JB's Blog

For years and years I’ve had paranoid users complain to me about webcams on their laptops.

So many times I have to re-commision a laptop I have to remove the tape over the camera

No doubt they’ll still tape over it.

Kernel fault.

So I got a job handed to me from a frustrated admin who’s been trying to fix a seemingly crazy problem.  It’s compounded because the problem was remote as well.

Symptom: User is reporting sporadic keys being pressed.

Troubleshooting: oh boy, here’s the list of things that were done before I had a look…

step 1) Assume hardware keyboard failure with laptop.  Try to get user to clean the keyboard and look for any blockages, etc.  Result: no fix.

step 2) Assume laptop’s keyboard is faulty and recommend sending in for repairs.  Configure spare laptop for user whilst machine is in repair.  Result: After an few hours usage the user rings back reporting same problem.

step 3) (next day) Assume some software being migrated between old laptop to new affecting keys being pressed.  Search google and find numerous references to crazy trojan viruses and other nasties.  Create new user login from scratch and purge user profile. Result: no fix

step 4) Assume some type of trojan, spyware, virus is affecting both laptops and begin extensive antivirus scans.  Result: no fix

So keep it simple?

I was handed this job and I asked what was the original problem?  By this stage it seemed quite convoluted and what’s worse the problem was intermitted  at best.

I remote into the Windows laptop, looked at the device manager and notice there are two keyboards listed…. I ring up the user and ask is there anything else plugged into the laptop.

Turns out he did have a device plugged into the machine.  It was an plugin for his wireless logitech mouse… turns out it was also a plugin for a wireless logitech keyboard.  The keyboard had shifted around the office over time and had somehow made it into the bottom of a filing cabinet that was being bumped once in a while by the receptionist downstairs.

So next time you come across a problem, please take a deep breath and rule out the simple things first.

I’ve been recommending Macbook Pro’s as replacement laptops for my clients for a while now and what’s crazy is that they’re actually buying them!

I had a strange request the other day from a user who was adamant that something was wrong with his Caps Lock key.  Working away on his machine I didn’t notice anything wrong with the key, and couldn’t find anything jamming the key.  So I wrote it off as a once off and told the user I couldn’t find anything wrong.

Time passed and a week later I had the same angry request that the Caps Lock key was annoying the user.

This time I had the user sit down and demonstrate to me their problem.  He said that it seemed like the key wasn’t responsive and began jamming away on the Caps Lock key.  Sure enough, as he smashed the key repeatedly you could see the LED light only blink sporadically at best.

I jumped on to test it myself and realised why I didn’t see it as a problem at first.  I very rarely use the Caps Lock key whilst this user uses it literally every time he wanted a Capital letter.  When I used the keyboard I didn’t pick up the problem as I naturally tapped the Caps Lock key a little longer then a normal key press.

Turns out, this is a feature and is intended to prevent people from accidentally hitting the caps lock key.  It’s been a feature since 2009 and I haven’t noticed the change.

Good news for the user I retrained him to use the Shift key instead when typing capital letters.

Lately I’ve had quite a few Windows laptop machines become infected with nasty spyware ( lots of variations of the infamous MS Antivirus ).

I do a lot of my work remote, so when the system is this crapped up you really need to mount the infected harddisk outside of the infected operating system to have a chance cleaning it up.

SystemRescueCD is a popular tool I have lying around.  If the infected person is remote I have them burn and pop a copy of this CD into their machine so I can remotely ssh into it.

Clamscan can usually pick up the nasties and remove them, but it is incredibly slow.  A little trick I use to speed up the rescue process is limit the scanning to .exe files only…

clamscan -ri –remove –include=’.[eE][xX][eE]‘

This way you’ll speed up the scanning significantly to get the machine to a usable level.

Fixing the damage of the malware in Windows is another process entirely altogether, but by removing the executable malware you have at least a fighting chance.  If not it’s rebuild time!

I’ve been experimenting using FreeNAS for some online archiving systems.

I put together a cheap AMD64 system for a client with less then $300AUD of parts (excluding harddrives).  It was an attractive alternative from something like a Drobo, because I could use NFS easily and not be limited with how many drives we could stack in one box.

Shock horror though, the server kept crashing with panic: kmem_map too small errors.  I thought initially it was having only 2Gig of RAM in the machine so I stole another 2Gig from an accountant’s desktop PC.

That didn’t work, so then I disabled ZFS compression, and still had the same results.

Then I realised I’ve mistakenly used the 32bit version of FreeNAS, so I lazily used UNetbootin to create a new USB thumbstick install with the 64bit version.

So what I’ve learnt is…

+ Minimum 4gig for ZFS compression
+ 64bit Freenas for ZFS

Googling around I saw quite a few people mention that if you want to use ZFS with FreeNAS then 64bit is the way to go.  Makes me feel safer knowing the data is being stored with ZFS voodoo!