, so those went on as well. I also installed AVG Antivirus, which is free for personal use, and can be updated periodically, like other antivirus services. I usually run Norton on my personal systems, but those require a paid annual subscription, which doesn’t seem worth it for a light-duty system on a dialup line.

I’ve been testing the system through intermittent startup / shutdown cycles and miscellaneous web browsing for a few days and it seems to be stable. I can’t imagine a typical retail customer managing the initial patch and installation process successfully, though, which helps explain why there is so much botnet traffic (presumably originating from unpatched desktop systems) in my server logs. I probably should have looked for a bootlegged but already patched WinXP installer on BitTorrent instead of building the system from scratch. Microsoft should provide this themselves if they don’t already, since the activation key is unique and is printed on a label pasted to the retail packaging. The physical CD is almost unreadable and is months out of date, so a downloadable ISO would have been better anyway.

I’m done with this project for now, but let me know if you have a better solution for bringing up a fully patched, basic WinXP system for home use.

I got a Blue Screen Of Death with the error SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED while trying to set up a clean install of WinXP this evening.

This install repeatedly failed after the Windows Setup finished loading after booting from CD-ROM, and just before it would have presented the text welcome screen.

The problem turned out to be small smudges on the CD surface. Apparently, SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED can be triggered by a failed read while booting the installation environment.

Other posts I found online reported this being caused by loose drive cables, conflicting IDE drive cables, bad CD-ROM drives, as well as damaged or smudged installation media.

I wasted half an hour reseating cables and memory chips and fishing around with Google for a solution.

Hopefully this will save someone some search time.

I’ve been getting thousands of attempted comment and trackback spam across my site during the past few days. Fortunately, most of it is getting caught by the keyword filters.

This round of spam seems better implemented than previous ones. The incoming comments and trackbacks are distributed across the entire site, rather than on one or two posts, and are also coming in from a broad set of IP addresses and user agents, which makes it hard to use .htaccess rules for blocking it.

I’ve added a few more entries to the comment blacklist in Wordpress, which has reduced the number of spurious comments making it through auto-moderation.

It turns out that getting my new Bluetooth headset working correctly with my IBM T42P notebook computer was more complicated than expected. The factory-shipped Bluetooth configuration is unusable with some devices, including my headset. Here’s the story, including how to fix it:

When I first set up the wireless headset last week, I paired it with my Nokia 6820 cell phone, which already has a working Bluetooth stack and handsfree device profile for using a headset. I was also able to successfully initialize device pairing with the notebook computer and the cell phone at the same time, which was one of the main selling features of the Plantronics 510. The headset showed up in the Bluetooth devices list, as expected, and I didn’t get around to trying to use it until today.

The headset has been working great for handsfree phone use, so today I was looking forward to trying it with some voice applications on the notebook computer.

It turns out that while the Bluetooth headset successfully paired with the T42’s built-in Bluetooth (IBM Integrated Bluetooth III), none of the headset device interfaces were recognized and initialized by the system (WinXP SP2 Pro). This means that in the Control Panel, the audio devices corresponding to the headset microphone and earpiece didn’t show up, so they were unselectable for use in applications.

From investigating this, it looks like:

1. IBM supplies a Bluetooth stack (Widcomm) specific to their hardware, and Microsoft also provides a Bluetooth stack with WinXP SP2.
2. If both are running, the results are unpredictable. In my case, the Nokia 6820 was able to connect without problems with both stacks in place, but the Plantronics 510 paired without loading the interfaces, making it useless.
3. Under most conditions, when WinXP detects new Bluetooth hardware, it will automatically load the Microsoftc Bluetooth stack.
4. If the Microsoft Bluetooth stack isn’t loaded, 3rd party Bluetooth stacks can still be installed and provide identical or enhanced functionality.

Here’s a solution that worked for me (although I still don’t entirely understand the problem interaction yet):

1. Remove all instances of Bluetooth stacks in the Device Manager.
2. Before rebooting the system, prevent the Microsoft Bluetooth stack from loading. Here are the instructions from Microsoft’s knowledge base KB889814:
   

   1. Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl, and then click OK.
   2. Click the Hardware tab.
   3. Click Device Manager.
   4. Expand Bluetooth Radios.
   5. Right-click each device listed under Bluetooth Radios, click Uninstall, and then click OK.
   6. Close Device Manager, and then click OK.
   7. In Windows Explorer, open the C:\Windows\Inf folder.
   8. Rename the Bth.inf file to Bth.inf.old.
   9. Rename the Bth.pnf file to Bth.pnf.old.
   10. Restart Windows XP SP2.

3. Now reboot the system. Windows XP will detect the Bluetooth hardware and begin automatically installing the drivers. This time, the IBM Bluetooth software will be installed, but without loading the Microsoft Bluetooth software.
4. At this point, the Control Panel item for Bluetooth Configuration will actually work, and there will be many tabs that weren’t there before. The Bluetooth Devices applet appears to do nothing, I think it may be left over from the Microsoft stack.

There are several lengthy discussions on Bluetooth and IBM T series notebook computers over at the thinkpads.com forum. This one is probably the most relevant, but be sure to read to the end, since the first post on the thread is from March 2005, and all the software involved has been updated since then.

After disabling the Microsoft Bluetooth stack and rebooting, I needed to reinitialize the device pairing to connect the cell phone and the headset, but since then everything seems to be working OK.

This is remarkably “user-unfriendly” and about as far from “plug and play” as I can imagine.

I’ve been using this blog and my running blog for testing out Wordpress 2.0 before trying things out on the main site. This evening’s task has been setting up tagging on my running blog. I’ve been using Jerome’s Keywords for a while, but have been reading good things about Christine Davis’ Ultimate Tag Warrior and decided to give it a try.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is extremely comprehensive and flexible. There are versions for both Wordpress 1.5.x and Wordpress 2.x, although I’m only working with the later version. The plugin works smoothly after being activated, and the only tricky part has been that URL rewrites are different in Wordpress 2.x. — rewrites are now done within Wordpress rather than in the .htaccess file, which seems like a good idea, but in the meantime this plugin and others are still a little in transition.

As currently shipped, the plugin automatically generates rel=”tag” links for Technorati, and can be configured to point to other tag services or use local tags. The URL rewrite problem breaks “clean URLs” for local tags of the form http://site/tag/localtagname, so if you just want to generate Technorati tags you’re already in good shape. Without working URL rewrites, other features like local tag clouds don’t work so well though.

In the meantime, here’s a temporary fix (from comments posted by Stephen Collins) which can be added to the .htaccess file in the root directory of the Wordpress installation. The example here is for http://www.hojohnlee.com/running/, you should change the paths to match your own.

This fix is unlikely to be needed for very long, there is a lot of activity underway among Wordpress plugin developers to get things working with the new version. If you put this in place, you should probably keep an eye on the Ultimate Tag Warrior page or the Wordpress support forums for updates.

# UTW

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /running/
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)/$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/$ /running/index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)$ /running/index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)$ /running/index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]

Update 02-08-2006 22:30 PST:
After upgrading to Wordpress 2.0.1, it looks like this fix for .htaccess is still needed with the version of Ultimate Tag Warrior that I’m currently using (2.9.2.1) over on my running blog.

Wordpress 2.x has moved the URL rewriting out of .htaccess and mod_rewrite and into classes.php. This provides access to more hooks forl plugin developers in the future, but in the meantime this seems to be causing a lot of problems with non-standard permalink structures or custom rewrite rules.