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Aug 18
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Hardware, Microsoft, Networks, Performance, Remote Protocols, Thin Clients, Troubleshooting, Vista, WiFi, Windows 7, XPe
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Some while back one of my US based colleagues passed on some advice about checking out some details on how to get the best out of Wireshark
For anyone interested in getting their feet wet using Wireshark the network protocol analyzer. This knowledge can be useful to have when dealing with network anomalies.
www.chappellseminars.com/s-wireshark101.html
Download the latest 1.2.1
As you may or may not know this was originally called Ethereal, and then morphed in to Wireshark, and has recently had quite a number of improvements and has moved from ver. 0.9 to now 1.2 plus in the last few months. There has been quite a number of additions including the ability to graph throughput etc from within the tool, as well as it now supporting GeoIP DB’s so that you can carry out extensive mapping of where the packets are going to or coming from.
http://wiki.wireshark.org/HowToUseGeoIP
Running Windows 7?
If you are running Windows 7 – then do be aware that the WinPcap driver (the component that does the sniffing) will fail to install by default – but if you modify the executable to run in Vista SP1 compatability mode then all should be fine – as detailed below:
I’ve just downloaded WinPcap 4.1 beta5 from here: WinPcap, the Packet Capture and Network Monitoring Library for Windows Set the compatibility mode to Windows Vista (right click on the installer executable then select Properties; on the Compatibility tab, check "Run this program in compatibility mode for", select Windows Vista SP1 from the dropdown list, then finally click OK =)) and it will install as it should.
For me it worked flawlessly so far.
Further reading
I then followed this up a bit further and noted that after a recent Sharkfest event there were a number of presentations made by a chap called Ray Tompkins (CEO of Gearbit) and these are available at:
At Sharkfest 2009 gearbit presented 3 sessions::
Finding the Latency:
How Protocols Work:
Wireshark Charts & IO Graphs:
OSTU – Wireshark IO Graph for Response Time Analysis:
Understanding the Need for Protocol Analysis: HYPERLINK
OSTU – Wireshark Case Study: Benchmark Test
OSTU – Wireshark TCP Stream Graphs
OSTU – Wireshark Capture Filters
OSTU – Wireshark Display Filters
OSTU – Identifying Zero Window with Wireshark
If you do find that you have to dig in on a Customers Site to start doing some serious troubleshooting around Networks then I would seriously recommend the first two presentations in PDF format as they do appear to explain things in a very simple and matter of fact way.
Wireless Issues:
Now this should in no way be any sort of substitute for a proper Wireless Survey, but when you find that you are up against some issues then try using inSSIDer as a very good starting point? And it works on Windows 7 straight out of the box 
written by dcaddick
Interesting? I’m already running an earlier release of Windows 7 under VMware Workstation as described in an earlier post so it’s good to hear that the Beta will be out shortly as this will put the code through a more vigorous round of testing and should seriously shake the bugs out? Although the latest update would appear to indicate that MS has pulled back from an early Jan. release I’d be guessing that it will be out earlier rather than later?
Ed Bott, a good friend of mine, recently predicted that Windows 7 Beta bits are going to be publicly unveiled on January 13, during CES. Some late night scrounging around revealed that Windows 7 could be available sooner — via download links slipped into the next Microsoft Action Pack Subscription quarterly update kit, which starts shipping January 5, 2009. Word internally is that the beta build was already baked a while ago, we just have to be patient.
Update (Dec 23): Microsoft has removed all mention of Windows 7 Beta.
What is also interesting to note is the amount of time and effort that Microsoft is taking to “eat their own dog food” as well as make sure people know they are focusing on both the actual performance as well as the perceived performance? 
In accordance with users’ expectations
In the sense in which Microsoft is building Windows 7 as the evolution of Windows Vista, the next iteration of the Windows client will perform as if on steroids, compared to its precursor. Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, along with Michael Fortin, one of Microsoft’s Distinguished Engineers and head of the Windows Fundamentals feature team, revealed that the Redmond company had a strong focus on delivering a high level of performance for Windows 7, comparable with end users’ expectations. And Microsoft should make no mistake about it, Windows 7 performance expectations are as high as they can be.
“We’ve been building out and maintaining a series of runs that measure thousands of little and big things,” revealed Sinofsky and Fortin. “We’ve been running these before developer check-ins and maintaining performance and responsiveness at a level above which all that self-host our builds will find acceptable. These gates have kept the performance and responsiveness of our daily builds at a high enough level that thousands have found it possible to run their main systems on Windows 7 for extended periods of time, doing their normal daily work.”
Microsoft underlined that the perception of performance was just as important as the actual performance delivered by the operating system. In fact, what managed to hurt Vista the most was this perception of poor performance compared to Windows XP, despite the fact that benchmarks from the software giant placed the two operating systems on par.
“We’ve been driving down footprint, reducing our service costs, improving the efficiency of key code paths, refactoring locks to improve scalability, reducing hangs, improving our I/O efficiency and much more. These are scenario driven based on real world execution paths we know from our telemetry to be common,” Sinofsky and Fortin added.
In addition to the actual efforts poured into building the Windows 7 bits, Microsoft is also collaborating closely with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) in order to ensure that Windows 7 will deliver a top performance in concordance with the hardware resources it is made available with. But at the same time the Windows developing team is keeping a close eye on the milestones of the operating system as they are deployed internally.
“Within the Windows dev team, we’ve placed a simple trace capturing tool on everyone’s desktop. This desktop tool allows each person to run 24×7 with performance tracing enabled. If anything seems slow or sluggish, they can immediately save the last minute-or-so of activity and send it for automated analysis. Additionally, a team of people visually inspect the traces for new issues or issues not yet decipherable by our automation. The traces are incredibly rich and allow us to get to the root of top issues most of the time,” Sinofsky and Fortin said.
In the end, Microsoft does not rely exclusively on monitoring tasks performed as an integral part of the dogfooding of Windows 7. The company is also centralizing telemetry from the testers participating in the Windows 7 pre-Beta program and will continue to do so throughout the Beta and Release Candidate stages. In addition, the software giant will take into account micro-benchmarks and specific performance scenarios for Windows 7, on top of the system tuning it is already introducing.
"For all Pre-Beta, Beta and RTM users, we’ve developed a new form of instrumentation and have used it to instrument over 500 locations in the operating system and inbox applications. This new instrumentation is simple in concept, but revolutionary in result. The tool is called PerfTrack, and it has helped confirm our belief that the client benchmarks aren’t too informative about real user responsiveness issues," Sinofsky and Fortin stated.
written by dcaddick
Well tell us something we don’t know?
Seriously, I have recently started using a new HP 2710p laptop and I’m shocked to find that my normal RAM load is something around 1 – 1.1Gb just doing routine tasks… how crazy is that? When I get time I do want to rebuild it with the XP image because this is a joke – and the supposedly fancy UI is not that good really.
What I did find interesting in this missive from Gartner is the comments at the bottom that are suggestions to Microsoft?
Their advice to Microsoft took several forms, but one road they urged the software giant to take was virtualization. "We envision a very modular and virtualized world," said the researchers, who spelled out a future where virtualization — specifically a hypervisor — is standard on client as well as server versions of Windows.
"An OS, in this case Windows, will ride atop the hypervisor, but it will be much thinner, smaller and modular than it is today. Even the Win32 API set should be a module that can be deployed to maintain support for traditional Windows applications on some devices, but other[s] may not have that module installed."
The reason I find this so intriguing is that this almost follows what Ron Oglesby was suggesting way back in 2006?
Where is all this virtualization going?
Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn
The researchers damn Windows in current form, urge radical changes
By Gregg Keizer
April 10, 2008 (Computerworld) Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.
In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.
"For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable," said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled "Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve."
Among Microsoft’s problems, the pair said, is Windows’ rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft — frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating — hit the "reset" button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.
"This is a large part of the reason [why] Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said. In turn, that became one of the reasons why businesses pushed back Vista deployment plans. "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile."
Other analysts, including those at Gartner rival Forrester Research Inc., have highlighted the slow move toward Vista. Last month, Forrester said that by the end of 2007 only 6.3% of 50,000 enterprise computer users it surveyed were working with Vista. What gains Vista made during its first year, added Forrester, appeared to be at the expense of Windows 2000; Windows XP’s share hardly budged.
The monolithic nature of Windows — although Microsoft talks about Vista’s modularity, Silver and MacDonald said it doesn’t go nearly far enough — not only makes it tough to deliver a worthwhile upgrade, but threatens Microsoft in the mid- and long-term.
Users want a smaller Windows that can run on low-priced — and low-powered — hardware. And increasingly, users work with "OS-agnostic applications," the two analysts said in their presentation. It takes too long for Microsoft to build the next version, the company is being beaten by others in the innovation arena, and in the future — perhaps as soon as the next three years — it’s going to have trouble competing with Web applications and small, specialized devices.
"Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X, but Microsoft requires a different product on handhelds because Windows Vista is too large, which makes application development, support and the user experience all more difficult," according to Silver and MacDonald.
"Windows as we know it must be replaced," they said in their presentation.
Their advice to Microsoft took several forms, but one road they urged the software giant to take was virtualization. "We envision a very modular and virtualized world," said the researchers, who spelled out a future where virtualization — specifically a hypervisor — is standard on client as well as server versions of Windows.
"An OS, in this case Windows, will ride atop the hypervisor, but it will be much thinner, smaller and modular than it is today. Even the Win32 API set should be a module that can be deployed to maintain support for traditional Windows applications on some devices, but other[s] may not have that module installed."
Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn
written by dcaddick
So while I don’t condone this, it is easy to see why people get annoyed trying to keep on top of all this when all they want to do is get the thing going and crack on with what they intended in the first place?
It all most makes me wonder if Microsoft is taking the stance that they have closed *most* of the obvious flaws but won’t get too carried away while Vista is struggling to gain widespread acceptance?
Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
My post on the Vista SP1 activation hack has generated a lot of feedback (especially in the form of questions) from both individuals and other media outlets. I’ve put together this post in order to answer some of these questions.
 First off, the hack. The hack in question is another OEM BIOS hack but packaged under the name of Vista Loader. This hack is similar to the Paradox OEM BIOS. The Paradox hack was the most commonly used Vista activation hack (which is why Microsoft pulled the plug on it) but this one seems to have been quite popular, so I’m not sure why Microsoft didn’t pull the plug on this one too. Since other outlets have now named this hack as working on Vista SP1 I don’t have any problem with naming it here.
 As you can see from the video above (or the gallery – I’ve put up a separate gallery because the video is rather small), this hack can take a non-genuine Vista SP1 installation and turn it into one that appears genuine to the OS.
After the reboot you can see a product key being entered – this is one of many OEM product keys shipped with the hack. Unless the hack is correctly applied these key is considered invalid by the OS. With the hack the addition of the product key makes the OS appears like a genuine OEM install.
 It seems to me that Microsoft has been rather half-heated about blocking OEM BIOS activation hack. However, just because this hack works today, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t change tweak WGA at a later date in order to close it off. Given how this hack works I’d say that it would be a trivial matter for Microsoft to add a detection routine for it.
SP1 was supposed to seek out and uncover activation hacks so that life was harder for pirates and that customers were reassured that their install of Vista was legit – it hasn’t. What I’ve shown here is that it’s easy to fool SP1 into thinking that a non-genuine copy is genuine.
More information on the Vista SP1 activation hack | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com
written by dcaddick
I have been trying Vista on a corporate Laptop over the holidays in advance of getting hold of the “Approved” corporate image for my laptop and in some ways it’s a clunker – so if you know what you’re doing and want to “trim” some of those annoying messages and confirmations then this might be just the tool for you?
Vista4Experts
Current Version: 1.0.0.1
Download Vista4Experts
Vista4Experts is kind of a treat for computer experts who don’t want security center notifications, User Account Control dialogs, automatic Windows Defender scannings, automatic update installations (which cause you to reboot your system if you don’t react quickly enough). People who want MSDN (or google) set as default search engine in the Internet Explorer search bar, who want the start menu power button to shut down the system instead of hibernating it, etc. These and many more fixes are included in Vista4Experts. All of these changes can be discarded, enabled or reversed. Vista4Experts is the first expert utility of its kind and works on every platform.
This is a free software and so it is given without warranties, this means the use of this tool is at your own risk. I take no responsilbity for any damage that may unintentionally be caused through its use.
I realize, of course, that many fixes in Vista4Experts lower Windows Vista’s default security, but that’s the difference between users who feel enough confident to decide what’s best for their system and users who don’t. Many of Windows Vista’s security features are extremely annoying to many developers and other IT experts.
I even think it’s bad that Microsoft didn’t provide a permanent way to disable the driver signature verification and making it possible only for signed drivers to run on x64 (that if the user isn’t in the mood of pressing F8 on every boot). This is my system and I want to run any driver that I want to! I’m pretty sure I won’t involuntarily execute a rootkit, don’t worry about me Microsoft…
Download Vista4Experts
NTCore’s Homepage
written by dcaddick
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