VKernel.co.uk – Your interface to the world

Windows XP SP3 and DNS Issues

This may be useful to a lot of system admins as a definitive answer to a very strange DNS Issue in Windows XP. The situation, you can do “Nslookup google.com”, and you get the following:

Name: google.com

Addresseses: 74.125.45.100 ….

However, when you do a ping google.com, it times out. Also, whenever you go onto the internet, you get either a timeout / error 404, or a similar error message.

Finally, whenever you type in the ip address of a website, e.g. http://74.125.45.100 – google, it loads. So we know the network works, and the internet works as we can nslookup and get an internet browser onto a webpage.

This can be very confusing so i thought i’d post why this happens and what makes it happen.

There is obviously a DNS problem, as you cannot resolve any Domain Name to an IP address; so why does NSLOOKUP work? The answer, is simply NETBIOS. Microsoft, being the brilliant confusers they are, decide that one resolution wasnt good enough so added NETBIOS. NSLOOKUP resolves IP address by using a NETBIOS packet / protocol, which is why you can resolve google.com etc in NSLOOKUP but not in PING, HTTP etc.

This seems to be an issue with Windows XP SP3 – once uninstalled the error should be resolved.

Sam.

Tags: DNS, Problems, SP3, Windows

Desktop running solely from RAM using Riser’s

Another idea, which we at VKernel.co.uk recently had, was taking a lateral view of the whole SSD Situation (Solid State Drive, a drive running basically on NAND Flash Drives similar to the ones you have in phones, digital cameras etc).

What if,  (a question for the SAN guys mainly), you had a desktop PC board, with DDR2 Memory Risers (similar to Intel Caneland systems), which you could load chock full of low-price high speed DDR2. You then attached a large, cumbersome hard drive, 7200RPM IDE drive of ~ 500GB capacity, and a battery powerful enough to run the PC for around 1 minute. You then basically boot into the hard drive, which copies all the executable files into memory (RAM). Your hard drive then shuts itself off (into sleep mode), and your system runs entirely from memory – a lot faster than hard drive read/write access.

At the end of play, when you shutdown your PC, all the files which need saving (updated files) are transferred from RAM to the hard drive, so that you are then able to use them when you reboot. If the power to the computer is lost, there should be enough energy in the battery to allow the system to write the RAM contents to a “quick dump” on the hard drive, which the OS will sort out next time the system is booted.

This should speed up operating system use times significantly. If anyone is interested in working on this with me then please feel free to get in contact by dropping me an email at sam[at]vkernel.co.uk (replace the [at] with an @ obviously, this is done to help dodge the spam bots!).

Sam Marsh 2008 (c)

Tags: Memory, OS, RAM, System

Windows 7 Blog Announced

A blog has finally appeared from the guys behind the development of Microsofts hush-hush OS, Windows 7. The blog can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/14/welcome.aspx

There isnt much interesting on it at the moment – mainly introductions, what we intend to achieve, etc. However after the couple of Microsoft forums which are coming up in the future, its safe to assume that more details will follow. One such rumour is that Microsoft are set to take advantage of Jeff Han’s multi-touch research by building the technology into their Operating System (Jeff Hans research page is here http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/) 

There is a video of the technology here http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid713271701/bclid713073346/bctid709364416 While Microsoft may claim this as new, this technology has been around now for nearly 3 years – i remember Matt sending me a link to their video at the beginning of 2006. It is fascinating yes, but at the same time it all depends on A) Everyone going out and buying a touch screen (not going to happen!) and B) People coding API’s for their touch screens and C) Windows not being over-zealous like they were with Vista and its driver certification -  otherwise they’ll have the OS, the Apps, but all the hardware makers of touch-screen interfaces (Zalman etc) wont have their drivers “digitally signed” or whatever nonsensical term Microsoft are using nowadays.

Good luck, but much like SSD i think we’re a long way off yet.

Tags: jeff han, multi-touch, Windows, windows 7