Welcome back, Feedburner!

Postscript to the last post – so many places, so little recall of all of them.  Just figured out that the old site was still being hit from Feedburner. At some point in the past I must have agreed to syndicate it out via that route, and never remembered to change the feed when Google upped sticks on me.  Sorry, but you should be back on line now.

Alice doesn’t live here anymore

Decision made, implemented – and now I have to pay for it.

After more than enough research to make my eyes bleed, the best hosting solution seems to lie with a company at www.vidahost.com, and I have purchased a hosting account there, two new domains and commenced the migration of my previous domains from their current place of residence to a new home.

Everything was going smoothly, up to that last part.  Vidahost have what appears to be an unassailable reputation on the Internets, and my brief contacts with support there, in the form of Dominic, have been unfailingly helpful and positive.  Nothing is too much trouble, unlike 1and1 where anything at all seems to be too much trouble.  But I screwed up the domain authentication key for the old MS Live domain, and that set into place a chain of events that may or may not resolve successfully yet.  I think the Live domain will transfer OK, but one of the two 1and1 name transfers is currently reported as ‘cancelled’.  The co.uk one went just swimmingly – but there seem to be fewer rules and thus less chance of error, for UK-based transfers than .com ones.  I have faith that Dominic can sort it out, but fear I’m going to be facing another year’s fees from 1and1 – with probably no hope of ever getting out of it.

On the subject of moving, it occurs to me that my faithful public may not have the new RSS feed sorted out for the blog.  If you’re seeing this, then in all probability it’s OK, but I suppose I better put a short and final entry up on the original pages (see, Google – I can manage FTP even if you can’t) to announce the change of address.  Remember – it’s http://blog.pemur.com/atom.xml now.

Moving on to the next point

Since Google (bless ‘em) decided to stop supporting FTP for this blog, it appears that I no longer have access to an archive of the contents.  That’s only slightly disturbing, because I very much doubt that anyone will ever want to refer back to older entries.  In fact, unless it’s pushed directly in front of anyone (Facebook, I knew you were useful for something!), no-one probably even looks at the up-to-date stuff.

The point of all this rambling is that for one reason or another I’ve decided to look again at my domains and hosting arrangements.  1and1 and I are likely to have a parting of the ways in the very near future, mainly because I don’t feel that they are very answerable to their customers.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was their unwillingness to provide me with proper access logs, including full IP addresses.  All I get is the /24 subnet.  This is not acceptable – and most certainly wouldn’t be OK if it were a commercial site.  Therefore, I’ve decided to vote with my feet, or at least with my credit card.

The requirements are for a domain registration and hosting service that allows me to manipulate DNS as I see fit (not under the strict 1and1 control) and which just provides the service and gets out of the way in terms of web sites.  Oh, and since the credit card comes into it, it also needs to be cheap. 

Of the possible candidates, none stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, but I do have a certain regard for kNET: they seem to offer reasonable storage, good bandwidth allowance, multiple domains etc all for no more than 1and1 charge.  Ok, bandwidth isn’t unlimited, as 1and1 claim to provide, but does that really matter?  After all, there’s little enough traffic nowadays, given that the blog no longer resides on my storage.

Move along, nothing to see

With reference to the last entry, it now seems to be definite that the BSODs linked with MS10-015 were linked to a root kit, and are not the result of sloppy programming by Microsoft.  Rather the reverse – it was those lazy hackers that did it.  However, you’ll all be pleased to know that they have got their act together and have updated the root kit to prevent this happening in future.  Kudos to the malware authors.

Cleanliness is next to …

Given the problems with the latest batch of Microsoft updates, and KB977165 in particular, it’s been interesting following the development of comments across the Internet.

Confusion over which update was causing the issues was rampant at first, with suggestions that all the recent ones needed to be removed before the BSOD was avoided, was quickly resolved as the ‘guilty’ party was identified.  But there still remained the question about what was actually causing the blue screen.

An early idea was that the only systems suffering from blue screens were already infected with something, and it now appears possible that at least one underlying cause has been found.

However, my interest is in some of the associated comments regarding how this was missed pre-release – and this poses an important question.  Presumably Microsoft keeps there system as malware-free as they can.  Patches are tested in a known environment, and while they can be expected to take into account as many variables in terms of configuration and hardware as possible, is it fair to suggest that they should take into account all the possible malware infections as well?

Those that shout loudest are likely to be people with infected PCs, but surely it’s their own responsibility to keep the system clean, not Microsoft’s to test against an already corrupt setup.  In essence, my argument is that KB977165 is not the root of the problem; as usual, this is clearly the fault of IT Security in ensuring that no infections got into MS.  A case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”.

A new hope

Didn’t someone use that title elsewhere?

Welcome to the brave new world, which seems to be functional including the archives.  So perhaps Google did overcomplicate matters in their instructions, or I’ve just been lucky.  First time if so.

All I needed to do, in the final analysis, was to set up a CNAME for blog.pemur.com, pointing at something going by the slightly worrying name of ghs.google.com, and then switch my Blogger settings to a Custom Domain, pointing at http://blog.pemur.com, and it worked – after a while.  There’s even a valid RSS feed, on http://blog.pemur.com/atom.xml, should anyone find this worthwhile subscribing to.

The negatives include the loss of my favicon: I’m going to miss that.  A boring orange B that looks like nearly every other blog on the web isn’t a suitable replacement.  Also, the RSS feed that Google provides (default) isn’t exactly inspiring, either.

However, if nothing else, moving the blog should kill the overheads on my web stats for the pemur.com/.co.uk domain.  I never did have much luck extracting out the real data from the occasional spider and regular FeedDemon lookups.  On the downside, I guess it will be even more disheartening once these hits are gone.

This may be the last update for a while

Not that there have been any at all, recently, if I’m honest.

No, in common with many others today, I’ve received an email from Google informing me that blogger.com blogs will no longer support FTP updates to my own web space, and I’m going to have to transfer to a custom domain, hosted on their system – if I understand it correctly.  Apparently, FTP is too complicated for them to deal with.

Google, I’ve got news for you.  Your Custom Domain looks too complicated for me to deal with.  They promise some sort of migration tool, but when I have the vagaries of 1&1’s DNS to cope with (including the all too common lack of control) this may not work.

What’s so difficult about FTP?  You give it a target, a username and password, and tell it to transfer the files.  The data remains under my control thankfully, so even if Google can’t transfer stuff I still have it for a manual upload later if necessary.  What would future generations do without access to these gems of erudite wisdom?  (That is a rhetorical question – I have a pretty good idea of the answer…)

So perhaps it’s time to rethink the pemur web presence – I own the critical domains (.com, .org, .me.uk and .co.uk) and so far they all do different things (apart from pemur.me.uk which does absolutely nothing at all).  The original idea was that .org would be sort of work-related, and .com would be my personal domain, including biking stuff.  Now I’m back on two wheels that may well take off again, and if the Google migration doesn’t work out then I can look in more detail at managing the structures myself.

Don’t think of it as the end of an era, just the start of a new phase in the Internet’s development.

Progress report

Things aren’t quite as bad as I thought last night.  I have, for instance, got Agent working, by the simple brute force expedient of running it in Win XP compatibility mode.  Sometimes the old ways are the best – literally, in this case.

However, I also ran off a list of all the installed software under the Vista regime.  This is going to take weeks to get everything back up and running.  Having made myself despondent I thought a bit of hardware hacking might help.  It’s always therapeutic to pull the insides out of a PC and put them back together again – as long as it works afterwards.

Needless to say, in this case it didn’t.  I’d found an extra SATA power adaptor and data cable, so went for the three drive setup.  This involved moving the current system drive to another SATA port – when the right-angle cable necessary to fit under the extended graphics card broke, leaving part embedded in the motherboard connector.  One fine pair of pliers later, the offending plastic was removed, and I was able to get all three SATA connections up and running.

Reboot – and only two drives showing.  The original data drive was AWOL: this was not what I expected, since it was the one cable I hadn’t touched, so it’s back inside the case again and check all the connections.  Turns out that the power lead to the drive had become adrift, so everything gets hammered back in as usual (which is possibly why the SATA connector above broke in the first place…), switch things back on and hey presto, three drives. 

Next question – which Samsung is the data drive and which is the old system drive in the BIOS?  Trial and error (emphasis on the latter) eventually got the drives in the right order, and I now have a Windows 7 workstation which boots up, complete with operational software.  Well, some of it’s operational, which is where we started.

Wish I hadn’t started

After all the hype, it seemed reasonable to try an update to Windows 7 on my main workstation.

I think my first mistake was to try to to this as a new install, rather than an update.  On second thoughts, perhaps the mistake was in the decision to upgrade in the first place.

We have any number of  PCs at work with complex configurations and obscure software, half of which is either totally obsolete or tied to hardware that probably belongs in a museum.  Frankly, they’re easy compared to this home monstrosity.  Servers running tightly optimised programs?  No problem.  This box?  Well, it has so many old and undocumented applications that I can’t track down sources for that there’s no way I can realistically hope to reproduce it in a new build.

So I took a decision to drop all the old stuff, and just concentrate on a core group of applications – the usual things, browsers, mail, usenet.

Problem number 1 – all my passwords and install keys are on the system drive that I’m replacing, and so far I haven’t been able to get three SATA drives running on the PC.  It will come with time, but to start with I need the new Win7 drive, plus my main data drive.  Why I didn’t store the passwords on the data drive is a mystery that will probably never be solved.

OK, several drive swaps later we have most of the info.  On to loading the applications, starting with Firefox: do you think I can find half the add-ons that I’m used to?  No, and to get details I have to re-attach the old system drive – again.

Even the Outlook install was difficult, mainly because of the number of external email accounts that I like to monitor directly.  I’ve forgotten most of the server names needed for IMAP and SMTP connections.  Thankfully, IE does work out of the box and I was able to research the necessary information.  Where would we be without the internet?  Oh, we wouldn’t have email…

Forte Agent – OK, it installs, and I even got the server account sorted (eventually); but on restarting the app it just hangs.   I don’t have the strength to fix this.

On reflection, the easiest components are still the Microsoft ones.  The company may come in for a lot of stick, but when things work, they work well: witness this, Windows Live Writer set up and blogging in no time at all.   Now if only Steve Ballmer would invest in buying a few more companies – like Forte.