Month: May 2007

Error 19 on dvd rom drive in windows

One of my clients had a dvd rom drive suddenly start to fail in Windows XP. Device Manager had the error message “information in the registry is incomplete or damaged (Code 19)” Acer’s website didn’t even have a driver for the cdrom so it was off to google. A lot of results for code 19 and cdrom drivers, but the results at Toshiba’s forums provided the answer – delete (or rename) HKLM \ system \ currentcontrolset \ control \ class \ {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} \ UpperFilters and LowerFilters and then reboot.
Ironic that I had to use Toshiba’s support for an Acer problem!

Comment spam ramps up a notch

I’m not sure if moving to the new host is the reason, but I’ve had a lot of comment spam come through MovableType today (all of which was moderated) but annoyingly I couldn’t permanently delete it as my computer did not have the new ip address for the domain name!
I have added another captcha, Comment challengeto our blogs. Hopefully it is not too difficult for you to answer the question correctly.

Initial SharedView thoughts

Kevin Devin asked how SharedView fits with Netmeeting and Livemeeting – my first thought when I was using this product was that it appeared to provide similar functionality to netmeeting. This product is actually the Tahiti product that Microsoft purchased, rebranded and re-released as a new beta product.
I’ve not used netmeeting for several years so the statements may not be entirely accurate.
However the differences I see are as follows

  1. Looks a lot nicer than the netmeeting did.
  2. You can share your desktop with up to 15 people – netmeeting was limited to 1.
  3. Works much better through firewalls – I’m guessing it is http based so no firewall tweaking needed.
  4. No directory support included – netmeeting had the ability to join a directory of available chats – this needs an email address to connect to the original host (but there must be a directory on MS’s servers somewhere but it is just not viewable to the public)

I didn’t find the performance to be that great, with my two pc’s connected the screen refresh was pretty slow and artifacts would often be left behind on the screen. I did like the fact that you could see the guests cursors (but this would be pretty hectic with 15 guests) but you can turn this feature off.
If another program was moved over the top of the shared application, a grey box would appear on the guest screen where the application was – this almost looks like screen corruption but it isn’t.
The host computer will only share one monitor, spreading the shared application over 2 screens will only share the portion of the application on the hosted screen
It takes a small part of the desktop as the controls get placed at the very top of the screen – a nice feature would be to merge this into the title bar of the application to recover a little more screen estate.
File sharing worked nicely and I was easily able to share files between the two computers. It would be nice to have the downloaded file appear in a most recently downloaded window or have the option to open the file once it was downloaded in the same manner ie/firefox does.
I’ll be adding my feature notes to the Sharedview forums shortly.

Website has now moved

If you can read this, then absoblogginlutely.net (and all my other domains) are now moved to a different host. It’s taken a while with each host being moved across at a time, with the last one being absoblogginlutely.net I wasn’t looking forward to it as there is a lot of customisation and tweaks in the background that I’ve done to the site. The actual process wasn’t too bad, the complicated bit is the testing to ensure that the new site works whilst keeping the old site active at the same time AND remembering what changes have been made to the old site and replicating them on the new one. MT posts, were simple enough, I just reposted them back to this blog again. I did testing by setting the dns on one pc to the new dns servers on the new hosting company and used that to test whilst keeping another pc on the standard dns to ensure normal internet connectivity. Hopefully it all moved across ok. For those people that are hosting stuff on my site, give me a shout if you can’t get anything to work and for those of you who have read this far, let me know too if there is anything you find that is broken.

Microsoft SharedView

Microsoft have just released SharedView – a program that looks like it can be used to present your screen to multiple (up to 15) computers. Not sure how it works yet as it doesn’t work with Lotus Notes (see my posts on the Microsoft forums). These forums are brand new – I was the first to post (2) posts for support/product feedback. I’ll be testing this out on the home pc tonight, and it will be interesting to see if gmail is supported as a mail client.
It uses a Live ID for the presenter (but it is not needed for the clients watching the screen) and as yet does not support audio (but neither does webex that I’m aware of). I think it will take some time for users to get used to getting SharedView installed on their computer and running it – it doesn’t seem to be deployed via a web applet/activex component like WebMeeting.
More later after I’ve got it working…..

IIS Worker issues with WSUS 3

On the two boxes that I’ve upgraded to WSUS version 3 this week I have received errors with the IIS Worker process crashing. One of the boxes has DEP intervening with the process and the other box just comes up with a message asking me to send the data to Microsoft.
Eventvwr shows event 1009, Source W3SVC with the error message being “A process serving application pool ‘WsusPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘4652’. The process exit code was ‘0xc0000005’.”
The DEP error states “To help protect your computer, Windows has closed this program”,

wsus3-depwarning

Name: IIS Worker Process. Clicking on Change Settings gives me the DEP Screen,

wsus3-depsettings

which shows the IIS Worker process already allowed. Clicking close then offers to send a report to Microsoft (again). Oddly enough, the mmc console seems to work ok when launched so at the moment I’m not sure what is causing it. Seems too much of a coincidence for it NOT to be wsus3 though.
Not had too much time to look at the main cause for this – it could be due to the fact that the pc’s haven’t been rebooted since the install (and may need .net patches installed)

Adobe Flash player install triggers virus alerts

I installed Adobe’s flash player 6 on my pc tonight and was surprised to see Comodo Antivirus kick in with a “Not-a-virus:RiskTool.Win32.PsKill.q” for the nsprocess.dll file included as part of the install – presumably to kill any previous installs currently running. I’ve seen things like this with Symantec Antivirus and pskill from sysinternals before but not with Flash Player!
I submitted the file to virustotal.com and got the following results.

Antivirus Version Update Result
AhnLab-V3 2007.5.10.0 05.09.2007 Win-Trojan/ProcKill.4096.B
AntiVir 7.4.0.15 05.09.2007 no virus found
Authentium 4.93.8 05.08.2007 no virus found
Avast 4.7.997.0 05.09.2007 no virus found
AVG 7.5.0.467 05.09.2007 no virus found
BitDefender 7.2 05.10.2007 no virus found
CAT-QuickHeal 9.00 05.09.2007 no virus found
ClamAV devel-20070416 05.09.2007 no virus found
DrWeb 4.33 05.09.2007 no virus found
eSafe 7.0.15.0 05.08.2007 no virus found
eTrust-Vet 30.7.3622 05.09.2007 no virus found
Ewido 4.0 05.09.2007 no virus found
FileAdvisor 1 05.10.2007 No threat detected
Fortinet 2.85.0.0 05.09.2007 no virus found
F-Prot 4.3.2.48 05.09.2007 W32/Trojan.RZG
F-Secure 6.70.13030.0 05.10.2007 no virus found
Ikarus T3.1.1.7 05.09.2007 no virus found
Kaspersky 4.0.2.24 05.10.2007 no virus found
McAfee 5027 05.09.2007 potentially unwanted program Generic PUP
Microsoft 1.2503 05.09.2007 no virus found
NOD32v2 2255 05.09.2007 no virus found
Norman 5.80.02 05.09.2007 no virus found
Panda 9.0.0.4 05.09.2007 no virus found
Prevx1 V2 05.10.2007 no virus found
Sophos 4.17.0 05.08.2007 no virus found
Sunbelt 2.2.907.0 05.05.2007 no virus found
Symantec 10 05.10.2007 no virus found
TheHacker 6.1.6.112 05.10.2007 Trojan/KillProc.p
VBA32 3.12.0 05.09.2007 no virus found
VirusBuster 4.3.7:9 05.09.2007 no virus found
Webwasher-Gateway 6.0.1 05.09.2007 no virus found

That is 5 antivirus products that presumably block or intefere with Flash from being installed.

Xp upgrade – cd issues

An upgrade to XP wasn’t working this morning with the pc giving various error messages – Setup was unable to verify drive C, Setup cannot copy the file: driver.cab. At this point it had damaged the w2k installation enough that the previous installation would not boot. A chkdsk from the recovery console would just reboot the pc. Booting to BartCD I was able to run defrag and a chkdsk with no problems found. I tried different installation media and still got the same problem. I searched for a BIOS upgrade but couldn’t find anything useful so I then swapped the cd drive itself and it is now working (or at least it is most of the way through the upgrade).

funky mail and hosting?

If you notice anything funky with emails or hosting, please let me know via a comment on this site (or at my flickr account as I am moving hosts this week. First up is the helsby.net domain. The website (what little there is) was moved yesterday and emails setup on the main server for the appropriate mail forwarding and I flicked the dns switch just now. This should really only affect emails to Kristen and I as the website is not really used (at the moment)
After that I will be moving this absoblogginlutely.net domain – that is going to be a lot more complicated due to sql servers, MovableType installations, redirection of subdomains, ftp accounts and what not. The good news is that I won’t need to pay more for hosting for the next two years and by this switch of hosts I’ll be consolidating the various payments made to various companies for hosting and domain registration.