Author: Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

Windows Patching KB3002885

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:windows-category ]Last month Microsoft released several patches and KB3002885 was included in the list.  When my 2012 servers applied the patches, this patched failed.

To compound the issue, when a single patch fails, Windows rolls back all the patches that were applied at the same time.

This meant that every couple of nights, my servers would reboot and try once more to apply the patch, fail and roll back the changes.

I didn’t have time to look at the problem until recently and really just kind of expect Microsoft to release a new version of the patch which would solve the issue, but that hasn’t happened so it was time to do some investigation.

Checking the “Update History” revealed a couple of different error codes (80073AA2 was common), which didn’t really seem to help, so the first step was to track down exactly which update was failing (Windows doesn’t tell you which one failed, it just marks them all as failed).

While a simple task (just select half the updates and see if it fails, if so select half of those and try again) it does take quite a while to go through the 20 updates and find the one that was broken.  In the end it as the patch for KB300285 that was failing.

Doing some research didn’t turn anything obvious us, but after searching the net for a while I did find a reference to a similar problem being caused by corruption in registry, specifically the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT hive.

The general consensus was to simply delete the entire hive, instead I renamed it and then re-applied the patch, which worked.

Windows recreated the hive with much less information in it, doing a quick comparison to the original hive turned up only a single key that was missing.  I exported that key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT\Publishers\{8c416c79-d49b-4f01-a467-e56d3aa8234c}), deleted the new hive, renamed the old one and re-imported the changes.

On my next server I decided to try and just import the missing key and then apply the patches, but that didn’t work.

I had to rename the hive and apply the patches on each of the servers by hand.  While this was tedious, it has resolved the issue.

 

Messaging Apps: Bleep

Greg

[sc:software-category ]Messaging apps have been centralized services for a long time, but Bleep from BitTorrent looks to change that.

Currently I have four different messaging apps that I use; Skype, WhatsApp, Viber and BBM.  They all have a centralized service of some kind (Skype being a kind of exception but not really) and security is not a high priority with any of them.

Bleep uses the BitTorrent protocol to make s distributed network with encryption built-in and no centralized servers.

If they can get broad OS support I’ll be very interested in moving away from all of my other messaging apps on to Bleep.

The Death of Opera 12

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[sc:software-category ]I’ve been using Opera 12 as my main browser for years now, but more and more sites are starting to fail with it.

The Chromium based version of Opera is just such a poor substitute that I can’t see myself moving to it.  That means either Firefox or Chrome.

I’ve used Firefox for years and with some add ons it’s a pretty good substitute for Opera 12, but it is a bit of a resource hog and with every version looks more and more like Chrome.

On the other hand I’ve been using Chrome for testing and Google has obviously put a lot of effort in making a technically superb browser, but it is Google 🙁

So the winner is Firefox, but I have to admit there’s no technical reason I can find to prefer it over Chrome.  Sometimes I guess you just have to accept a moral stand as the only reason for choosing one vendor or another 😉

Migrating to Firefox was easy enough, just had to export my bookmarks out from Opera (Firefox has apparently dropped importing from Opera at some point) as HTML and then loaded them in to Firefox.

I did have to setup Firefox Sync again as I haven’t used it since the major update they did a while ago.

I did install a couple of extra add ons:

  • Adblock Plus
  • Bookmarks menu (to get an opera style bookmark menu item back)
  • Download Panel Tweaks (to get rid of the annoying download arrow animation)
  • DuckDuckGo Plus (easy default search setup)
  • Firebug (to replace the Opera debugger)
  • NoScript (I may remove this again, we’ll see)

The only other thing now is to store my passwords in the browser again as I logon to the various sites.

ClamAV on Ubuntu 14.04

Greg

[sc:linux-category ]I recently upgraded my Ubuntu box to 14.04 which went smoothly, but one nagging message has been showing up in my daily logs since then; ClamAV is out of date.

ClamAV often pushes out minor point releases and that has been the case with the current 0.98 release cycle.  There have been four releases so far, 0.98.0-0.98.4 which have been minor updates and security fixes.

Ubuntu 14.04 has 0.98.1 but nothing later in its default package repository so each day when I get my status e-mail from the box, right at the top is ClamAV’s warning that it’s out of date.  0.98.4 isn’t a big update and no security issues with it so I left it for a while expecting Ubuntu to do an update automatically, but it’s been months now and I no longer want to see the warning so I did a bit of digging around.

Apparently it has been a known issue since May and it’s still not fixed, I found a thread about it and you can use the backports repository to get 0.98.4 installed with the following command:

 apt-get install -t trusty-backports clamav-freshclam clamav clamav-daemon

It seems weird they haven’t resolved it on the long-term support version of Ubuntu, but at least I won’t see the warning message anymore.

New Windows Hardware

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:hardware-category ]A while ago Microsoft announced that licensing on Windows devices 8″ and under would be free to license Windows on.  It took many by surprise, but it seems to be working.

Recently there have been a host of announcements of new partners for Windows Phone and Microsoft has even brought the Blu Win Jr and HD to the Canadian Microsoft store as unlocked phone.

This is something I’ve been saying for a while, unless constrained by a carrier exclusive, every Microsoft store should have every Windows Phone device available as an unlocked version.  It’s good to see at least a little movement in this direction.

One the Windows front, lots of tablets have started to come out in the 8″ and under category, including some really dirt cheap ones under $70 (US presumably) for a 7″ tablet.

If Microsoft can continue to push these kinds of devices it would seem to be a great way to grow the market.  Especially with Windows 10 and a big push towards universal apps on the horizon next year.