There’s a new WinDBG release. Enjoy!
Archive for April, 2007
New WinDBG
Friday, April 27th, 2007Blog spam redux
Friday, April 27th, 2007I’ve begun getting a ton of blog spam again, so I had to turn moderation back on. So, if you don’t see your comment for a few minutes (or days?), don’t despair, and as soon as comment spam is resolved again, I’ll turn it back off.
On the upside, it’s really very nice, flattering, complimentary spam. Way better than e-mail spam, which generally seems to indicate that I have some sort of problem or other.
New networking book
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007I just received my copy of Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures a couple of days ago, and I’ve been making my way through it slowly but surely. This book covers computer networking theory and practice, with a strong bias toward IP-based networks. Lots of people in the network engineering world really only understand end systems – network drivers, host configuration, host security, and so forth. Even when I was studying for my CCIE certification several years back, I was mostly studying configuration and debugging of network routing, rather than the principles that govern it.
I had the opportunity to take a couple of grad classes from Professor Deep Medhi, the book’s first author, and I always enjoyed the content. At that point in my career, I was running an ISP and studying for my CCIE cert, and he seemed at the time to be the only CS professor I’d ever met who actually understood IP networking.
So, if you have an interest in the theory that goes into the practice, this is a great book. It’s written at a graduate level, and it’s very light on introductory material (if you manage to learn IP by reading Chapter 1, I’d like to meet you!), but if you’re an IP network professional, you should be well prepared to absorb this book.
New DTM revision
Monday, April 9th, 2007There’s a new version of DTM available. It was released at the end of last week. Craig has the details..
This marks a change in the way Microsoft is distributing the logo tools. Whereas they were built into the Vista WDK for RTM, going forward, they will be released separately as the Windows Logo Kit (WLK). They’re going to try to do annual updates to the kit each June or so, with beta availability of the kit six months earlier.
DTM alternate-drive installation fails (Sometimes?)
Monday, April 9th, 2007Hopefully this stops someone out there from duplicating my recent mistake. DTM warns of needing 300GB to install (although that’s not true), and I didn’t have anything like that much space on the drive I had installed the OS onto. So, I chose to install on E: instead, which had more (but not quite 300GB!) space. All seemed to go well.
Then, I tried to install a couple of QFE’s (which, if you run DTM, you should check for regularly). The QFE installer told me my version wasn’t compatible with the patch, and it quit. It turns out that the problem was simply that it was looking for the DTM version number in a file on the C: drive, which is what %ProgramFiles% evaluates to on my computer, rather than on the E: drive where the file actually was. A complete re-install onto C: fixed the problem.
Someone on the DTM newsgroup tried to repro this and couldn’t, so this obviously isn’t universally broken, but I don’t think I’ll mess with alternate-drive installations any more – I don’t want to risk the 1hr re-install time. Again.
DTM doesn’t take 300GB to install (!)
Friday, April 6th, 2007The installation instructions for DTM state that the controller needs 300GB of disk in which to install. This has obviously caused consternation, as now not only do you need a Windows Server 2003 OS, but you need what is still a lot of hard drive space. New computers are OK, but if you hope to e.g. use a VM server, you might be in trouble.
The good news is that all evidence seems to contradict the installation notes. I just did another (!) fresh install of DTM on a freshly installed Windows Server 2003 Standard box, in workgroup mode, with all patches and service packs and a fresh installation of DTM, in under 8 gigs. Obviously this will change as clients and tests are added, but with that as a baseline, it’s hard to imagine where 292GB of test data are going to come from.
Others have posted on NTDEV and in the DTM newsgroup that it’s not taking nearly 300GB for them either. Anyone have any experiences to corroborate or refute this?
DTM install has a button-whacker
Thursday, April 5th, 2007I’ve been working much with DTM lately, and two interesting things have risen above the ambient difficulty level that seems to be associated with every DTM installation.
The first is this dialog box I received on adding a Vista client:
Setup has detected that Internet Connection Firewall is enabled on a network connection. Test Client will not be able to communicate with the sserver unless a port is opened up through the firewall. In order for you to continue with the installation of this package you must select the Yes below
Warning: A pop-up dialog may occur during setup while this port is opened, setup will take care of dismissing it.
Not-quite-English aside, this dialog seems to indicate that the installer will click the allow anyway
button. I didn’t realize Microsoft shipped button-whackers, particularly to driver developers who they are hoping will not write their own button-whackers.
Interesting.