yon Leveron blog

Good Saturday to all. Some of the Tech bits I’ve posted in the past involved how to deploy the Windows operating system from a corporate network, RIS, etc. Now, we aren’t going to be pushing images via PXE.

Today I’d like to focus on the lower volume users, the home / home office. You know how it is, someone wants you to help them, because “their system doesn’t seem to be working right”. Ahem You know the realistic course rather than trying to debug all that has plagued their system is a reinstall.

Backup the data you care about before I come over, you tell them. (this is the point that you hear “what’s a backup“, so you know you’ll need to verify that you have all of their data backed up before you “floor mat” their system; yes, someone once asked me over the phone to floor mat instead of format)

Then you contemplate manually installing everything; even the Windows install now looks like significant work.

If you do this often enough, it doesn’t have to be. Invest the time up front in a couple of things, and it will go quickly, and without your intervention :

1) Nlite or Vlite : http://www.nliteos.com/ or http://www.vlite.net/ the former for Win XP class, the latter for Vista / Windows 7.

While some of the automation side was technically possible before Nuhi and team created these, it was a lot more arcane. These two are simple and menu driven, you can add or remove major or minor components of the OS, adjust tweaks, automate user creation / login / etc., adjust default time zone settings, slipstream service packs and patches up to today’s date with, and it also boasts integrated .iso creation or burn straight to disc.

One of the nicest things that these programs can do is to integrate specific text-mode drivers for certain system components. This is a godsend under XP, if not generally as much of a factor in Windows 7. That custom motherboard you run for the “gaming machine” can now have the built-in RAID recognized during the install, without the need to try to find a USB floppy drive to install drivers from.

I just enjoy having a potentially slimmed down version of what I want to install, that had security patches up to the day I created my image. Less to download, less security risk. Security is also sometimes increased by removing some unneeded components; if you’re not going to use them, perhaps they shouldn’t be there.

Regardless, one of these two (as appropriate) is really worth checking into.

2) WPIW / Windows Post Install Wizard : http://www.wpiw.net/

Very handy for reinstalling any set of programs within Windows; I’ve used this for both DVD based installs, directly from the DVD (and automatically running after Windows installs) and more commonly from a fast USB memory stick drive, after the install, by double-clicking it (the latter method to take advantage of faster read speeds / large space for a huge menu of programs for friends, family, self, etc.)

Per the WPIW site :

Windows Post-Install Wizard (WPI for short) is a hypertext application designed for giving users choice. While Windows XP offers many ways of customizing the setup process out of the box, its major drawback is the lack of being able to select which applications an end user may install. In the past, end users and administrators needed to either download the files manually, or create overly complex scripts that could only be used once. WPI allows you to create one image, which can then be custom configured, and optionally, automated, so that end users can install any applications.

WPI is a simple to use automation program for the choice and installation of multiple programs, tweaks and scripts. No longer will you need a dozen CD’s or more when doing a fresh Installation. No longer will you need multiple files when you are servicing another PC. With Windows Post-Install Wizard all that you will need is 1 or 2 CD\DVD’s to fully install your PC with all of your apps, scripts, registry files or tweaks. Instead of having to re-download those apps like adobe reader, flash or updates to programs you can have them all on one disk. With WPI you can have all of them all on one disk and then have a nice interface for selecting which apps to install and after configured properly WPI will install all of them without any needed input from you. WPI also and is commonly used added to your windows installation disks. This way you can automate the complete process of Windows and program installations.

With your typical setup of WPI you have your OS and all of the apps, tweaks and such on one disk. After windows installs, WPI kicks in and you are given a selection of everything you have configured WPI with, then you can select the ones you want or simply let the timer run out and your default apps will install.

This can be customized with multiple default menus / layout with a little bit of experimentation, to allow you to handle your Window 7 Ultimate developer needs in 64 bit, and your less technical friends need with Windows 32 bit, and quite a different (and possibly smaller) set of programs.

While WPI does take a bit of time to configure, it is easily recouped with just a few installs. You do still have to maintain an “up to date” set of install programs, such as Firefox, Java, etc. Hint to Adobe : please release a new downloadable version of at least Acrobat Reader, and don’t force folks to go online to go from 9.1.0 (the latest available for download) to update to 9.1.3, which includes security fixes. Ahem

You will learn about the whole new world of silent installs / switchless, if you’ve never done this. I much prefer to configure all things for an install of the operating system, or all of the application programs on one screen, start it, and walk away. You can always work on or enjoy other things while it’s running for however long it needs to install all that you require.

Between these two things, I think you’ll find your world to be better off. Once you’ve gotten that nice new system in place, you might consider using at least Windows backup to the cloud, for one off-site copy of the original / basics. If you’re looking for more features and insurance, I can highly recommend Acronis True Image Home 2010.

Have a wonderful day folks!

Pretty interesting NAS device, for the starter market (like at home). That’s a lot of features; granted, their bottom level, one drive NAS is $300 but still, it’s always refreshing to see innovation like this. And the ability to hook up other drives externally to it is a plus’ you could get a backup rotation going there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery enabling and disabling Time
Limited Error Recovery mode on WDC / Western Digital hard drives (RAID or not RAID . . .)

This is a lot of “green” space
Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EADS

Though this is certainly less expensive to build out a RAID system with :
Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD15EADS

And if you just want a ton of space and fast speed :
Western Digital 2 TB RE4-GP SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive WD2002FYPS

64 meg of cache directly on each drive.

Sheesh, I remember when my computer didn’t have that much RAM

And naturally, I’m looking forward to USB3 – backwards compatibility is always nice, but we are sure due for some higher throughput, and not everyone has a handy esata port to hook up to one of the drives above. For my local backup solution, I tend to use those handy external cases,  like the Macally G-S350SU Hi-Speed eSata/USB2.0 External Storage Enclosure for 3.5inch SATA HDD.

I’ve gotten a few inquiries about backups and storage since there’s been some focus here, so I’ll share my (not perfect, but seems reasonable) backup plan.

At home, I tend to copy off any new install CD, any new movie I’ve purchased, etc. to my main system, and then place the original on edge on one of the many bookshelves. This means it’ll both be locatable if I need it again, and pretty safe from scratching. Add to that the music collection I’ve carefully digitized to lossless, etc. as well as many high resolution digital pictures, and we have quite a bit of space taken up.

These reside on the primary system internally, across 4 1.5 terabyte drives running in Raid. 2 partitions in the raid manager, 400 gig of striped Raid-0 for speed, and 2.5t of Raid-5 for redundancy. Within Windows 7, the strip is split in half, C and D drives, with D being scratch / temp space. Drive E: is all of the raid5; all are set as primary and GPT partitions under Windows 7.

I backup to external drives, as above, and am paranoid enough about lightning etc. that even with a quality UPS per system I just know it’s hard for electricity to make it across that “air capacitance gap” when the external is unplugged from power and data, at the drive end for my convenience.

Multiple local drives for backup (reused a number of old .75t drives) as well as online backup via service as well as multiple Gladinet targets, for second tier. This keeps me from having to shuttle external disks between locations, in order to keep some of the backups “off site”. It’s not hard to tell who has experienced data loss, is it?

Hope you all have a great day.

Update : gone gold, c.f. http://leveron.com/blarg/2009/09/acronis-true-image-home-2010-launch-today-of-first-backup-tool-compatible-with-windows-7/

This actually looks like a great upgrade, and I’ve successfully used this program for years after dumping a competitor.

Definitely Windows 7 compatible, as I’m running it under 64 bit RTM right now.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

As well as their own online backup provisions, I also found it useful to create a max compression backup locally, and then to replicate that well-encrypted backup out to the cloud.

More generational copies are better, when it comes to disaster recovery (even at the home machine level).

---

From: Acronis Central <noreply@acronis.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 12:07 AM
Subject: The Acronis True Image Home 2010 and Acronis Online Backup Beta program closure notification
To: John

Dear Acronis True Image Home 2010 Beta Participant,

Thank you for taking the time to be a part of the Acronis True Image Home 2010 and the Acronis Online Backup Beta program! We have used all the valuable feedback that you have given us to improve our latest product Acronis True Image Home 2010 which will launch in a few weeks. We’re sending this email to inform you that the Acronis True Image Home and Acronis Online Backup Betas will end on Sep 7th, 2009. You will be able to use the beta build of Acronis True Image Home till Oct 1st, 2009, but we encourage you to purchase the final release of the product to take advantage of all the new features. After Sep 7th, 2009 your Acronis Online Backup accounts will be disabled and you will no longer be able to perform online backups. After Sep 14th, 2009 all your data will be permanently removed from our servers. To prevent the loss of the backed up data you may need, please retrieve it from our servers before Sep 14th, 2009. We will permanently destroy the data on these servers after Sep 14th, 2009. To ensure safety of your data, we recommend you to retrieve the data as soon as possible. Once again, thank you for your patience and active participation in the beta program. We truly appreciate your time and your feedback is helping us make a better product for you!

Kindest regards, Acronis Beta Testing Team

Acronis. Move. Manage. Maintain. Seamlessly.

I’ve been really impressed with Gladinet Cloud Desktop so far.  I’ve been able to seamlessly push and pull things from a few different cloud objects, including from within programs.  Being able to redundantly store that long letter locally, as well as remotely at the same time is pretty good tech.

My first test was with Google.  While Gladinet supports Google Apps, it is not quite as mature there as it is for Picasa, and standard Google accounts (yourname@gmail.com type email addresses). I expect that will mature with continued releases.

Webdav and FTP were certainly no issue, and the plugins for those allowed anonymous mode as well.  I appreciated the flexibility modes regarding bandwidth, as well as scheduling options – the Pro version includes scheduled backup options.

It can push to a cloud like Amazon S3 (that also worked well).  I suspect as others become more prominent in this field (like Rackspace) there may be plugins added for those as well; the Gladinet code seems pretty modular, with one or more plugins per service (support for Adrive added, and they’ve supported others like Box.net for some time).

With the Premium Edition it looks like Gladinet has plans for a rather “feature enhanced” enterprise type version. That’s usually what I try to choose even for home “power” use, when I can.

While SkyDrive is not perfect yet (Microsoft still has the 50 meg file size limit per file, which is sure acceptable given they give you 25 gig for free) it has been easy to drag and drop things back and forth, create new folders, etc. all from the Windows side.

Due to their plugin architecture, I expect we’ll be seeing nice incremental upgrades to this technology. While it’s easy enough for some of my non-tech friends to use, it also will definitely find a home with many of the IT folks I know.

I have to admit, the free 30 day test drive of the full professional mode helped sway me to buy.  I admired their product confidence in offering a full “free” mode for 30 days, yet still allows all of the core functionality for free after that time.  They seem to know that once you experience this in action they’re more likely to close a sale.  As well, they are taking care of their active beta testers. A business like this, I can deal with!

I haven’t tested this on anything but Windows 7 RTM (go go, final code!), 64 bit ultimate.  Lots of applications don’t work smoothly (some not at all) under this, since it’s so new; Gladinet works fine.  I suspect it’d be breezy on a standard Windows XP 32 bit installation, eh?  You can download either the 32 bit or 64 bit version for free from their site.

For those that want the full scoop you can check out their complete version comparison chart;  Gladinet also has their own blog, forums, and they tweet their version upgrades.

I’ve added this to my “must have” list this year. Even if I never get an Amazon S3 account on the European side, or my very own EMC Atmos . . .

If you’d like to purchase Gladinet Cloud Desktop Professional Edition for Home Use or their Professional Edition (non home use) I’d appreciate it if you’d use these purchase links; fair disclosure is to tell you that while it won’t cost you anything additional, I would get a small commission should you purchase.  Thanks

Or at least, how to try.  One of the home machine’s primary partitions, when backed up with Acronis and no compression or encryption, was 24.4 gig in size.  Using 7zip, and making a nice solid archive, I ended up at 8.58 gig, spread out in (177, yep) 49.9 meg chunks to meet the 50 meg upload file size limit.

http://cid-c2e163eab4b150a0.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public?lc=1033

More experimentation, you actually can use a client such as Gladinet to push a backup over to Skydrive. You can use the “conserve bandwidth” option while actually using your computer, and crank it up before you leave

(edit – there’s been an upgrade to Gladinet, it’s actually even improved a bit more – was a good investment it seems)

I’m pretty confident in leaving things out there in public, as long as I got to choose the passphrase.  I’ve verified that 7 zip really does care if one character is off in a 200 char password, and it does use AES-256.  Luckily, my data doesn’t consist of anything important enough to expend that sort of resources in attempting to decode.

Reasonably good passwords / phrases can be generated by things such as https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm – as well, 7zip does have the option to encrypt the file headers as well. I remember a business case where someone thought that an old Winzip file was encrypted with their super-secret password (likely their dog’s name) and didn’t realize that anyone, without any password at all could read the name, size, etc. of each file within the archive.  Oops, that caused him some issues with their employees.

More pith – 7zip can use the “63 random printable ASCII characters” portion of Steve Gibson’s GRC password page, which is significant, bits-of-entropy wise, because

1;s[&Exv3[-?=c*zX;sgdkHn.J’Y;CWC$.y9ScB*xl’+e9′(G$^Uk\A@loZdiPM is a little harder to try to brute-force than

82FCB457CDB17D9E08F7A1A62BB798046373F9D89EF4DDDAC47224385F7D489 – while both may be 63 characters long in this case, the second string is not quite as “strong”.

Since you put up with the tech, ending with a nice random song lyric for you : Bloodhound Gang, “I’m the root of all that’s evil, yeah, but you can call me Cookie . . .”