Update on chkdsk wiping out permissions on folders

After spending considerable time with Microsoft on the phone and an ezassist session on the server in question this is what I found out. There are two hotfixes available. One for W23k servers with SP1 and one for W23k servers with SP2. You must apply these hot fixes and reboot the server BEFORE you run chkdsk on any volumes. There are no easy ways to replace the permissions on the user folders once the damage is done. Option A is the GUI routine where you right click on the user folder and readd the users or global groups and then select to push to all files and folders. Option 2 is to use a xcacls.vbs script to run lcacls.exe and associated commands to push the permissions out to each file and folder. If you need to apply global changes only to a group of folders you can go to the top root folder and make your changes and then select inheritance for all sub folders and files under the root. That will not work for individual folder security permission needs which is much more granular.

I dodged a bullet with regards to replacing the security permissions on my file server today. Since the office is closed and no one is accessing the server or making changes to data I was able to revert the E volume back to 12/26/07 at 5 am via the Volume Shadow Copy. It took some time for this to happen but once it was complete and I rebooted the server I spot checked several folders and everything was back to where it was before I ran chkdsk and accidentally stripped out the permissions. If this had been a normal work day and all the users had been making changes to their data or adding data to their user directories then I would have been forced to go the lcacls.vbs route or the manual point and click GUI routine to replace the permissions. I can not begin to tell you how much fun that is.

chkdsk disaster on W2k3 NTFS partition

In October of this year I ran Chkdsk on a volume on one of my W2k3 servers. I ran this utility because we had evidence of file or folder corruption on that particular user share. I was rewarded for my actions by chkdsk removing ALL the security permissions on every single folder. Needless to say I was a huge hit with the rest of the server support team who wound up helping me to replace all the security permissions on these folders so that folks could access their data. In four days we got this accomplished. We did our research and according to Microsoft knowledgebase articles this was something that happens to Windows 2000 servers. No where did we see where Windows 2003 servers with SP1 were supposed to be susceptible to this type of problem. We did find an obscure article that hinted that there was an NTFS related file that SP2 would update that would keep this from happening. Fast forward to December and this same server is now updated with SP2 and all of the Microsoft Updates that are available for Windows 2003 Standard Edition. We are in the midst of Christmas holidays and everyone other than us unlucky contractors are out doing other things than work. I figured this was a wonderful opportunity to let chkdsk do its magic and fix whatever data corruption that might be on the user share of this server. I run chkdsk with the /f switch so it dismounts the volume and off to the races it goes. The volume is close to 1.5 TB in size so it takes several hours to do. Phase 1 and 2 go along just fine with nothing being reported back to the screen as an error. Phase 3 checks the indexes and that is when I got the dreaded “replacing invalid security id with default security id for file (numbers). Needless to say I was not really excited about the prospect of having to manually replace the permissions on all these folders. I called my boss, told her the problem and she authorized me to call Microsoft and get paid support. I am hoping that they can identify the problem for us so that I can document it and make sure it never happens again on our hundreds of other servers and that they can provide me with a script from AD that will allow me to replace the permissions with the correct permissions from the command line. I will let you know what I find out when the dust settles and things are fixed.

Vista Problems

Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft.

I subscribe to the ItsVista newsletter/blog and when I saw this I could relate to the PAIN that some of these problems have caused all of us. I have been using Vista every since the first beta release and I must say that the OS is different and takes some getting used to. I am currently using Vista Ultimate in a networking environment at work. There are two things I dont like specificially about Vista in a LAN environment.

A. you cant launch a program with the RUN AS option

B. Copying data to and from a network share takes forever

In XP Pro you can launch an application by right clicking on the icon and selecting Run As which allows you to select a domain admin account or system account with administrative rights higher than the current credentials that you are logged on to the domain with. The only way I can do network administration from my Vista box is to use a program called Hyena which allows me to sign on to a server individually with whatever credentials that I want.

As for copying data this is just rediculous. I have a friend who has experienced a laptop crash which is partly hardware and partly software related. I plan on disecting the laptop so that I can visually inspect the motherboard and other things attached to it to see if I can find out why it is overheating. In the interim I decided that I would bring the hard drive to work with me and get the data off of it.

I utilized a nifty little USB hard drive adapter that I used to plug the laptop hard drive into and copied all the data from the hard drive to my XP workstation. My Vista workstation did not know what to do with the new device. Welcome to the wonderful world of driver hell. I moved the device over to the XP machine and XP recongized that I have a external usb hard drive attached to the system. I copied the 7.3 gb of data over to my XP machine hard drive and then I copied it over to my user share on the network.

This is where the fun begins folks. I started this mess around 10 am this morning and figured I would just work on this inbetween my other work tasks today. I figured I would have it done pretty quickly. Never assume that a computer related task will happen quickly and without any problems. I always find myself assuming that and then wind up spending way more time than expected. I tried to copy the data from my network share to a folder on my Vista machine and after Vista estimated the time it would take it came up with 5 days and 2 hours to move 7 gb of data. I looked at the bit rate the data was moving and it was fluctuating around 25 to 30 kb per second. My Vista box is a Dell with dual core processor at 3.2 ghz and 2 gb of ram. I have a 160 gb hard drive plus network storage. I have a race horse under the hood folks and that does not matter. My nic is a gb ethernet and I have a GB ethernet connection to the switch. There is no way this connection should grind to a hault like this.

The downside to this nightmare is that the DVD writer is on the Vista machine and the XP machine is my dual boot windoze/linux box that does not even have a cdr writer on it. That means that I have to burn the DVD on the Vista machine. I finally got smart and totally bypassed the gui interface and went to the command line interface. I used xcopy to copy from the network share to my backup directory on the hard drive. I started the process , locked down the workstation and went to lunch. Once I came back from lunc the data had been transferred. I have tried several times to burn the data from the windoze explorer to a dvd ram disk with little to no luck. My next and final attempt at this is to use a DVD burning program called BurnFree which is ad driven freeware for copying dvd movies on Vista OS. If that does not work I will be forced to cart the data on an external USB hard disk to my friend.

During my research on the Net I did find some TCP settings to muck with as well as some system services that could supposedly be turned off and give me some more network speed. I tried all of the suggestions but none of them did the trick thus far. Due to time constraints in writing this I dont have time to give you all the gory details but if you do a Google search you will see lots of conversation going on about this problem.

BAD VISTA. You dont play well on the LAN... LOL

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

I have always been intrigued with "Crackberry" devices.  Oh, yeah, I meant to say I have always been intrigued with Blackberry data devices.  I call Blackberry devices "Crackberry" devices because the folks  that own them always seem to be fiddling with them no matter where they might be.  

Once upon a time the cell phone was this large black leather bag that weighed 25 lbs and took up the front passenger seat of your car.  Cellular telephones disconnected us from land line telephones and gave us a new freedom while being mobile.  We could be on the road and still communicate with loved ones, co workers, vendors and clients.  Never in our wildest dreams did we dream that the telephone that used to be solely an audio voice device would turn into so much more. 

The RIM blackberry's primary feature that attracts so much attention is the ability to send and receive corporate and pop3 e-mail.  Any business can install a Blackberry Enterprise server and seamlessly integrate the business e-mail communications and send and receive this e-mail on the Blackberry device.  If the Blackberry Enterprise Server is too costly of a solution you can download a Blackberry redirector that integrates into Outlook and forwards whatever e-mails you want to your Blackberry account. 

I can also set up to ten e-mail accounts on my Blackberry Peal that will forward to my device and I also have my own Blackberry Email address that I can give others. 

One of the nice e-mail functionality that I love is the ability to filter out all of the e-mail or spam that I do not want to receive on my Blackberry device.   

Now that we have briefly touched on the e-mail functionality of Blackberry I would like to touch upon some of the unique characteristics of the Blackberry Pearl. 

• The Pearl is half the size of all the other Blackberry devices
• The Pearl is a Data device that combines telephone , e-mail and data services
• The Pearl features a very nice  Audio player
• The Pearl gives you Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk clients
• The Pearl has a micro SD port that allows you to increase your ability to save data such as music and pictures
• The Pearl has a very nice Digital Camera with flash
• The Pearl provides stereo headphones that allow you to listen to the Audio player as well as talk on your telephone. 
• The Pearl provides VAC or voice activated calling
• The Pearl comes with a mini USB data cable that utilizes the RIM desktop manager to synchronize your data.

Now that I have briefly touched on some of the features that stand out with regards to the Pearl I have a couple of comments about usability.  I like the ability to be on the bus listening to MP4's that  I loaded on the mini SD card.  I also like the ability of getting a phone call while listening to music and the music automatically being muted while I handle the call.  Once the call is ended the music continues. 

One of the biggest learning curves that I had to overcome was how to use the keyboard to tap out messages.  The keyboard is not a full QWERTY keyboard which means that it has keys (buttons) that combine two letters instead of one.  I really felt clumsy and frustrated trying to learn how to type using this keyboard. 

The first typing method is called "Multi tap" which means you find the key that has the letter you want and you tap either one time or twice depending on which order it appears on the button. 

The second typing method which is very difficult to wrap your brain around is called "Sure Type" .  If you have been typing for any length of time either on  a personal computer or doing text messaging on your cell phone you are used to pushing a button and inputting the appropriate letter, number or symbol. 

SureType technology works best if you just start hitting the keys where the letters are that you want to use to construct the words in your message.  As you type the SureType technology learns what you want to say by putting together different combinations of  letters that you chose from.  The longer you use this method the more accurate it gets.  Not only that but the SureType technology saves a custom word list so that when you type in a specific key combination it already knows what you want to type and completes it for you.  I have been very amazed at how well this actually works. 

Ok, what are you waiting for?  Go to your cellular provider and tell them you want to put your hands on one of these data devices and give it a test drive.  Be sure to click the link below this blog review to see a nice flash video of this device. 

 

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

Windows Live Writer Beta

I discovered Windows Live Writer Beta and I think I like it ok. It allows me to publish to multiple blogs or to choose which blog I want to publish to.  It not only supports native Windows Live Blogs but it supports other blog services such as Blogspot.  One of the unique functions of Windows Live Beta is that it logs on to your Blog account after you  give it access and it determines the blog format that you have selected and it downloads any typeface or fonts or graphics that you have in place so when you are publishing an article the WYSIWYG editor shows you exactly what the blog will look like.  Other products like this allow you to post text and  graphics to your blog but you have to preview what it actually looks like before you can publish it.  You can insert the following items as well.

• Hyperlink
• Picture
• Table
• map
• Tags

I am using this tool now to post this article to my Chief Blog.  Enjoy!

Windows Live Writer Beta

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

 I have been using Windows Vista Business and Ultimate for some time now.  All in all I have enjoyed using the software despite some of the learning curve and hardware/software hurdles to get here.  Then again being an I.T. professional  I am willing to go where most people do not dare to go.  I do not mind the words crash recovery and bleeding edge when it comes to computer technology. 

Identify theft is a buzz word both in personal finance circles as well as Information Technology.  Companies are coming to their senses and realizing that there are some very talented yet unscrupulous people who sit at home or at their cubicles at work and figure out ways to hack into Microsoft Windows and other  Operating Systems. 

More and more people are going mobile and carry around sensitive data.  No one wants anyone to have unauthorized access therefore Windows Vista could be a good choice with an OS with extra security built in.    Bitlocker Drive Encryption is one such security aware program that can encrypt your data. 

I subscribe to several Vista related RSS feeds including ITsVista and saw the article about ROHOS Logon key utilizing a USB drive.  USB drives are so cheap now you can carry around more drive space on your key ring than you could have put on some of the earlier hard drives.  One of the things that I hate to do is to constantly have to type in my password on my Windows Vista laptop.  I thought that the pricing matrix for this type of utility was very nice as well. 

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

Incompatible driver error in Vista with Roxio driver

Go to this link to fix your issue with Vista not liking the driver for Roxio. Early on when I first ran into this problem there was not a solution. That was several months ago. It is nice to NOT see that darn error popping up all the time now.



http://kb.roxio.com/content/kb/Creator/000131CR