Windows Media Center 2005 woes

I managed to acquire, for the price of a nice lunch, a brand new Elonex media center Artisan LX a couple of days back. I was initially very excited because up to then I had still been running my first media center was really just an experiment, built from scratch containing mostly old components I had around my place. A year and a bit on, I am firmly hooked on a PC based PVR system the cornerstone of my entertainment system. It contained an Athlon 2600+ processor with 512Mb of DDR coupled with a DVB-T Hauppage tuner and an 80Gb drive for recordings running the open source MediaPortal software. So as you can see, there was plenty of room for improvement.

This was the first time I have really had a tinker with the Windows Media Center range of Operating systems that Microsoft produce and I went in with few expectations, apart from wanting at least as comparable an experience in terms of functionality and flexibility as I have enjoyed with MediaPortal.

The first thing that struck me was how fickle Windows Media Center 2005 was, even with all the roll ups (essentially what Microsoft call Service Packs for Media Center OS) installed. Wikipedia sums up the ‘capabilities’ of WMC 2005:

‘Media Center originally had a limitation of 1 analog tuner, but was raised to 2 analog tuners with Media Center 2005. With Update Rollup 1 for Media Center 2005, support for a digital tuner was added, but an analog tuner must still be present for the digital tuner to function. With Rollup 2, up to 4 TV tuners can be configured (2 analog and 2 HDTV). All the tuners must use the same source, for example they must all be off an aerial or a set-top box using the same guide data, you cannot mix Sky Digital and DVB-T for example.’

XP Media Center really shows its age here - I do not watch any analogue transmissions, so for a Media Center to require a legacy piece of hardware just to be able to access DVB (digital) seems preposterous. But that was not the worst thing! Windows Media Center 2005 is not capable of pulling EPG data OTA (over-the-air) instead requiring an overly elaborate system that relies on a permanent, always on Internet connection. This also raises some privacy concerns as ‘anonymous’ data, which is not entirely anonymous as Microsoft asks for your postcode during set up, is fed back to Microsoft which can include recording / watching trends and general EPG usage. Hitherto my media center system has not been networked. Considering it is in the opposite corner of my house, and I do not stream my recordings or have formal media shares, I never felt the need to network it. It was nice to just have a static, secure system without any security programs or periodic updates - now security monitoring of my media center has been added to my list of digital chores.

None the less, I was determined to give it a fair go, so I added a wifi adaptor, added some plug-ins and configured everything. After spending eight hours getting everything working, playing around and testing… I went back to my custom build. Not all the problems can be put squarely at Microsoft’s feet however. Elonex declared bankruptcy shortly after launching this range and the malicious part of me can see why, if this mediacenter is the sum total of their expertise.

Whilst the case looked rather nice from the outside, the hardware and the design of the internals is what really lets it down. The only element Elonex got right was the noise (or lack thereof) - the media center barely gives out a murmur when idle due to only a since fan which is housed inside the power supply. It runs at 690rpm, which draws air over the CPU heatsink (which has four heat pipes) and directly out the side of the case. However, I stressed ‘at idle’ before for a reason. When the media center does anything the incredibly noisy hard drive starts very audibly clicking and crunching away and it completely lets the machine down.

However that’s not the worst thing about this mediacenter. Due to the fact that there is only one very slow fan the airflow in the case is restricted to circulating around the motherboard tray, the processor then out the power supply. The harddrive and PCI / AGP cards are completely neglected. This point was slammed home when the harddrive consistently reported temperatures of high 50s to 62 degrees Celsius!!! Worse still, when I idled the system, that heat didn’t dissipate. The hard drive is locked into place with a pretentious plastic locking mechanism which neither improves the accessibility of the drive bay nor decreases the vibrations from the drive. There is no thermal (or thermally viable) contact between the hard drive and the case and as such, the hard drive is left smouldering away with no way to cool down predictably with next to no drop in temperature. There is a valid point that maintaining electronic components at a set temperature prolongs their life by avoiding constantly repeating thermal differentials (i.e. heating and cooling) however the fact remains that 60+ degrees centigrade is far too hot for a hard drive. Although my brief research on this did not yield any definitive threshold, most sources agree that 50-55 degrees Centigrade is about the absolute maximum recommended operating temperature.

Couple this practically zero thermal conduction with a lack of airflow and you have a recipie for a very short hard drive life. Even worse, this thermal issue was not limited to HDD, the south-bridge and GFX heatsinks were equally poorly cooled and get unpleasantly hot to the touch.

Worst of all, it is just slow. CpuID and the BIOS disagreed with each other about the exact Intel processor that powers the system. I believe it to be either an Intel Pentium 4 530 (at 3.06Ghz) or a Celeron D 345. There is no way the much older Athlon 2600+ processor with the same RAM should be out performing this setup and yet it does so without breaking a sweat.

All in all, very disappointing. A remarkable demonstration of technical ignorance on the part of Elonex. But hey, I didn’t pay for it and now I have an extra DVB-T tuner back in my original, self built machine.

Design (cosmetic) : 8/10 - Pleasing, with a nice Hi-fi look.

Design (technical) : 2/10 - Poor components poorly arranged.

Cooling : 6/10 - Great CPU and powersupply cooling, but everything else is woefully neglected.

Acoustics : 6/10 - Silent until it has to touch the harddrive, still a good effort though

Connectivity : 8/10 - Lots of connectors for digital Audio and Video

Capacity : 5/10 - 200Gb harddrive with a portion taken for recovery. I wouldn’t trust it though and by modern standards it is rather anemic.

Overall : 2/10 - Great for free, if I paid anything for it I would have been annoyed.

Vista SP1 and the Red Herring (+ breaking the 32bit 4Gb limit)

We all knew it was looming, the mathematical limit to address referencing in 32bit computing. A 32Bit number can only be between 0 and 4,294,967,295 which neatly adds up to 4Gb and what this means is, using existing architectures, a program (or Operating System) will not be able to address more than this number of bytes of system RAM via the existing system called byte addressed memory allocation.

What this means for those among us who do not speak geek, is a system which is built or shipped with 4Gb of RAM (and some other cases*) will not be able to fully utilise all of that space.

Lets take a trip back in history and imagine a room with a cupboard containing 256 drawers. Each drawer could hold one bit of binary information and was administered by a librarian. Anytime anyone wanted a piece (or pieces) of information, they had to ask the librarian. What I am describing here, is the era of 8bit computing circa late 1970/ early 80s with the cupboard representing system memory and the librarian representing the Operating System’s memory management system. During day to day running of the system the librarian takes data in and returns data to people (program threads) from the corresponding drawers where the information is stored. Everything works, everyone is happy.

Now what happens if we introduce a second cupboard containing another 128 or 256 drawers? The librarian can only keep track of information stored in the first 256 drawers and as a result, nothing can be stored or retrieved from the newly added cupboards; in effect, they do not exist. Time to get a new secretary i.e. goto 64bit computing (or in this example, replace the 8bit librarian with a swanky 16bit one - who will even ever use 65536bits of RAM? )

But wait, there is more… I read today that Windows Vista SP1 changes (depending on hardware configuration) the total amount of displayed RAM from 3.5 Gb (current the RTM limit when 4Gb is put in the machine) to the full 4Gb, although this still does not help, given the limitation previously discussed. But this made me curious, if the Operating System could see RAM, then surely it was not a BIOS / mathematical fundamental limitation. Turns out I was at least half right …

You see, although the fundamental mathematical limitation can not be breached, there is a rather interesting technique called Physical Address Extension. Using this process, a 32bit Windows system can address more than 4Gb of RAM upto a (present) maximum of 128Gb. To explain what Physical Address Extension (PAE) is, lets go back to the previous example and introduce a new figure - an administrator.

The role of this new entity, is to allocate and manage the time of their underling. Lets also assume we are still running a 8bit system (with the 256bit limit) and have 1024bits of memory i.e. four times the mathematical limit. On the face of it, the extra memory is invisible to the librarian however the administrator is smart enough to both know about the extra memory and who (i.e. what program) is currently using what amount of it. As such, any person (program) can request the full mathematical limit 256 drawers for their own use at the same time as another person (and another …etc) requests more memory.The administrator can instruct the librarian which series of drawers to use per person (program).

This is loosely referred to as 36bit computing and, as the non power of 2 number suggests it is a bit of a tweak. The physical address size was increased (on a 32bit processor) from 32 to 36bits back during the days of Pentium Pro (circa 1997) and most modern CPUs have maintained this legacy. It is important to point out, this does not make all 32bit processors 36bit processors as the change happened in the MMU (memory management unit). Modern Operating systems use page tables to store information about the Virtual Memory system and allocate it based on processes requirements. In effect they act like the administrator from my trivialised example and allow multiple processes to benefit from a pool of memory which traditional 32bit systems (without PAE) would not.

I know what you are thinking, you are rejoicing at being able to avoid the negative aspects of migrating to 64bit computing, but hang on, there are a couple of important caveats. Firstly, each thread (person in our example) can only access a maximum of the mathematical limit of RAM. That means, in a system with 16Gb of RAM, you could quite easily have 3 or 4 processes each taking up 4Gb, but no one process taking up 8 or 16Gb. The other bad point is, it is not supported** in Vista or XP. In-fact, to use such a feature, you would need to be running a Server Operating System from Microsoft or a Linux equivalent. Interestingly enough, Linux contains support for PAE since kernel version 2.6 although I will not discuss it further in this post.

Presently, the only Operating Systems with suitable (or rumoured) PAE support are :

Windows 2000: Datacenter Server and Advanced Server Editions

Windows Server 2003: Enterprise and Datacenter Editions

Windows Server 2008: Enterprise and Datacenter Editions

As you can see, non are particularly home desktop friendly. So, despite Vista displaying the correct amount of RAM in Service Pack 1, it is still fundamentally limited to the 32bit mathematical limit despite Microsoft having the technology to at least improve on the functionality of such systems.

On a side note, I brought this up with a few people at my head office. I work for a large UK retail company that sells PCs and Laptops. I was surprised to see when our first 4Gb models came into the stores a few months ago that they were running Vista 32bit Editions. The UK is not a litigious as the United States, but I can’t help wondering how long it will be before the lawsuits start flying. After all, it is misrepresentation in my book to sell something that, due to a software shortcoming, can never be fully utilised to the specification it was advertised at. Particularly since an alternative is available to OEMs and yet, all retailers not just the one I work for seem to be taking a cavalier attitude towards this.

*The total amount of addressable space inside a 32bit system must add up to 4096Mb, this includes system and Video RAM, so if you have an all singing, all dancing SLI graphics card with 2Gb of Graphical RAM, the total amount of system RAM you will be able to address is around 2Gb.

**Actually this is not true, ever since Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft has used PAE for security purposes coupled with the NX bit. This is a hardware security feature built into a processor which allows program and system developers greater control over what they designate to be executable and non-executable user/memory space. Microsoft has set a fundamental limitation of the amount of RAM being used by home versions of 32bit Operating Systems to 4Gb regardless of the fact the technology to increase this is in place.

The 2k bug

Whilst it seems the Internet enjoys a good Microsoft Vista bashing (see previous post on topic) research today came out suggesting Windows 2000, an eight year old operating system that recently entered long term support phase by Microsoft, is more ’secure’ than Windows Vista. (Cue fanboy and antiboy posts.)

But this is rather misleading, let us not forget, Windows 2000 was released in February 2000, a dark era where firewalls, security software and Windows Update were treated with suspicion previously reserved for black magic. Ok, so maybe I am exaggerating slightly, but back then the average PC had either a Pentium 2 or 3 processor between 600Mhz - 1.2Ghz, between 32-128Mb of RAM and a 20Gb hard disk and was aimed at the business market not consumers who had the privilege of running Windows ME (let the justified ME bashing commence.) But we are still missing the point here, now the only users that run Windows 2000 (which accounted for about 2% of all Internet traffic in March 2008 ) are those who are comfortable power users (like Steve Gibson) or those with old hardware (e.g. Third world etc.) As such, it is not worth the malware authors’ time to target such a small percentage of the userbase when they are more likely to snare the vulnerable XP or Vista users.

Worse still, serious doubts have been raised over the validity of this study given PC Tools did not scientifically determine the states of key security within the operating like Windows Vista’s UAC or even which service packs were installed on the computers. As noted by Ars technica, often the first action by typical malware is to download the target package(s) onto a system immediately after it has been compromised with the usually relatively small initial exploit. This could mean that their numbers are greatly misleading when three or four ‘infections’ could actually be a single instance of malware.

The only way to scientifically conduct such a test, would be with three virtual machines, one running Windows 2000, one with Windows XP and finally one with Vista each running a with a comparable set of security tools and the latest patches. That way, after each exposure, the virtual machine could be examined to determine if the exploit was successful and if so, the degree to which the target machine was compromised. At the end of the experiment, the virtual machine is ’switched off’ without writing the changes to it’s virtual disk and restarted to test the next exploit. Using this methodology, all exploits can be tested equally and methodically and various configurational permutations can also be tried (e.g. Operating systems with only default security measures etc.)

Let us also not forget, there is no way to tell whether these threats are serious silent drive by download style exploits (which would constitute a serious threat) or as a result of user ignorance which even the most secure operating systems and security applications can not guard against. Playing Devil’s advocate, I can see a case that unscientific tests like these better represent real world conditions, however it can not be used to judge to reliability or security of Operating Systems nor the users using them as no conditions nor variables have been made constant. As such, unfortunately, these results have no validity as far as I am concerned.

When the file extension… is not the file extension.

I was bemused to read on bbc news earlier that a trivially simply ploy stung half a million file sharers. The concept is nothing new having been started a fair few years ago by virus / malware writers and adopted by Copyright enforcement agencies in recent years. Do the anatomy of a decentralised file sharing system, anyone can seed a file. Once this seeded file is made available to the peer-to-peer network it either becomes advertised to a localised central file distributor (referred to as a Super Node or Server) or is found during a spider search query run by another user logged into the peer to peer network. If these files are topical or sought after, they can be transferred onto a different node (client) rapidly. There they are stored in the second user’s ’shared’ directory where more people can download it.

Once a seeded file has been downloaded and spread over a few tens of nodes the rate at which it can be downloaded by others increases almost exponentially with a cascade like effect. Other people of the peer to peer network are lured into downloading this file based on the number of people who have it therefore assuming it must be genuine and would be comparatively quick to obtain. Couple this with a topical or sought-after song / album or file aimed at the masses (who statistically would contain a fair percentage of PC-illiterate users and those with a penchance for agreeing to all the pop ups they come across) means these files explode across networks.

This malicious file in question appears to have masqueraded as a MP3 by Girls Aloud. Given the fact that on running the file pops up a message saying the computer requires a codec to play the song and tries to direct you to a website in order to download it, most computer users would stop and reexamine what they had just downloaded. People that brazenly proceeded and downloaded the malicious ‘codec’ package had spyware installed on their system which would ‘bombard’ users with pop ups. Also, the download file would spawn copies of itself within the User’s shared folder under different names to try to make itself attractive to a greater audience.

But what happened? How were people tricked into downloading an MP3 file but ended up running a malicuous program? The answer to this lies in the file type. Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which a file can be opened:

1) via script or binary execution (e.g. .exe, .com, .vbs, .java, .scr … and some others)

2) via program read from an external application (e.g. .txt, .doc, .wav, .mpg, .avi …. and MANY more.)

MP3 files (Moving Picture Experts Group version 1 audio layer 3) are the latter, upon execution, Windows searches through its list of known file extensions stored in the registry to see what it should do. It instantly finds the entry for MP3 and sees this type of file is handled by a media player like Windows Media Player, WinAMP, iTunes etc etc. Windows then executes the media player which, on loading, opens the MP3 file specified in the command line argument, decodes a block, fills its buffer and starts to play. Unless a clever trick like a buffer overflow is used, which have historically been responsible for security breaches in various Windows programs as well as console homebrew development, this renders all ‘program read’ type files harmless*. As such we have to look elsewhere for the source of this problem.

That brings us nicely to the point I wanted to raise in this post, file extensions and more specifically, security vulnerabilities in their implementation. Recent versions of Windows from XP (and possibly earlier, I can not remember) have automatically hidden the file extension by default leaving the user to distinguish between file types by iconographic representations. Whilst at times this is both cleaner looking and more functional, it does present an interesting security problem, what if there are two file extensions? Window will quite happily truncate the file .xxx from a file name leaving the first extension, despite the fact Windows ignores anything before the final .xxx . As a result, if you name a file SomethingInteresting.mp3.exe, in its default state, Windows will happily display the file as SomethingInteresting.mp3 but will execute the file as an EXE when double clicked. Obviously, if you quieried the file by right clicking on it and selecting properties you would be immediately told what type of file it is, but most people will take the file at face value.

Luckily there is a very simple way to gaurd against such black magic, in Windows XP and Vista** in the file browser, goto the Tools menu and select Folder Options.

In this dialog, uncheck ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ and click Apply followed by clicking Apply to all folders.

And that’s it! A simple check box and some common sense now separates you from being lured into downloading fake or malicious files.

* Some files like some movies can have containers which direct the media player or operating system to web pages. It is not just media files which are vulnerable but this is a completely different topic.

** In Vista you may have to enable the classic menu

PC Recovery How-to

This started off a reproduction of a leaflet I wrote for the company I work for. It basically attempts to answer the question : “How do I recover my computer” or “How do I run a system recovery” (and permutations there-of) in as few lines as possible. Because I am not constrained for space on here, I have expanded on it somewhat and will continue to do so, if you have any questions, feel free to comment and ask.

The reason for this procedure is simple - recovering your system to the ’shipped’ or factory settings is the best way to clean your system. Over time Operating Systems (Windows is the worst for this) accumulate lots of rubbish. This can be in the form of zombie or orphan dependencies (e.g. .DLL or .OCX files in Windows that are no longer needed) miscellaneous and or useless configuration or drivers and even damaging or misinstalled components. Some retails can not take in laptops or computers for warranty repair unless a full system recovery has been performed first due to the high occurrence of non-supported software related problems being futily sent to manufacturers for hardware repair.

Please note, a full system recovery is NOT the same as a Windows Restore / System Restore point recovery or a partial system recovery. In some cases, Windows Recovery Environment (only on Windows Vista) can solve the issue although I mostly have found it time consuming and unhelpful.

Step 1: Back up all your data

When done correctly, a full system restore will completely wipe your computer. This means all your data (e.g. photos, documents, music) and settings (e.g. ISP / Internet, Web Passwords etc) will be removed. Please make sure you have a complete copy of all the data you wish to save on a external source (e.g. a USB Flash drive, USB Harddrive, CD/DVD, NAS etc) before you continue.

Step 2: Determining what recovery method your PC / Laptop uses.

Regardless whether the unit is a PC or a Laptop, it would have been shipped with a method for recovery. This can be in the form of backup CD/DVD(s) or preinstalled on the computer in a hidden ‘partition’ on the computer’s hard drive. You may have been required to create the recovery discs yourself when you first switched on the computer. If this was the case you normally would have been prompted. If you have not created recovery disks or something has happened to render your recovery partition useless, see troubleshooting #4.

Step 3a: Performing the Recovery with Recovery Discs

If your machine has (or came with discs) read on, if not, skip to the section 3b.

Put the (first if applicable) recovery disc into your machine and restart the computer. When the computer switches on, you may be presented with the option to ‘boot from Optical / CD / DVD / Media’, press enter (or the key specified) to do this.
The disc should now boot into the recovery mode. (If not, see troubleshooting #1.)

Follow the on screen instructions. When imaging / recovery is complete, your computer will restart. Remove the recovery disc from the drive when prompted.

Recovery should be complete, follow any remaining instructions on the screen.

Step 3b: Performing the Recovery from a Recovery Parition or Image.

If your machine has backup software installed on the hard drive, please read on.

The process is very similar to the one discussed in section 3a, except there will be a short time window where a certain key combination will need to be pressed BEFORE Windows XP / Vista starts to load. If you see Windows XP / Vista start to load, you have missed the window of opportunity and should restart and try again. A PC or laptop system will go through the following steps whilst booting:

1) Video card POST *

2) Main BIOS Post (CMOS and Ram check)

3) Secondary BIOS POST (for RAID cards or some legacy 13h network equipment) *

4) Cycle through boot device order. At this point you might see a small white icon flashing in the top left corner for a moment.

5) Transfer execution to boot sector (MBR) of specified harddrive.

6) Windows starts to boot.

* Only applicable to some systems.

This key combination changes depending on the model and manufacturer but will be something along the lines of [alt]+[shift]+[F10] (for Acer PCs) or [F12] (for some Toshiba and HP models) etc. More confusingly, different manufacturers check for this key combination in different places. Acer tend to check for the keypress predominantly during stage 3 to 4 although some models exist which check for the key combination during BIOS POST (stage 2), HP base units normally check during stage 2 whilst their laptops wait until stage 3 to 4. The general rule is start pressing the keys when the BIOS shows up and keep pressing them until you get to the recovery partition. If your operating system starts to boot, simply restart and try again. CHECK with your manufacturer the key combination your system looks for.

When done correctly, it will take you to the recovery section of your computer. Follow the on screen instructions selecting, if asked, the full system recovery option. If this fails, please see troubleshooting #3.

Recovery should be complete, follow any remaining instructions on the screen.

Troubleshooting
For more detailed information relating to your specific model, please consult the manufacturer’s website or helpline.

#1 - Can’t Boot from Recovery Discs
If you are trying to run a recovery from a CD/DVD but it is not loading (booting) from the disc, you will need to make sure the CD/DVD drive is checked before the hard drive (containing the software issue) is read by the BIOS.

You will need to go into the BIOS by pressing a button almost immediately after the computer is turned on. This can be [F2], [F8], [F10] or [Del] depending on the specific model you have.

CAUTION, do not touch anything other than what is directed here.

When inside the BIOS, check the ‘boot order’ to make sure the CD/DVD drive is booted first. These drives can be called a number of different things, when in doubt consult the manufacturer. When you have changed the boot order, save the configuration into the CMOS and let the computer reboot.

#2 - I have lost my recovery discs / I didn’t back up my recovery software
Some manufacturers have a facility to send you replacement discs if you have failed to keep or create your recovery software. There may be a charge related to this service, please contact the manufacturer. (See #4)

#3 - Can’t Boot from Recovery Partition / Recovery from recovery partition fails
Some software problems (e.g. malware / viruses) can corrupt the built in software recovery. If this has happened, there will be no way to complete the software recovery and you should contact the manufacturer for further instructions. (See #4)

#4- Recovery partition destroyed / useless or no recovery option.
There is a more advanced way to perform a system recovery than using the built in recovery method. I would only reccommend this for more advanced users as it involves manually installing and setting up Windows (XP or Vista) and installing drivers by hand. You may also need to be comfortable manually partitioning your hard drive. This method will give you a better, more responsive system free of crapware / bloatware preinstalled be the manufacturers as well as potentially utilise wasted hard drive space.

With almost all Vista PCs (I will cover XP in a moment) you will receive a Vista Installation DVD. This DVD contains every version of Windows Vista and you can use it to wipe your computer and reinstall Windows Vista. The process to using the disk is the same as is outlined in Section 3a substituting the recovery discs for the Vista disc. Simply select the version of Windows Vista that came with your machine (you can install any edition of Vista e.g. Home Premium / Basic, Business or Ultimate but it will be limited to a 30 day demo) if you are unsure which version you have, check the side of your PC (or under side of your laptop) for your Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (sometimes called CoA.) This brightly coloured certificate will not only have the version of Windows you are entitled to use written on it, but your Product Serial key as well - this will be important as it proves you are entitled to run the particular version of Windows and will be required during the installation.

Alternatively, if you are using Windows XP (or another Operating System like 98/95, NT, 2000, Server etc) you may need to obtain a Windows CD. I am not sure of the legality of this, but if you find a download somewhere online for a Windows CD image (I won’t provide a link) and install it using the Product Serial key provided on your certificate of authenticity, strictly speaking you are not committing piracy as you are entited to run that operating system on that machine. Because I am not a lawer, I do not know if such a proceedure would be legal and as such can not recommend it. You can always buy a new CD (OEM version) or go directly to the manufacturer for a replacement.

Once Windows Vista/XP (etc) has installed, you will have the basic framework for your PC / laptop. What will still be missing is the drivers and software. Drivers can be downloaded from the manufacturers website and should be done prior to reformating your computer. Some operating systems (XP and prior although to a lesser extent Vista as well) will need security software loaded onto them before you allow the computer to be exposed to the Internet. There are a number of free alternatives as well as commercial options.
Useful Contact Numbers (for the UK)

Sony 0870 240 2408
Acer 0870 853 1002
HP 0870 010 4320
Toshiba 0870 220 2202
Fujitsu Siemens 0870 243 4390

GIMP Basics - Screenshots

One of the main programs I use is Photoshop, I use it mostly for simple image editing / cropping and resizing for my blog. I am trying to move over from Windows to Linux for blogging and as such, I decided to finally get to grips with the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) which is the GNU photoshop equivalent for GNU Linux. Whilst the Wine project have made great leaps forward in recent years to the point where Photoshop can be run inside Wine, it is still not an ideal solution.

In this post, I just want to very briefly explain how to do something simple : take a screenshot, crop it, shrink it and compress it using the GIF interlaced format.

1 ) Download and install GIMP. On Windows this is done via a download from the GIMP site, on GNU Linux it is done via the distribution specific package manager.

2 ) Once it is installed, lets assume we have a screen we want to capture. Fire up the program and goto “File>Acquire>Screen Shot”. This will bring up the WinSnap dialog which will allow you to take a screenshot of the entire screen (after a defined pause) or a specific window. The specific window feature didn’t work particularly well so I recommend taking a snapshot of the entire screen. (If you have pressed the Print Screen button, you can instead use the “Past as new image” option.

3) Now we have the entire desktop, we need to use the select tool to highlight the area we want to capture.

4) Next we goto the menu, select “Image > Crop to Selection”

5 ) Finally, I tend to scale the image to 80%, this is achieved by going to the menu “Image > Scale Image” and selecting 80% width and 80% height. If you constrain the proportions of the image (the chain icon) then selecting a 80% width will automatically select 80% height.

6 ) Now simply goto “File > Save As..” and append “.gif” to the end of the filename. This will launch the GIF exporter.

7 ) You will be told that the GIF exporter can only handle Greyscale or indexed images. Select “Convert to Indexed” and click “Export”.

8 ) Check “Interlaced” and uncheck the “GIF Comment” field and click “Save”.

And thats it! When I get some time to play with GIMP’s more advanced features I will write more on the subject.

Minor Vista Bug

Has anyone else noticed this strange GUI bug? When you goto the Notification Area property page you are met with the following screen.

Now if you opt to not show the network icon, this happens:

For some reason, the power icon is also removed even if it is checked. If you actually apply this, only the network icon is actually removed, its just strange Microsoft have not found and fixed this yet given it is a trivial GUI issue.

Hidden World of Linux: Follow up Part 1 - NAS

Since my previous post on the hidden uses of Linux attracted so much attention, I thought I would do a brief follow up adding a bit more to my conclusion in which I discussed the main drawback to all these great Linux distributions - power consumption. At some point I am going to buy a power meter and test a variety of old computers I have around the house to see how much power they draw, but for now I just want to give some illustrated examples of low power hardware that can be bought which are ideal for some of the uses described in my prior post.

This is the first of two follow up posts. This way I can go into detail about each specific section. In this post I will be discussing NAS (Network Attached Storage) and will follow up shortly with a post on Firewalls later.

Realistically retail NAS devices fall into two categories, ones with a single harddrive and ones with multiple harddrives.

Single hard drive setups

There are a large variety of single harddrive NAS systems available at fairly reasonable prices and, unless you need a specific feature that a Linux/BSD distribution like FreeNAS provides, it will likely be better to purchase a separate NAS drive. This way you do not need to worry about installation / upgrading potentially buggy software and the power requirement will be in the tens of Watts.

For the sake of argument, let us consider three hardware examples for building (or reusing an old computer for) a single drive NAS. The first is by far the cheapest - reusing your old PC. All that is really required is a new harddrive to replace the small one the PC would originally have been shipped with.

At an average price of £35 for a 250Gb SATA drive (slightly less for an IDE version,) simply reusing an old PC is by far the cheapest option, however there are a number of things to watch out for. Old computers used to have limitations as to the maximum hard drive capacity the BIOS on the motherboard would be able to address. Back in the days of single GB hard drives, a then theoretical limit of 137Gb must have seemed as far off as 32Gb RAM for desktops does today. Fast forward back to today; whilst modern systems are very happily addressing far more than 137Gb thanks to logical block (LBA) 48bit addressing, chances are you will want at least around 160Gb space for your NAS meaning this could be a problem for some of the really old hardware. The reason for this so called “ATA Interface Limit” issue (which is by no means the first in computing - check out this great article) is a mathematical limitation in the way in which harddrives used to be accessed at a very low level using discrete geometry (cylinder, head and sector numbers.) BIOS patches are available although these are few and far between.

Worn power supplies are also a potential hazard, check before deploying a system for 12/24 hour use that the power supply cooling fan is in good condition and that there are no overheating issues caused by an old or clogged cooling system in the rest of the hardware. Please do not open up a power supply - such an action could be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. When in doubt, replace it - it will be cheaper in the long run than if you end up setting fire to your house or destroying your data through a power spike induced head crash. In summary, this option is by far the cheapest of the three, but there can be some problems along the way.

The second option I explored, would be to buy a complete, custom tailored PC system for use as a headless NAS. I went to one of the eshops I frequently purchase from and quickly, virtually built a low powered, cheap PC that would be suitable for such a purchase. Surprisingly, it turns out that building your own NAS box is a lot less expensive than I would have thought with my NAS PC costing a total of £108 (Full specification and links in appendix at the end of this post) inclusive of the £35 250Gb harddrive used in the previous example. This compares very favourably with the (currently) cheapest single HDD NAS box available from the same eshop which is £77. With your own PC, you get the advantage of customising the services your NAS provides giving you greater control coupled with expandability down the road, an option unavailable when buying a retail NAS. The downside to this is the increased power consumption. To mitigate this, I picked recent components which have power saving features like AMD’s Cool and Quiet as well as the special, low power consumption versions rather than going for a generation (or two) old technology which was roughly the same price anyway.

The final ’self-built’ NAS hardware option I wanted to explore is building a NAS with ultralow power embedded components frequently used in routers / modems and in actual NAS systems. It is possible to buy a limited selection of embedded motherboards, some even with low power processors like the VIA C7 or AMD Geode. VIA C7 processor boards seem to be a lot cheaper, and I selected a board which had everything minus RAM, the HDD (hard disk) and a power supply. Unfortunately, due to the limited production scales of some of these ITX boards (you pay a premium for the miniaturisation) the cost of building such a low power device was higher than I anticipated. The total price for a small, very low power embedded NAS build was £143 (full specification in appendix at the end of post) also inclusive of 250 Gb hard disk drive.

As you can see, the cheapest option, (predictably) would be to reuse old hardware assuming it is only two or three generations old. In all three PC specifications, I have kept the harddrive size and cost the same in order to allow for a greater comparison, but I find it hard to recommend either self build option even given the extra flexibility that such a computer would yield running a BSD distribution like FreeNAS. Also, although FreeNAS is a fairly mature product, there is no guarantee that it will work flawlessly with the hardware you have (I had some ACPI issues with my test machine) which would render potential effort useless. If you have an old PC and hard drives lying around then you have nothing to loose by trying FreeNAS, I would even encourage it, otherwise I must stick to my original comment - if you are only want a NAS for casual backup on a single drive, buy an off the shelf product.

Multiple hard drive setups

If on the other hand you want more than a single HDD, this is where things start to get interesting, there are very few (reasonably) priced multi disk NAS systems on the market. The key exception is a piece of hardware I alluded to in my previous post which I would like to talk briefly now about. (I am sure other options exist, but this is the only reasonably priced one currently available in the UK market.)

The enclosure I found which would allow two drives to be used is made by Nanopoint and is model ‘Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B.’ It has an interesting feature set, supporting 2 SATA harddrives with Samba, NFS, FTP, RAID 1 & 0 as well as a USB to act as a print server. Unfortunately it is twice the price here in the UK than in the US but it seems to be one of the very few NAS enclosures that allows for RAID 1 across two harddrives. This was important as I am after a system that has built in redundancy - if one hard disk failed - another automatically had a copy of all the files. (Although the theory behind RAID is somewhat flawed - more on this another time.) I am seriously tempted to buy one of these and if I do I will write a full review with how it compares to FreeNAS at a later stage. UPDATE: I have found another similar device by Netgear (SC101 SAN/NAS device) although it only supports IDE drives, the other features seem roughly the same.

This is the point where FreeNAS starts to really distinguish itself from some of the commercial offerings. The reason is simple, anything more than one or two hard drives is seen as either SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) or Corporate grade and has an appropriate price tag and feature set. FreeNAS can, and will scale beautifully with a number of hard drives (even performing fault tolerant RAID 5 as well as the more popular RAID 1) although at the moment, it does not support clustering or failovers. This is relatively trivial as we are getting now into the realms of enterprise grade computing.

Due to the relatively simple firmware required to get these devices working (even with a variety of services) it will likely be cheaper over the course of a year to skip distributions like FreeNAS or OpenFiler and instead opt for a NAS drive enclosure, unless you specifically need some of the features FreeNAS offers or you are using several hard disks.

Related Idea : Virtualisation

Thumos made an interesting point in one of my posts about using a server running multiple virtual environments which each role (e.g. firewall, NAS / SAN, MythTV etc) all running on one PC. The downside of this would be, as he noted, dramatically increased hardware requirements and to be honest, I am not confident such a system would be able to handle all those roles effectively but I am not an expert on Virtualisation. Windows Server 2008 can do some pretty amazing things in this respect with their hypervisor based virtualisation system.

Related Idea: Windows Home Server

Although strictly speaking Windows Home Server is a completely different program (and incompatible with freedom (or F/OSS) software philosophies) it deserves a mention given the subject of this post. Built on a modified Windows Server 2003 r2 core, Windows Home Server adds automated backup as well as some impressive disk management tools. Perhaps the most striking to me was the absence of RAID as we classically see it. RAID has become ubiquitous for redundant, performance or server/enterprise grade storage solutions mostly because the only practical alternative is confined to high end data centers. Ask an IT expert or geek the various modes to connect multiple hard disks and invariably you will get a discussion involving RAID 0,1,5 (or mixed modes like 0+1, 5+0, 5+1, 6, 8 etc) and JBOD spanning with likely no mention of DFS or FRS. These are Microsoft technologies developed “in-house” by their Advanced Technologies Lab (ATL).

To understand DFS and its routes, I had to take a brief crash course in enterprise level computing as the technology was not initially developed for use in Windows Home Server finding its routes a few years before, however the similarly between DFS and the storage technology in WHS is very similar as Paul Thurrott notes in an early preview of WHS. Infact, DFS started life a as a way to transparently link various SMB (Samba) Shares in a way in which there would be greater flexibility, transparency and reliability in corporate environments with multiple data centers. DFS generally can be used in one of two ‘modes’, the first being locally administered (without an Active Directory) and the second being domain based roots which by their design provides redundancy and is the most commonly used. There is an excellent demo of this technology on the Microsoft website.

The key to software implementation of data redundancy in Windows Home Server is found in the transparent way storage shares are presented to the end user, not through a network mapped drive letter or a (classic) network share. Infact, WHS automatically shadow copies data in such a way that a copy of it exists on more than one hardware device protecting against failure. This is completely different from RAID 0 which directly mirrors the contents of an entire drive (byte for byte) onto another one to provide redundancy. In the event of a hard disk failure (or capacity upgrade) the RAID array must be taken offline and rebuilt with a replacement disk. Furthermore, because the data is mirrored from one hard drive to another, the maximum size of the mirrored array is constrained to the smallest drive in the array. Windows Home Server supports hot swapping of disks, meaning that if a hard disk fails there (likely) is no data loss nor interruption in service. If an extra drive is added (e.g. via USB) or an existing drive is hotswapped it expands the overall space available to encompass the new storage and automatically (shadow) copies the data on it’s existing drive(s) to (re)create redundancy.

The hardware requirements are significantly higher than just running FreeNAS, a minimum of a 1Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM are required before the installation will continue making it twice (or 3/4 times) more resource hungry than F/OSS equivalents. The ability to access your data remotely (through Windows Live integration) is interesting as it acts like a RAS dynDNS service, but it means trusting a third party for your authentication. A properly configured local network with secure FTP or Samba services would provide exactly the same (if less flashy) functionality with the advantage of giving you complete control over who, what and where your network can be accessed from.

Conclusion

There are features that FreeNAS provides which ‘off-the-shelf’ NAS enclosures will not and for this it is an extremely good piece of software. For multiple harddrives and / or multiple users all requiring different services, I would recommend FreeNAS everytime possibly even with some of the ITX hardware (coupled with a PCI RAID card) suggested above, however for someone wishing to make a single HDD into a NAS for occational home use it is unlikely to be a smart choice.

Appendix : Example hardware costs

Please note, these are example prices correct at time of research, please do not go and take this as a recommendation of a system specification, it is for illustration only.

First example : Equipment already in your home.

Existing hardware eliminates a lot of initial outlay.

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) - Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Total Cost: £35

Second example: Building a very basic / cheap PC

Processor: £19 (AMD Low Power (45 W) AM2 Sempron)

Motherboard: £27 (MSI Motherboard)

RAM: £7 (512Mb Extra Value PC2-5400 RAM)

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) - Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Power Supply: £10 (Budget 350Watt) - Although I would STRONGLY recommend never buying a budget PSU.

Case: £10 (Budget ATX case)

Total Cost: £108

Third example: Building a low power ‘ITX’ form factor PC

Motherboard & Processor: £50 (Via iDOT) - Very cheap low power board

RAM: £7 (512Mb Extra Value PC2-5400 RAM)

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) - Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Case & Power Supply: £42 (Simple small case)

Total Cost: £143

Vista Bashing = Cheap Traffic!?

It seems the web (and certainly the blogosphere) is full of posts damning Vista for various reasons and I do not believe all this harsh criticism is justified. It all came to a head when I read a particular blog entry tonight. I started writing a brief reply in order to express my feelings on the matter, but it turned into a semi-lengthy rant which I would like to reproduce in a somewhat tweaked / editing form here.

What worries me is that it is very fashionable to bash Vista. It feels like any self proclaimed Tech expert thinks it is almost their prerogative to write long anti-Vista articles based on and citing other anti-Vista articles - does anyone else see a pattern emerging here?!

For the record I should say I am a huge fan of Linux, I run more Linux boxes than Windows, but of those windows boxes, the majority are XP and only one is Vista. I am very happy with Vista as well as XP but it is about managing your expectations. It is completely unrealistic to assume Vista will run on hardware that is a couple of years old (or even some budget machines.)

Surprise surprise, it won’t, Vista has been plagued by hardware and software incompatibilities - what does this tell us? Simply that Microsoft was not lying when it said Vista is a major update to the Windows platform. Historically all major updates have had driver and software compatibility issues (anyone remember XP 5/6 years ago?!?) Drivers are the responsibility of the manufacturer NOT Microsoft, for years prior to release Microsoft were talking to hardware companies, asking them to update their drivers but most ignored them. Why!?? Very simply because they will sell more hardware if people have to go out and buy Vista certified equipment. It is not in their interest to revisit hardware they released 2 years ago - it does not make them any more money and the consumer be damned.

Saying that, there are a number of platforms / situations when Vista is clearly not suitable and for those I still run XP - it is more responsive on such hardware and has the added bonus of comfort factor (i.e. I have been using it for years and I am very familiar with it,) but lets not forget, this is old technology that has not really been worked on since 2005 (sp2.) SP3 is nothing more than a security roll up with a few extra Vista developed features added. The desktop rendering in XP (called GDI+) is based on a software stack that is several years old and incapable of hardware accelerated desktop compositing - the same thing Mac OSX and Linux have been capable of for years.

The problem is, noone seems to have a long enough memory to remember the Windows 2000 / 98 saga, or the Windows XP / 2000 saga that followed that…

There is nothing wrong with Vista*, similarly nothing wrong with XP*, nor is there nothing wrong with Linux*, and even with OSX* - it depends on what hardware you have and what you want to do with it.

* Of course it is not as black and white as this, all platforms have their inherent strengths and weaknesses.

I wish we would move beyond this fanboy like bashing, if there is merit to a discussion I am all for it, but I am getting fed up of reading the same FUD constantly. Most of it is simply fishing for cheap traffic.

/Rant

Vista SP1 - A reflection

It is interesting how perusing or glancing at the popular tech topic currently doing the rounds on wordpress can give an insight into the impact such announcements (or software/game/hardware/press releases etc) are having on the general public. Its all well and good reading about something (in this case Vista Service Pack 1) from recognised tech insiders such as Paul Thurrott, it is far more telling to read about the experiences everyone else is having.

Here are a selection of headlines from the last few days,

Vista wreaks havok on some PCs, users complain (anti Vista blog), My Nightmare trying to upgrade to SP1 (Insightful look into incompatible drivers), Vista SP1 update not showing up is for your own good (Reasons why SP1 may not be available yet for some people), SP1 Now available, Delayed, Delayed, Delayed, SP1 Day two (interesting positive feedback from a user), Hell has frozen over (overexcited user).

And guess what? Its not (entirely) the usual doom and gloom and has become almost ubiquitous when it comes to reports about Vista. Vista Service Pack 1 has come a long way since internal betas handed out to the Microsoft beta testers. These poor guys must have been feeling particularly abused this time round if the early write ups are anything to go by. With several restarts required to complete the process (and a few hours) these so-called tech elite reported back their thoughts on the process and as you can imagine, even the most staunchly pro-Microsoft of them has a few ‘choice’ comments to make.

But anyway, fast forward to now and you will see in your Windows Updates Vista Service Pack 1 waiting patiently for you to let it into your digital home. Software and hardware compatibility is good and the lengthy installation process has been slimmed down dramatically to a single reboot after completion. Inevitably it won’t go that way for everyone with some users reporting issues with certain drivers. To Microsoft’s credit, a fairly comprehensive list of drivers that have issues has been published and I have reproduced the list below.

Realtek AC’97

For x86-based computers: Alcxwdm.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Alcwdm64.sys - version 6.0.1.6242 or earlier
SigmaTel

For x86-based computers: Sthda.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Sthda64.sys - version 5.10.5762.0 or earlier
SigmaTel

For x86-based computers: Stwrt.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Stwrt64.sys - version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier
Creative Audigy

For x86-based and x64-based computers: Ctaud2k.sys - version 6.0.1.1242 or earlier
For x86-based computers: P17.sys – all versions (This was originally a Windows XP-based driver.)
Conexant HD Audio

For x86-based computers: Chdart.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier
For x64-based computers: Chdart64.sys - version 4.32.0.0 or earlier
Display drivers

Intel Display

For x86-based computers: Igdkmd32.sys – versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403
For x64-based computers: Igdkmd64.sys – versions between and including driver 7.14.10.1322 and 7.14.10.1403

Unfortunately, I am the (not-so) proud owner of a Ac’97 soundcard in my primary laptop so it looks like I may have to fish around for drivers (AGAIN!!) to get my laptop to work properly with Redmond’s latest offering. The issues here are not Microsoft’s fault. Infact, as several tech insiders have noted, Microsoft was beating the drum about drivers to ODM/OEMs for months prior to Vista’s (and SP1’s) release but when the moment came to deliver, most manufacturers did not come to the party.

The reason is simply, it is not really cost effective. Take a computer you bought in the last few years (or Motherboard) and goto the manufacturer’s website and check the date of the ‘latest’ drivers (or BIOS.) Whilst these companies are fairly diligent during the product’s lifecycle, when they move onto something else, they stop putting out bugfixes or updates because it no longer makes commercial sense for them to pay their software engineers to do so. When Vista came out, many people had equipment (like me) that was designed for XP but could, with a fair amount of tweaking, run Vista very comfortably. The problem I (and many others) faced was a complete lack of native driver support for this hardware. I understand the problem, but I still think it is ridiculous. Microsoft did try to smooth this over by building in a compatibility layer into Vista to allow the loading of some XP drivers and while this helped a lot, there were performance penalties.

For now, I am not particularly fussed about SP1 so I will be sticking to vanilla Vista until either these driver issues are resolved (unlikely) or I get the time to find replacement drivers for my laptop.