I came home from work Monday to find that my computer had restarted after seventy-two days uptime. I had been in the middle of a project the night before so I already wasn’t happy when I sat down. I tried to launch the Event Viewer to see what had caused the reboot, but got this error:

“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have appropriate permissions to access the item.”

Now, I’m running as a least-privileged administrator with UAC enabled. I was never prompted to elevate. In fact, forcing it to elevate did nothing. And because the local administrator account is disabled, by default, I was out of luck.

I downloaded the NT Offline Password Cracker and unlocked the local administrator account. This let me at least login with admin privileges. I tried again to launch the Event Viewer, but this time it silently failed. Strangely, starting the Microsoft Management Console and then adding the Event Viewer snap-in worked.

The log showed that several services were failing to start on boot due to insufficient privileges. I opened “My Computer” to look at the file ACLs and the label for my boot disk said “Access Denied”. Clicking on the icon yielded the same error in a message box.

I ran chkdsk and it found file system corruption. Apparently the security descriptors for the boot volume were corrupted. I downloaded subinacl and took ownership of the volume root and then granted myself full access. I could at least see my files now, but some directories were still inaccessible. So I fixed permissions at the root and forced propagation through the entire file system tree.

Upon reboot, most services were able to start again. The System Event Notification Service wouldn’t start because it couldn’t write to the event logs. So I granted “Local Service” full permissions on the logs. Everything seemed to be fixed.

I let Windows install its 3,278,904,732,984 updates and then finally Service Pack 1. After the SP1 installation, I tried to login but was greeted with this little gem:

“The Software Licensing Service reported that the license store contains inconsistent data.”

and then I was automatically logged out. How special. Fortunately I remembered an old trick from Windows 98 and clicked on the help link in the message box. In the help article was a link to contact technical support. Clicking on that started Internet Explorer. From there, starting Windows Explorer was cake.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do since my copy of Windows was genuine. So, I thought, what if I forced Windows to re-activate? I remembered reading several months prior, that it was possible to “re-arm” Windows and set the evaluation clock back to zero. That fixed the licensing error and I didn’t even have to re-activate.

Everything seemed to finally be working again. Except Windows Update wanted to download and install SP1 again. So, I let it do that and it broke the licensing mechanism again! After fixing that again, Windows Update still thought SP1 wasn’t installed. I checked the Windows version and sure enough, I was using build 6000! wtf?

In the end, I had to flatten my machine to completely fix everything. I now have Windows installed and up-to-date. I’m annoyed that I had go to such lengths to re-gain access to my computer. But as a developer, I understand that sometimes software fails. File system corruption isn’t fun, but it was mostly fixable.

The part that I find really bothersome is that Windows wouldn’t let me use MY computer with MY licensed installation because something was corrupted. I understand the desire for ISVs to protect their products, but licensing mechanisms can introduce defects and cause undesirable side-effects. Like any operating system, Linux has issues. But there’s one issue it will never have: failure due to licensing software.

I’m happy to see the “reduced functionality mode” has been eliminated in Vista SP1. But, in following with a good article on the subject, I think Microsoft should spend less time on license enforcement and more time on software quality.

The suite now includes a special management studio that uses the VS IDE. In the past, developers needed to use an MMC snap-in to manage databases. It was usable, but generic. Features weren’t obvious and the interface was clumsy. The new feature-rich interface is much more friendly and intuitive.

But the IDE does, however, carry the same massive footprint as Visual Studio. I would have preferred it if they had kept the MMC snap-in for server use. Needing to install the IDE on the server seems silly, considering the amount of use it would get. Overall, though, I’m impressed with the software.

I opened my existing “Beta 1″ virtual machine with 256 MB of RAM and 8 GB of hard disk space, set the ISO as the boot media, and started it. Setup started, but then presented me with this:

The file WinSetup.dll could not be loaded or is corrupt. Setup cannot continue.

Disappointment took hold, but a quick Google search told me that my RAM was insufficient. So I increased it to 512 MB and the problem disappeared. With a renewed hope, I again started setup. This time setup prompted me with a different message:

A required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.

I was stuck, since choosing “Cancel” looped back to the prompt. I attempted to search online for any mention of this error, but found nothing relevant. I also attempted to locate suitable drivers, but came up empty again. So I moved on to “Plan B”.

I created a new virtual disk, installed Windows XP, and booted into it. I was able to start Windows Vista setup from there without error. I typed my product key and started the installation process. While attempting to copy files, setup threw up with this error:

Setup was unable to locate a locally attached hard drive suitable for holding temporary Setup files.

Another quick Google search revealed that this was caused by not having sufficient disk space. I remembered having this problem with Beta 1, so I tried the newest minimum. After three or four attempts, I was finally successful with 25 GB.

Once Vista was installed, it was time to remove the Windows XP virtual disk. So I copied “bootsect.exe” from the Vista DVD, onto a floppy disk, and booted with a BartPE CD. I copied “C:\bootmgr” and “C:\Boot\” to the “e” drive and then ran “bootsect.exe /nt60 /force e:”. Once I verified that the boot loader was working, I removed the virtual disk and… tada!… it worked.

VMware tools installation was smooth, with the exception of the network adapter drivers. Back when I tested Beta 1, the vmxnet driver was not yet compatible with Vista. Following a suggestion from the VMware community, I switched the card to AMD PCnet. Since I had that setup already, I chose to install the driver and let it be. But I am curious if vmxnet works now.

While I realize this is a beta test release, the setup process leaves much to be desired. Development releases should contain more information, not less. Indescript errors are frustrating and difficult to diagnose. Hopefully, the operating system itself is better in this regard.

My first chore was to install Windows Server 2003 and configure it to be a domain controller. This part was fairly easy, although a little time-consuming. Once that was working I was able to quickly join the Windows machines to the domain. Now to deal with Linux… for that I chose Windows Services for Unix. This software alters the AD schema to allow for Unix account attributes. On the Linux machines, I installed OpenLDAP, a Kerberos client, configured PAM… and voila! Now AD users can authenticate on the Linux machines.

My home-made DHCP/DNS configuration tool, however, was a little trickier. The data for this tool is stored in a MySQL database and accessed via a PHP script. If I wanted to grant someone access to the tool, I needed to first give them a MySQL account. Since Active Directory is basically an LDAP server, I rewrote the authentication mechanism to query AD.

With very little work, I was able to simplify authentication and account management. While this is not new technology, I still feel all warm and fuzzy with a sense of accomplishment.

The bad part is that only Windows client operating systems are capable of supporting trusted connections (NT Authentication). This means that I can’t write a program to interface with the database server unless it’s running on Windows. So when I was asked to make my Windows creation work on a Mac, I was at a loss. Fortunately, I had been writing the suite of tools in VB.NET, so I started investigating the possibility of running a .NET app on OS X.

I found two contenders: Mono and DotGNU Portable .NET. Both projects are free implementations of the .NET standard. Mono doesn’t seem to have the anti-Microsoft sentiment and was easier to install. Right out of the gate, Mono allowed me to run a .NET app on OS X. PNET complained about ncurses not being installed. While this is probably a simple fix, it was one step that Mono did not require.

The end result? I managed to clone my VB.NET app in C# and make it run smoothly on a Mac. High five for .NET!

But now-a-days I’m seeing other computing professionals sharing their thoughts about products, personal projects, and even works-for-hire. Microsoft has a special blogging site for its employees to blab about company products. I am consistently finding good and helpful information from that website. And that’s just one of many.

Using the Internet as a publishing platform has definite advantages. Instead of handing prospective employers my resume, I can point them to my website. I tried this approach with my present employer… and it worked. The other big advantage is a little more altruistic. I know something… and you can know it, too, if I publish it. The point is that innovation breeds through collaboration.

In following with a good article that I recently read, I’m going to give this blogging thing a try. I think I shall write about my field — software systems and information security. These are great topics that I’m really interested in. And who knows?… maybe somebody will get something out of my ramblings.

So… here’s my blog.