Windows

News flash: Windows is cheaper than Linux!

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Lots of people asked me today what I thought about the IDC study that says Windows is cheaper than Linux. I yawned.
Consider the source. Microsoft paid for the thing. You think IDC was going to come back and say Linux is cheaper all around if Microsoft was paying the bill?

Yes, sometimes it’s cheaper. If all your sysadmins know NT and don’t know Unix well, then yes, Windows is going to be cheaper.

But I can think of some times when it’s not. Like if downtime means anything to you at all. My clients scream when I have to reboot an NT server. But I can count on having to reboot a busy NT server once a year due to a lockup or general server stupidity. And virtually every security update is going to require a reboot. I can slipstream a Linux security update almost every time without a reboot–unless it’s a patch to the kernel, which is rare. With the right distribution, I can even upgrade distributions without a reboot. Try that when going from Windows NT or 2000 to something else.

I saw a story on DebianPlanet today about someone bragging he’d done a server migration in 3 hours. You’ll never do that with Windows. But you can do a migration even faster than that–copy everything over somehow to the new server, either through a tape backup or disk cloning, then adjust /etc/fstab as necessary, plop down a generic kernel straight from a distribution, configure the NIC if it’s not a close relative of the old one, and reboot. If you want to get fancy, compile a custom kernel tuned to the new server’s hardware. You can do it all in an hour. We dread the day any of our Windows servers is destroyed by some kind of accident and we can’t find an identical replacement. It’ll take us a minimum of 5 hours to install and update the OS and re-install whatever apps are on it and re-create whatever shares are on it, because that’s how long it takes us to set up a new one out of the box.

And maybe you’ve got picky clients like some of mine. One of them decided out of the blue that they didn’t like how their network shares were named. Never mind that everyone just calls it “the O drive.” Yes, they’re anal-retentive morons, but the client is always right. So one of my coworkers spent a thrilling Saturday un-sharing folders and re-sharing them with new names. On a Samba server, you can just load a text file, change some names, and restart the daemon. Done. The job that took 6 hours and was full of potential for human error is reduced to a few minutes. There’s still potential for human error, but it’s much less because the job isn’t as tedious and boring. And it’s much quicker to fix.

And don’t even get me started on tracking server licenses and CALs. Many organizations, when faced with a Microsoft audit, find it cheaper to just re-buy all of them than to spend the time tracking down the documentation that proves they’re honest. With Linux and open source, there’s no danger of having to pay for something twice, not counting the upgrades. (Those are free too, if you want them.)

Dot-matrix printers in Windows

Dave Farquhar Windows ,
Dot-matrix printers in Windows

I had e-mail today about running dot-matrix printers in Windows, which confused me at first because fundamentally, getting one type of printer to work in Windows is no different from getting another one to work: You load the right driver and you go.

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The worm that’s not a worm

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I got mail at work today. The subject:
David you have an e-card from Alex.

Well, about the only person I know who calls me David is my mom. And I don’t know anybody named Alex. And why would a guy be sending me an e-card? Not wanting to explore that possibility any further, I disregarded it.

Then I remembered reading about something like that somewhere, so I went back and looked at it.

Short story: A really sleazy e-card company is sending out e-mail containing nothing but an URL at friendgreetings.com, which sends down ActiveX controls and installs some spyware that, among other things, sends bogus cards to everyone in your Outlook address book. That’s where I got that e-card message from. I was in this guy’s address book, for whatever reason. (Turns out he’s the webmaster at work. Funny how the webmaster and the hostmaster can go for long periods of time and never meet, eh?)

Officially, this isn’t a virus or a worm because it’s a company doing this crap, rather than a bored loser who lives in his parents’ basement and you have to click on an EULA (which most people do blindly anyway) for it to activate. I fail to see the difference, but I guess I’m weird that way.

I originally wrote that the anti-virus makers didn’t consider this a worm, but Symantec seems to have relented. You can get a removal tool at Symantec’s site.

If you want to protect yourself pre-emptively, locate your hosts file (in C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc on NT/2000/XP; I’m wanting to say it’s in C:\Windows\System on Win9x; on most Unix systems it’s in /etc, not that it matters since this not-a-worm runs on Windows) and add the following entry:

127.0.0.1 www.friendgreetings.com

More cleanly, you can ask your network admins really nicely if they can block friendgreetings.com at the firewall or DNS level.

If you have inadvertently unleashed this monster, first, close Outlook immediately. Normally, I’d advise getting right with everyone else before cleaning things up, but since there’s the risk of making things worse if you do it that way, clean house, then start apologizing.

Next, download the removal tool.

If you want to be really safe, go into the control panel and remove anything that appears to have anything to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d go to www.cognitronix.com and download Active Xcavator and remove anything having to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d head over to LavaSoft and download Ad-Aware and let it shoot anything that moves.

Next, apologize profusely to the guy who runs your mail server (ours got clogged up for hours processing all the mail from not-our-friendgreetings.com) and to everyone in your address book. I can’t offer you any advice on the best way to do that. Except I’d use something other than Outlook to do it. Head over to TinyApps.org to find yourself a small freeware mail client. Assuming you’re not on an Exchange server, I’d suggest pulling the network plug before firing up Outlook again to get those e-mail addresses.

Meanwhile, it would do no good whatsoever if everyone who’s gotten one of these annoying e-cards (whether they opened it or not) opened a command prompt and typed ping -t www.friendgreetings.com and left it running indefinitely. No good whatsoever. It’s still a distributed denial of service attack if all of the participants participate voluntarily and independently. Right?

An emergency POP client

Dave Farquhar Windows

I went looking for a lightweight POP3 client last week for Windows so I could do some testing. I found Popcorn. I like it a lot.
For one thing, it’s a self-contained 216K executable that keeps its info in an .ini file in the same directory. Simple and elegant. Its user interface is certainly adequate. It’s not as fancy as Outlook or some other clients maybe, but it’s fine. Best yet, it’ll grab the headers and let you see them before you download your mail, which is a real boon on a dialup connection. Flag the spam, hit delete, then only download the stuff you want to read then and there.

Memory usage starts at about 2 megs, which makes it even more ideal for that 486 laptop with 8 megs of RAM running Win95 that you take with you on the road.

It’s a simple program for simple needs, with a couple of compelling features thrown in. Even if you’ve got a multi-gigahertz P4 with a gig or two of RAM, there’s probably something to like about it. Check it out.

In defense of Wordstar

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, Windows , , , ,

Over at Ars Technica, there’s a thread expressing horror and dismay that the Navy is using WordStar in some of its departments–or, for that matter, that anyone alive is using WordStar.

Which leads me to ask, have any of these critics seen WordStar?

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Phoenix hits 3, er, 0.3

Dave Farquhar Windows

I think I have a new most favoritest Web browser of all time for Windows. Or I will soon.
Phoenix is Mozilla on a diet. The idea is to cut out all the stuff not related strictly to Web browsing in order to make it as small and fast as possible.

Early releases were slightly faster than Mozilla. But the Mozilla feature I use most was missing: The ability to right-click on an image and select “Block images from this server.” It’s a good way to block objectionable content, be it an especially annoying ad (though most ads are tolerable if I keep animation turned off, I’ve found) or anything else I don’t want to look at.

Version 0.3 brought that feature back and nearly halved the memory consumption. It’s still not as slim and fast as Galeon on Linux, but it’s getting there. The last time I tried using a Mozilla theme to change its appearance (I like the TinyMozilla theme because it lets me use my screen space to display Web pages at the expense of big buttons–since I don’t need big buttons, that’s a good thing) I crashed it. But I can live without my fave theme for a while.

The nice thing is we’ve got a reasonable-sized Web browser that incorporates popup blocking without having to run additional programs. You can easily chew up 4, 8, 12 megs of RAM by keeping a popup blocker running. That’s the amount of memory a Web browser all by itself should be using.

Check it out. It’ll keep getting smaller, faster, better.

Switched off

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

In response to Apple, Microsoft started its own “Switch” campaign featuring a freelance writer who ditched a Mac for a PC that runs Windows.
Well, the Associated Press tracked down this freelance writer and found she was a Microsoft PR hack. She said she really did switch. But Microsoft pulled the ad.

The AP tracked her down from the personal metadata Microsoft puts in all Office documents.

Can’t you just see the Apple “Switch” response now?

“Hi. I’m a CIA spy. I got rid of my insecure PC and switched to a Macintosh.”

I always thought the “Switch” campaign was really dumn, but suddenly Microsoft seems to have made it interesting.

Who needs Ghost?

Dave Farquhar Windows

One of the most common search engine queries I get hits from is “open-source ghost clone” or something similar. There’s no doubt in my mind why; Ghost is probably the most useful utility I’ve ever found, but not everyone can afford it or its competitor, DriveImage.
The closest thing I’ve found in the open source world is PartImage but it’s a Linux program. I suspect most people want something that runs in plain old DOS.

I don’t know of anything open source for DOS, but I found a freeware program called Savepart. It sports a clear, easy interface and it’s just 268K in size, so it’ll fit easily on a Windows boot floppy. It’s not as fast as Ghost, but for people who just need to make a backup copy of their OS installation for disaster recovery, or for organizations who can’t afford Ghost, it’s great. Re-imaging a system with Savepart is much faster and easier than reinstalling Windows and your applications from scratch.

The progress meter didn’t work right for me, but it beeps at you when it’s done. Just hit Enter after it beeps, and you’re set.

If you’ve never used a tool like Ghost to make a backup copy of your system in its current state, or if you don’t like Ghost’s licensing terms, give Savepart a look. I don’t think it’ll take long for you to love it.

Windows XP networking advice

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

I ran into a problem yesterday with a VPN client not working in XP. After a Usenet search, someone suggested that removing the QoS client (which does nothing useful anyway) fixes the problem about 80% of the time. In my case, that worked.
If something networking-related isn’t working right in WinXP for you, try removing the QoS client and see what happens. At the very least, you’ll speed up networking slightly, and at best, you’ll fix the problem.

Palladium and You

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk on the Web lately about Palladium. If you don’t have strong feelings about it, it’s probably because you’re not a bleeding-edge computing enthusiast. That’s OK. You’ll hear about it in time.
Basically, Palladium is Microsoft’s initiative to reinvent the PC and make it more secure. There’s a big uproar about it because it reeks of ulterior motives. Some fear Palladium means you will surrender all rights to your PC and cede them to Redmond.

I’m not totally convinced this is a bad thing. Read more