customising life

Your NTFS partition may not have been shutdown cleanly. Blame Windows.

After upgrading to Gutsy recently, I was annoyed with a particular, persistant problem, where my PC would continually run fsck (disc checking) on every reboot. Every reboot.

And it would hang at the disc checking stage for what seemed like an eternity. Now I’m not a patient person when it comes to PCs so I used Alt + Sys Rq + e (end all processes, nicely) to cancel the task so the init process could continue. There was nothing in the usual logs; dmesg, /var/log/fsck, etc. No reason as to why it would repeatedly get stuck on boot.

This went on for over two weeks until I decided to find out why this was happening. After starting Kubuntu in recovery mode, I watched the boot process up until the disc check; no problems. Then it tried to mount the local filesystem, which is when I saw the message.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:
Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.
Choice 2: If you don’t have Windows then you can use the ‘force’ option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 -o force
Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

Still being impatient, I tried searching for what to do, thinking about reporting a bug, going for broke and using the force option, until I realised it was right there in front of me.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)

All I had to do was reboot into Windows and then restart the PC.

Cleanly.

So not using Alt+Ctrl+Del or the restart button, which was no mean feat as my Windows install is plagued and dying a slow painful death. Fortunately the PC did restart and mounting the NTFS partition is now right as rain.

(Again I’m wondering why I even keep it around at all?)

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Long winded title, but you may find the outcome very useful.

With more time at work to spend on things other than .NET coding, I decided it would be great to setup one of my PCs as a company intranet server. In fact I was directed to do something like this a while ago, but didn’t get the time.

My department does a lot of project work, and thus needs a central location for relevant files. We already have one on our Windows 2003 server, which I is an extremely tempremental beast, but we could benefit from having some sort of content system around these files. That would allow managers and directors to log into our network from anywhere in the world and get the information they want. Browsing through dozens of folders isn’t easy or flashy (flashy is good).

So I set about setting up my old Xubuntu box as a local server (it won’t be facing the outside world). It’s got a AMD3200 CPU and 512MB RAM, which should be quite sufficient.

The first important step is to get a server actually setup. The process I followed, sometimes blindly, was contained in the great Perfect Setup - Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 Server [Howto Forge]. Following the steps you can’t go wrong.

If I could make several points about the installation they would be;

The guide does mention this but I want to reiterate it. After installing the OpenSSH server and configuring the network (Steps 4 and 5), log into the server machine from another PC. I didn’t realise just how useful this would be until I was constantly changing between computers on my KVM switch.

Coupled with the fact that most application windows handle mouse scrolling without taking the focus, you can have the HowTo running in a web browser, while entering in the commands into a terminal window connected to the server via SSH. It’s as simple as

ssh <servername> -l <username>

OR

ssh <username>@<servername>

Setting up the server so that it would be seen on the Windows Active Directoy Domain as server1.companyname.com and not it’s IP address was a little harder. Well actually it was very easy to do, but it took a long time to find out what needed to be done. At this point in time I was not interested in SAMBA or authenticating the server on the domain, all I wanted was for people to be able to access the server by it’s hostname not it’s IP.

The solution was actually very simple. In the Windows 2003 server in it’s Computer Management section is an area for DNS. You need to add a new host to the domain; then simply enter in the computer’s hostname and IP address.

Simple!

Next I’m planning to setup SAMBA so I can share files/folders on the domain and install a content management system on the server.

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Around the office I am more often than not turned to as the technology/computer/network/database/website/email expert. I really wish we had an IT tech or something.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list … <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.

I just came in to work this morning and I had the Blue Screen of Death across both monitors, it was very cool!

I actually have never seen a BSOD on XP before. Interesting.

I was going to say at least it’s not coming back, but it is coming back … all the time.

Here’s the gist of it …

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

blah blah blah

STOP: 0×000000D1 (0×00000023, 0×00000002, 0×00000000, 0xB78531B6)
NVTcp.sys - Address B78531B6 base at B784F000, Datestamp 4253b85b

etc etc etc

Turns out from a simple google search for nvtcp.sys that the culprit it the NVIDIA network manager; apparently it tries to share an IRQ address, which causes the issue? Over my head.

So I’m uninstalling that quick smart, I wan’t my dual screen setup back …

It seems that everything is fine now.

I put together my brothers PC yesterday. I found a nice computer shop in North Rocks; ITEstate, to gather the components for the upgrade to his ancient K6 processor.

Their prices are quite competitive (considering how easy it is for me to get there), and the girls at the sales desk are polite and helpful, as well as being super cute. The guys who get the parts for you are just as friendly. One thing I did like is that he made me stop and double check the serial number of each part before I left.

So for the fraction more I paid, than say going to Fluidtek (but only just), is worth the fact that I didn’t have to wait in queue, and I got what I wanted. Their website also made things easier too.

Anyway enough of a plug.

It took me just over an hour to assemble the parts in my brothers old, and way too small case, which was quick. The mainboard a Gigabyte M51GM-S2G was a micro ATX, so I was able to squeeze it in. It seems quite a good board from first impressions, but I don’t really delve into that area of hardware. So long as all the bits match and work, I’m happy. My only regret was not upping the hard drive specs.

After the ease of assembly, it was time for the pain of installing Windows. While I’ve sold my parents on Ubuntu for their new PC (which is now in the planning stages, and may even become a MythTV box), my brother wasn’t so easy …

He is wedded to iTunes.

But from what I gathered it’s mainly because of the insanely high playcount his library has; he’s so damn proud of it, he can’t let go!

So I started the process at around 3PM, as he returned from his day of Scuba diving (some have it tough don’t they?) and I just managed to finish installing drivers, basic software, etc in time to limp home to bed at around 11pm.

Not the worst time I’ve ever gone through, but made the more difficult by the fact that he had two old IDE drives, I only had one plugged in due to size restrictions, but once plugging in the second, I was left with a nice “hall.dll” not found error message.

Fortunately it was a simple as fixing the boot.ini file using bootcfg, which for the record was quite easy.

… damn it’s hot this weekend!