Blogging About .NET : Personal Achievements

Upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003

cchrism — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 03:33:00 GMT

In the past couple of weeks I've been busy trying to update a Windows 2000 installation to Windows 2003. Apparently something went very wrong, so the upgrade took about a week in total or so, because setup program failed to do some steps apparently required in order to complete the upgrade.

After running WINNT32.EXE in the working Windows 2000 installation, program asked for a reboot, I agreed and BOOM! blue screen. The famous BSOD stating stop 7F (aka INACCESIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). Trying to debug the issue via WINDBG and serial cable (yeah, I had to run to COMPUSA, they are closing the stores in my region and get a plain old serial cable) didn't revealed anything terribly wrong. After long sessions of registry compare revealed that the culprit was VIAAGP1.SYS driver. If you are wondering what has to do VIAAGP1 with disk access (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE is directly tied with disk access), well, the only explanation I came up with is that VIAAGP1 is marked in UpperFilters key for the AGP bus which has PCI.SYS as a driver, and apparently VIAAGP1 failure was tearing down the entire PCI bus access.

If you think it's the end you are terribly wrong. After that, SETUP was crashing with access violation at the "Installing Devices" step. The culprit? Apparently, MS_NDISWANBH instance which is the network monitor filter driver for WAN.

And after a week of rebooting and debugging, Windows 2003 finally came up, with the fenomenal problem of not starting TCPIP driver. Reinstalling the protocol fixed the issue.

The short conclusion: now it works fine!

So if someone face similar problems this is what I've done (standard disclaimers apply, I'm not responsible if anything fails on your machine, make backups, you know the story):

Delete VIAAGP1 from UpperFilters entry in HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSetxxx\ENUM subtree. More specifically the AGP bus, but there is no standard location. Just search here for VIAAGP1
Delete CDR4_2K entries UpperFIlters from HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSetxxx\Control\Classes subtree
Delete all the entries for NDISWANBH in HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSetxxx. This might was the cause for TCPIP driver not starting, however since setup kept crashing I could find a better solution at that moment. You might want to backup all the keys you are deleting, and restore them after the setup completes, YMMV

And a side note: kernel debugging via WinDBG / serial cable at 115200 bps is not that bad. However the best is not to need such a debug.

Reporting Services Uploader

cchrism — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:26:00 GMT

Quite some time ago I have written a small utility that allows users to upload multiple Reporting Services reports (RDL files) at once to a Reporting Services Server. I have decided to make this utility public as others might find it useful.

The main problem with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services (either 2000 or 2005) is the lack of capability of uploading or downloading multiple RDL files at once. I know that the RS.exe utility exists, and it's presence is more proeminent in the 2005 version by adding the SQL Management Studio ability to script files of RS.exe, but you cannot upload quickly a locally stored folder full with RDL files, or for example copy a lot of reports from one server to another. That's why I decided to create this utility named RSUploader at this time at the version 0.5. Although I intent to update it a little bit I cannot promise that this will happen or a timeline for it's improvement.

RSUploader was built using .NET framework and presently the user interface is not the best in the world, but still gets the job done. The minimum requirement is .NET Framework 2.0 and it can connect to Microsoft SQL Reporting Services versions 2000 and 2005. You can download it from here

Among it's features you can:

Browse the folder structure of Reporting Services
Download all report definitions from one Reporting Services folder
Upload a local folder containing RDL files in a reporting services folder
Delete reports
Hide/Unhide reports

In addition to the ZIP archive I also attached a screenshot to know what to expect.

In order to successfully use RSUploader you have to type the URL of Reporting Service Web service, usually http://[machine]/ReportServer, do not swap it with the URL of Reporting Service Manager, and also if you are not using Integrated Authentication, type the username and password in the corresponding textboxes, and click Refresh in order to connect to the Reporting Services. Any time you change the URL or user / password you must click on Refresh in order to pick the new location.

Then expand the folder structure in the left view and in the right view you will have the actual list of reports and datasources. The checkbox in the front denotes the visibility of the item (if it is not checked it means it is hidden). Also you will have fix datasources for reports if you uploaded reports before you created your datasource and the GUID that Reporting Services is using for matching the datasources is not in sync.

If you find this utility useful please drop a note using the contact form.

Of course, the information in this post and the utility is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. I am not responsible if any thing doesn't work as expected or for any loss of data.

Upgrading the WRT54GL

cchrism — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 03:42:00 GMT

As I was saying quite some time ago I decided to upgrading my router firmware. Originally, I wanted to buy this particular model, due it's upgradeability to a open source firmware. The upgrade was a little bit postponed due the fact my computer decided to stop working so I finally managed to do it. If you ask me which were the primary reasons of the upgrade, well static DHCP allocation and SNMP daemon are in the top list. If Linksys would add these feature in the stock firmware, right now I would not add this post. Static DHCP allocation is a very nice feature these days, as you can reshuffle your network (I mean especially in a more business scenario) without touching all the computers/devices out there, but eliminates the disadvantages of changing the device address without any reasons, or not having a predictable numbering scheme. As I said these are quite important in a business scenario, but even at home if you have more than a few devices it worths. Actually, I had a problem with the stock firmware that if I unplugged the router all the devices would have new addresses that usually are not the same, depending which device was faster to request addresses.

The next feature I do not think requires much explanation: graphing the network traffic is quite essential in pinpointing potential problems, so here it goes.

And the lucky winner was DD-WRT after all. I investigated a little bit over OpenWRT, but I decided to go after DD-WRT, since it seemed to me a little bit more interesting. I agree that both distribution have pretty much the same offerings, and even found that they even want to merge to concentrate the effort.

The upgrade process was plain simple, just followed the Wiki installation tutorial and in about 10 minutes it was completed. I decided to skip the mini version and go directly to the voip version. I found that works perfectly going directly to the bigger version, with the warning that it might not work for some devices/versions, but apparently if it doesn't work it doesn't brick your router. This being said I very happy with my latest DD-WRT v23 SP2, and it seems very stable to me. So, keep up the good work with DD-WRT!

Getting my computer back

cchrism — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 03:59:00 GMT

After a long time I managed to get my computer working again.Two months ago my mainboard decided to no longer boot Windows, mainly due to expanding capacitors. Originally I didn't know that and I assumed that the hard disk is malfunctioning (being the previous owner of two IBM harddisks have taught me that better safe than sorry, although I didn't lost my data), so I bought a new Western Digital 250GB hard-disk. After waiting almost a week, I found that even if I changed the harddisk, the symptoms are the same, so the this wasn't the cause. I knew that my mainboard capacitors started to expand, but I never thought that the computer will hang and after reboot it will stop working, I assumed that firstly it will start randomly crash and eventually will die, but it turned out that this is not the case.

So I started to look after new mainboard. I had/have a Socket A Epox board (8KRA2+ if it matters), and I had two options: either find another similar board, or renew my computer to a more recent CPU. After browsing the sites, I could not find a interesting Socket AM2 board (particularly I was looking for a few things: VIA chipset and Firewire on board and no onboard graphics, and don't ask why I want VIA chipset, simply I do not like NVidia on the chipset side, a matter of personal taste), and I searched the Epox Store for another 8KRA2+. Well I found a refurbished 8KRA2+ for a lovely almost 38 bucks. But boy, their S&H is almost 10 dollars. Updating to a AM2 socket would mean a new CPU - ~160$ at that time the cheapest, a new board (not to expensive), a new 1 GB of DDR2 memory, a new graphics board as AGP isn't in style these days and so on. Way out of my budget. So I bought the refurb board and waited to receive it, another few days.

If you think that this is the happy end you are plain wrong. After receiving the refurb board the nightmare begun. Board started to hang randomly, after a few minutes to few hours. Who knows me might call very well "do not reboot guy", so for me it was pretty annoying to see that the medium time between reboots went down from 12 days to below 7 days in just a week. The hang was so deep, that I had keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to be able to reset it, as the reset button didn't do it's job while the board locked up. So after another 1 week of diagnosting with Epox support, trying to rule out the possible incompatibility between WD HDD SATA II with the VIA KT600 chipset, I decided to RMA the board. Few days ago I received a new board that works and I'm pretty happy with it. So for almost 55 dollars (including a Fedex ship for RMA) I have my computer working again. I'm not including in this the new HDD, I wanted to upgrade it anyway.

So right now I should be back in business and blog more frequent.

Linksys WRT54GL

cchrism — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 04:40:00 GMT

In case you don't know Linksys WRT54GL is the actual version of one of the most routers that kept the headlines a couple of years ago, since Linksys used some GPL code in their firmware and eventually they were forced to release firmware sources and as a consequence a myriad of open source projects started based on the bits published the firmware. This means that you are no longer forced to use whatever a manufacturer decide to release to public, and if you do not like some part you can customize it. Basically WRT54GL can run a linux distribution of course trimmed down to fit the small amount of memory available.

When I builded my wireless network I decided that this router is the best option, so I bought it. I paired it with another Linksys product a BECMU10 cable modem, a very nice thing of this setup is that the cases are builded to be stacked and they use very little space. Anyway, for 49,99 $ after mail-in rebate I do not think I can find a better wireless router at least now. The stock firmware is good but not the best so I started looking for alternate open-source projects. Well, as much as open-source fan I would I think that due the nature of the things (they are not making any money) the marketing is quite short, if at all. So, right now I could not find a comparative analysis between all major open-source firmware for WRT54 in order to decide which is best for me.

At this stage I oscilate between two different projects: DD-WRT and OpenWRT, and I will try to compare them. As far as I've seen in OpenWRT the WPA(2) support is not free so most likely I will go with DD-WRT, apparently this project has a lot of fans, and I should join it. Do you have other opinions?

Drinking from the firehose - or the latest update on my status

cchrism — Tue, 23 May 2006 22:27:00 GMT

If you ever wondered why there isn't a lot of activity on this blog lately, even if I said that I will try to be more active, now I'm ready to share the news. Well, the unexpected hapenned and in the past 4 months I've gone through a relocation process to Redmond, WA, United States, and more specifically to Microsoft. If you ever relocated, even for a few miles, you know that there a lot of things to do, starting from giving notices to landlord and utilities, to packing and shipping things, and most important the order of packing things. Personally I learned the hard-way that if you have two types of freight, one that is faster one that is slower, think not twice, but ten times what you put in the faster freight. Now I'm renting houseware until my slower shippment arrives... A relocation that has left me without a computer and any other stuff for a few months, but otherwise a quite successful relocation.
Until I got here, and I was reading other bloggers posts that said about "drinking from the firehose" I thought: "Yeah, that can'be so bad, I mean they are humans too!". After my first days I realized that this is true, the quantity of information is huge and there is a lot to learn and to find. So, I am a Microsoft employee right now.

And as of today, a lot of things shipped as Beta2 (released at WINHEC2006):

WinFX Runtime Components
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4A96661C-05FD-430C-BB52-2BA86F02F595&displaylang=en

Visual Studio Extensions
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5C080096-F3A0-4CE4-8830-1489D0215877&displaylang=en

Vista:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/products/getthebeta/default.aspx#downloadWindowsVista
You must have MSDN subscription or be part of the Beta program

Office 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx

Apparently there are other bits that were shipped today and I didn't know (http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2006/05/23/605150.aspx).

And if you will be relocating, and need some advice about what to ship first use the feedback form.
Right now I'm back on track so expect more frequent posting here. Keep tuned!

Upgrading to CS 2.0

cchrism — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:10:00 GMT

I've just finished upgrading my site to Community Server 2.0. Well, my opinions are mixed at this point at least from an "administrator" point of view. Although the interface is more complex and with a lot of new features I was kind of puzzled that out of the box the configuration file is kind of damaged. The fix is straightforward, but still... for a piece of software that wants to be RTM is quite annoying. (For more details you can drilldown on Community Server forum: ). And, yes, others were puzzled by this quality of this release, too.
Anyway, I overcomed all the issues and the upgrade was very smooth. Basically, the longest operation was uploading of the new files, and they are quite a lot. Applying the upgrade script worked flawless. In the same step I've switched to ASP.NET 2.0 so I'm pretty much up to date right now.
As a side note, just after updating the installations I've seen on the Community Server site that they are planning for 2.1 release to be available in July 2006. So I should start planning for the new update.
One of the reason of upgrading to 2.0 version is that I found a very nice tool named CS Gallery Manager that can be used to upload multiple pictures in one step. Although it supports CS 1.1 with a small hack, I thought it's better to upgrade. The great thing of CS Gallery Manager is that it supports both rotate and resize on the fly, so you can keep it on the desktop or laptop machine, plug in the SD card of your camera and you are good to go (actually your pictures :) ).

Long time no see

cchrism — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 08:10:00 GMT

I agree with you. I didn't post here for quite a long time. Actually my schedule was very busy, because I'm trying to graduate my master, and do something useful at work.

In the last period many things happened: we had a major release (although labeled as minor, for marketing purposes), we are running an optimization iteration, I've been evaluating Visual Studio Beta 2 (BTW, very nice look). I'll try to improve my post rate, but don't hold your breath...

My next post should be about trying to convert the product I'm working for to .NET Framework Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005.

miniSD & Smartphone C500

cchrism — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 15:31:00 GMT

I've bought a 512 MB miniSD card manufactured by ATP and I've placed inside my Orange SPV C500, so now I have much more storage space. Finding a 512 MB miniSD card in stock was quite challenging since many stores listed the item (but temporarly sold out) but I found only in one e-store the item in stock at a resonable price. By the way it was 65 USD with free shipping, and I think it is a good price since the transfer rate they list is quite good (10MB/sec, if I remember correctly).

Also I've noticed that using this card also gave me more available memory, as now when I restart the phone I have 41% available memory, and with the 16MB card that came with the phone it was around 30%. Did anyone have an explanation or is it magic? So I moved my pictures and now I have space for music also. A Bluetooth headset is on my buying list so I could listen mp3s. A case is also on my list but a 25$ Krusell is quite out of my league.

I attended MSF Course 1846

cchrism — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 21:29:00 GMT

My blog was quite inactive for a while, and the primary reason is the fact that I find very little free time. Usually, the finish of the year is quite crowded by the work related tasks that are waiting to be finished.

Last week I attended a Microsoft Course, to be more specific “1846A - Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials”. It was a great offer from Microsoft Romania, offer presented at MSDN Briefing this fall: the only two certified trainers in MSF are working for Microsoft, and they wanted to promote MSF in Romania, and the course was FREE. Yes, you've read correctly, three full days, for FREE. The typical fee for a course like this I've heard that is around 400-500 USD.

This course can be used in order to achieve the 70-301 exam, a brand new exam, that is for MSF 3.0, and replaces 70-300 exam.

The course was presented in the Microsoft Romania meeting room, in Bucharest. With this ocasion we could see (we were around 25 people) how is Microsoft Romania from inside. Just like you've heard: there are free beverages, but I couldn't find Coca Cola. Only Pepsi was present in the refrigerator. Maybe people at Microsoft Romania don't like Coca Cola, who knows.

Well after attending this course many things were clarified to me. The most important thing: you cannot have great products if the whole team doesn't agree on all the aspects. Actually this is the first rule of MSF: all team members (I'm talking about MSF team here) are equally important, and they must agree. If they don't agree, the project is a “No-go” without any doubt.

Moving to a new home

cchrism — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 15:43:00 GMT

Since webmatrixhosting decided to remove accounts after 30 days of trial, I had to find a new home for my site, including my personal blog. I found Webhost4life, which have ASP.NET hosting at resonable price, with 300 MB of storage, SQL Server 2000 database, email and so on. For the moment the main site is not online, but two subdomains: blogs.mconstantin.eu.org and gallery.mconstantin.eu.org. Soon, I'll update and the main site.

nGallery Installed - my personal pictures

cchrism — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 06:56:00 GMT

I've just finished installing nGallery. In case you didn't know nGallery is a FREE and OPEN SOURCE ASP.NET Image Gallery written in C#. Getting it to work along with .Text was a little bit tricky but it worked after all. So if you want to see some of my pictures: http://gallery.mconstantin.eu.org/

End of FREE "Brainbenching" period

cchrism — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 22:23:00 GMT

After 14 days of free Brainbench, the results are:

Certfied as .NET programmer (this was my main target)
16 tests completed, 6 @ Master level
3 more exams required to be certified as “Systems architect“: Network Monitoring, Software Business Analysis, and one elective (from 3 possible options)
1 more exam required for “Linux System Administrator“

In conclusion, I'm satisfied with the results.

Brainbenching

cchrism — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:16:00 GMT

As you already should know, between 1st and 14th of July 2004 all tests of Brainbench are FREE!
I tried the plan feature of the Brainbench and I must say that is very cool. So far I selected four job roles: .NET Programmer, Systems Architech, Network Administrator and Linux System Administrator. My main target is to finish “.NET Programmer” Role, others if it is possible. I graduated all electives, and I have 5 more required: “Business Communication“, “Listening skills“, “Programmer analyst aptitude“, “Programming concepts“ and “Written English“.

I've got 4.53 at ASP.NET and 4.6 at ADO.NET. For the others I'm not so proud, but still... I'm not perfect.

I won't update the post, so in order to see my latest achievments and if I got the .NET Programmer role after all, check at http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/transcript/public/viewtranscript.xml?pid=191487