"Windows Vista Capable" Hardware

I was browsing /. this evening and someone has linked to a hilarious Dell page touching on the hardware requirements for Windows Vista. The page is here. Once there choose the hardware link and browse the Hardware Requirements portion. The page is covering the various labels they have been putting on computers in preparation for Windows Vista - you know the ones like, "Windows Vista Capable" or "Windows Vista Premium Ready".

On Dell's page here is what they say "Windows Vista Capable" is good for... are you ready? Here it is:

""Great for... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games."

Great! So Dell is saying that if your computer is only labeled as "Windows Vista Capable" you had better not be wanting to do much more than boot the OS! Good luck to you if you actually want to run an application and use your computer! Of course they are listing the "Windows Vista Capable" hardware as only having 512MB of RAM and I know there are "Windows Vista Capable" machines out there with a GB of RAM. Still sort of funny though!

Saturday Game Report

Saturday’s game was a great time! We had a little bit of a late start due to the show we were getting. My place is out in the country, so sometimes the roads in my area take a bit to get cleared. Everyone made it and only one person got stuck in the driveway. A little pushing got that situation sorted out. We all got settled in and feasted on North Market cinammon rolls!

First up was an adventure called The Blackguard’s Revenge. Lots and lots of undead and our party doesn’t have a cleric. It wasn’t too bad though, luckily despite their sheer numbers they weren’t that powerful. And we all had a good string of Fort saves to keep that pesky level drain problem from being too bad. There were a couple of purple tongued things that were a little difficult, but doable. Then we ran into the Blackguard who was pretty tough. And then on to some big monstrous thing that had spectal hands to deliver touch attacks. The fort saves were quite high - I think my fighter was the only one that had a chance to make them. That critter also tried two Will save based spells which thanks to great rolls by my fighter and a little Action Point help allowed me to make both of them. With that one down it was on to the next adventure.

I am not sure of the full title, Iron Crypt something. More undead and lots of traps. The party rogue was doing a good job at taking care of most of the traps. We aren’t finished with that one yet, most of it has been trap/puzzle based so far.

So a successful gaming day! We played from about 10:30am till 9pm. A full day of gaming!

Saturday Game Day

Saturday gaming session tomorrow! Our gaming group occasionally has a marathon gaming session on a Saturday. Tomorrow is one of those sessions. The guys are coming down tomorrow and I think we are playing from at least 10am to 6pm. I know one person needs to leave at 6pm - I’m not sure if that means we are all stopping or if we will just continue with one person short.

We recently switched DMs back to Crothian (screen name), but we are still carrying on the Eberron Campaign. It should be a fun session - I think our resident rogue has us headed off to some crypt to kill some time while we figure out how to repair our recently salvaged airship. Too bad our party doesn’t have a cleric!

Virtual Server vs. SQL Server

It looks like I have run into my first real issue with VMware Server. After many successes I have finally come across a problem. We are ramping up for some testing for an ERP upgrade. To help allow us more complete testing I decided to role our current physical test ERP server into a VM. Day to Day operations in that test VM have been working fine. I have done some DB restores, people have been using the VM for normal testing and no issues to report.

Last night we tried our first upgrade of the software. It failed part way in saying it had lost connection to the database. We looked at the errors just a bit, but decided to roll back to our shapshot and then re-run it. No point wasting time on what could have been a fluke. The second upgrade also failed. There were several errors including ones saying we needed to run DBCC CHECKDB on the database. We did that and it returned clean, no errors. Running it again though resulted in a lost connection with the server error. More digging in the SQL logs also showed I/O timeout errors as well.

Doing some searching through the VMware forums show there are several others that have had this problem. So far, no one has a good solution to the issue. The best I have seen so far is to create a VM in GSX Server and then upgrade to VMware Server. I would rather avoid doing that, so I have not tried it yet.

In looking at the VM it appears it is using the buslogic driver (the OS is Windows Server 2003). That is not the ideal driver, so I will try switching that to the LSI driver tomorrow and also increase the amount of RAM available to the SQL VM to see if that can help us get by the problem. If not it looks like I will have to go back to a physical box for a bit to keep from holding testing up at this early stage.

Seems so odd that I am seeing this issue though. I did some serious testing in VMs with Exchange upgrades, restores, etc and had no issues at all. Some of the Exchange restores included 15GB restores, much larger than the DBs I am working with now. Hopefully I will get this figured out or VMware will come up with something - it doesn't appear I am the only one facing this issue.

PayPal Security Keys

There has been talk of PayPal offering security keys for use with their site - as well as eBay's website. The story recently surfaced on digg.com (it's probably been on there 50 times before - it is digg.com after all). PayPal's page on it is here. It is still in beta testing phase now, but if you give PayPal $5 then they will send you one of the key fobs. You then activate your account for use with the new key fob and your new login process will include entering your normal username and password, as well as the 6-digit number displayed on the key fob (which changes every 30 seconds). Two factor authentication.

This move is obviously due to the fact that eBay and PayPal customers are frequent targets of phishing attempts. By using a method as above those attacks become much, much more difficult to be successful. I applaud PayPal for making this move as a solution to the problem. There are several people that criticize PayPal for charging $5 for the key fob. I see no issue with that, it's a token amount of money. These devices are not free and I am sure they realize if you charge just a little for something, only people who will really use it will ask for one. Why send a key to someone who has no real intention of using it. And if you give stuff away for free people will take it even if they have no intention of using it (my closet is full of T-shirts that I have and never wear only because they were given away for free from some convention).

The largest issue I see in the future with these measures are that one has the potential to end up with several of these key fobs from various banking sites and such if this becomes more of widespread practice. Just from sites I frequent I can think of three or four that I would like to see move towards this type of system. Despite that, I still think this is a good move by PayPal and am anxious to see how the system works for them.

Time Zone Updates

Thanks to the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 IT folks get to roll out time zone updates across all of their machines - servers, client PCs, various applications that might be running on the servers or clients and any network devices that might need an update to continue keeping accurate time. We have delayed our rollout a bit because of our CRM product which is using what I think to be a "hack" to solve the problem with their app. So we waited another couple of weeks to see if they came out with something a little more elegant. They have not.

So I started looking over the various tech docs as a refresher for the updates we will start rolling out next week. This just doesn't look like it is going to be much fun....

Trojan on Dolphin Stadium Site

I just caught the article on Digg about a trojan being on the Dolphin Stadium website. Websense was the one with the warning on their site. Apparently a bit of javascript code had been dropped into the header of the site and was downloading a bit of malware - a keylogger/backdoor. You can read either of the above articles for more details.

This just goes to show that folks really need to keep their browsers (and web servers) updated with the most recent patches. Often you will hear the excuse from the user side that they don't go to the "bad" parts of the Internet. But this is a common tactic - infecting either the main page of a mainstream site or often times easier, exploiting the banner ad system to get harmful content to run. So just a heads up that even if you stick to mainstream sites keep you browsers patched and seriously consider switching to an alternative browser such as Firefox.