Time ensures that things rarely remain the same.

At Tritech, many things have changed since even just one month ago.  Here’s a spiffy list of such things.  By the way, my new favorite word is “terse.”  The magic of the word “terse” is that practically all of its synonyms not as terse as “terse.”  It’s a self-fulfilling definition!  ^_^  So, what’s been going on during my silence, you ask?  Read on!

• My Sylvania G has an unusual issue with the custom Linux installs I’ve done on it where the keyboard and mouse touchpad stop working.  This didn’t happen while I had Windows XP on it whatsoever, nor the custom gOS that came with the computer, so I’m fairly sure it has something to do with a more generic (read: not G-specific) Linux distro running on the VIA CX700M2/C7-M platform.  I doubt it’s the hardware itself because of this.  The headphone jack worked on XP, but not on my custom Linux, which apparently is caused by an incorrect HD Audio pin mapping in the HD Audio drivers in the stock Linux kernel.  I’m not too concerned about it, though, since I haven’t needed to use it much at all lately.
• I’m still working on the custom Tritech Service System.  It’s grown from a very humble project to simply give us basic remote access to a machine in a clean operating environment to a much more useful general service system.  Big secret: it’s a Linux-based project.  The entire “distro” is essentially built from scratch, however, and uses such classic tools as busybox to minimize space usage.  What really sets TSS apart from the Linux solutions we’re using now such as KNOPPIX (CD) and Slax (USB drive) is the fact that the entire system runs out of an initramfs, eliminating the need to find the rest of the system after booting has started.  This presents some extremely tough limitations, but solves the biggest problems I’ve run into with Linux live CD and Linux live USB distributions.  Sometimes the rest of the system can’t be located at boot-time, which on KNOPPIX in specific “crashes” to a “very minimal shell” in which you can essentially do nothing at all.  When a CD drive is old, dirty, or otherwise impaired, you can have these failures as well as major problems when the KNOPPIX cloop driver chokes on every little scratch in the disc surface.  Slax sucks because it constantly spews out OOPSes in the kernel log when you don’t use a “fresh mode” to boot, and since it doesn’t come with any of the specific tools we need (and the only way to properly add them is to make a squashfs thing I don’t feel like dealing with) it’s a huge pain in the rectum.  Enter the Tritech Service System: completely customized for our own exact needs, reliant only on the bootloader working as expected and not locking a CD drive or USB flash drive in the process, and EXTREMELY FAST to work with.  Plus I made a cool green-on-black splash screen to go with it.  The fact that it easily installs on any Windows XP machine as a boot menu option seals the deal.  NO OTHER COMPUTER SERVICE COMPANY HAS THIS POWERFUL TOOL.  Granted, any sufficiently skilled Linux nut could do what I’ve done, but most Linux nuts would rather deal with KNOPPIX forever than go to the trouble of making their own custom distro from scratch.  The lack of Linux-knowledgeable techs out there makes it impractical for a large company to even bother with.  Now all of you that thought my claim of being the only company that is capable of doing this was audacious can understand exactly why I can make that claim and support it.  We’re not to the point that I’m willing to release it to the public yet, but it’s been so much better than KNOPPIX or Slax on every system I can boot it on that I’ve fast-tracked my development on it and I’m making it a very high priority on my list of things to do.  Stay tuned.
• We cleaned up the shop.  I’m not kidding: we REALLY CLEANED UP THE SHOP, big time.  One unfortunate problem with computer geeks is a complete lack of organization, particularly with a shop as busy as mine usually is.  We didn’t have many customers at all over the past week, so I took full advantage of the opportunity to give the place a brutal cleaning.  We’ve moved all the security camera equipment, run permanent wires that we’ve been using temps for for months now, purchased lots of additional storage bins and shelving and made excessive use of all of it, organized and better proceduralized the process of shuffling customer equipment in and out and keeping said equipment organized and together, tossed out an insane number of disintegrating cardboard boxes we REALLY didn’t need, built a central working “kiosk” at the front of the shop where we can print invoices and perform other administrative tasks (where previously all of this work was done on our own individual workstations in the back of the shop), optimized the table configuration for better access to existing power and network cables, completely cleared off the bird’s nest of wires that had formed on the front tables due to lots of working and no time to clean up after it, and a ton of other minor things I don’t even want to think about right now.
• I mowed the lawn at my house.  Like an idiot, I did so at 4 PM instead of waiting until it started to get cooler in the evening.  Boy, push mowers SUCK.
• Yes, the last item was comic relief.  So is this one.
• I recently managed to use Linux to fully change XP HALs, rendering all of my disparate XP “clean system images” obsolete.  I’m actually looking at ways to get chntpw/reged to be easily scripted.  They’re the most useful and most underdeveloped Windows tools on Linux that I know of, and a reged that is inherently script-friendly (without using expect) would be a boon to the Tritech Service System, as well as frustrated sysadmins in general around the world.  With a fully scriptable reged/chntpw, I can write a simple package for TSS that replaces HALs on images without any additional effort, making life much easier for my technicians (and myself) in the long run!
• We also created a custom HAL.INF file that opens up access to all the XP HALs from XP itself.  Reverting to “Standard PC” pre-imaging and then using this file in the images to allow changing to, say, “ACPI Multiprocessor PC” would be much easier than having six images per XP type (home retail/OEM, pro retail/OEM, MCE OEM) and would save TONS of disk space on the poor old server.
• I’m also writing a custom Web-based Tritech administration system using PHP and MySQL (well duh), which will let me throw a bunch of crap out of my filing cabinet and go nearly paperless.  Invoice creation will also be much easier, because invoices, work orders, and inventory usage share huge amounts of information between them already, so invoice creation would essentially be a two-click thing for most jobs.
• We raised our prices.  Let’s face it: we charge by the half-hour already, and $80 per hour is outrageously cheap for access to my skills and the skills of the technicians I contract work to and teach my ways to.  We may need to go up again, and I’d love some feedback on that.  I feel that we should because we’re selling a level of quality that Siler City, Pittsboro, Goldston, and all the other towns in Chatham County can’t get within an hour’s driving distance, but of course I fear pricing myself out of business at the same time.  Given the economic climate right now, I’m not keen on going up too fast, but we could use some capital SOON.  Plus, that pesky $65,000 in small business loans is still hanging over my head, sucking up essentially all of the “profits” and converting them to expenses.  The rest is used to buy what we need to keep serving customers in the future.  Even if we charged $100 per hour, our competitors’ bench fees and rates put them at or above that price tag on almost every job, and unfortunately Chatham County’s pre-existing computer service shops apparently have the worst customer service and/or technical skill you can imagine, considering we hear horrible anecdotes from multiple customers on a DAILY BASIS about who we’re supposedly “competiing with.”  I’d hardly call them competition at this point; we’ve had two separate laptops come in that I personally serviced where Siler City’s established computer shop I won’t name had charged $100 or more to look at each and came back with the answer that “it’s unfixable, you need to buy a new laptop.”  In both cases, I fixed the problem in less than five minutes.  One was a loose LCD data cable behind the laptop screen, the other was a RAM stick either making bad contact or the SODIMM socket going out (I moved the stick from one socket to the other.)  I’m so upset when these things happen, and I know I shouldn’t be, but I feel that these things tarnish the reputation of the industry as a whole and bring customers to my door wondering if I’m going to screw them over before they’ve even met anyone on my staff.  I digress a bit, though; should I raise prices from $40 per half hour to $50 per half hour?  What do you think?
• We now have four technicians that come here to get jobs regularly, and all of them are awesome at what they do.  They really care about my customers, and that’s what I like!

That’s about it for now.  I have a repair job I’m working on that I must return to, so I have to wrap this post up.  A construction company owner and long-time client of mine got a HORRIBLE virus infection, and I have gone very far out of my way to personally see to it that he’s back up by 8 AM tomorrow (Monday) morning.  His system went down completely on Friday.  If you’re a client or potential client of my business, I want you to know that just like I’m doing for his business, I will bend over backwards and do whatever I must to make sure you’re taken care of.  I’ll post more anecdotes about how I do this later.  That’s all, folks.  Happy computing!

Antivirus 2010 on the horizon…and how we’ll help destroy it!

I just put up a new site in anticipation of the latest nuisance that I only recently came into contact with: “Antivirus 2010.”  You can view the new site at removeantivirus2010.com, but be aware that it’s pre-release at the moment, which is why I haven’t done any SEO or cross-linking for it yet beyond this post.

Antivirus 2010 is the successor to the infamous beasts “Antivirus 2009″ and “XP Antivirus 2008.”  The scammers behind these fake security programs have literally raked in hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’m quite sick of seeing them on our customers’ computers.  The major problem with removing these kinds of beasties lies in their inner workings: they use rootkit tactics inside kernel-mode drivers loaded very early in the boot process to hide themselves from any and all anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions on the market.  The loaded driver’s name always starts with the capitalized string “TDSS” and the older versions use “TDSSserv.sys” as the name.  The ultimate problem is that there is no simple way to delete this driver because of the security manipulation done by this virus: the service registry key permissions are typically null, automatically meaning everything in Windows is denied access to it and successfully hiding it from programs like AutoRuns, StartupList, MSConfig, and HijackThis; furthermore, the virus hooks numerous key NT kernel system calls and “edits itself out of the list” whenever a directory listing or process list is requested by any program on the system, such as Task Manager, Windows Explorer, and even whatever antivirus solution you use.

Worst of all, it locks your system down like this even in safe mode, and its early boot loading means boot-time scanning solutions such as Avast’s can’t get rid of it either.  It’s a truly clever little booger, immune from all your favorite security software.

Spybot can’t get it, nor Ad-Aware or Malwarebytes.  We can get it all gone, but traditionally you had to call a very highly skilled and expensive local technician to get this stuff removed, because a clean boot environment is required as well as somewhat complicated knowledge about the inner workings of Windows and how viruses tend to slip up in the process of securing their presence on your system.  Antivirus 2010 makes almost no mistakes, so you’re currently stuck either getting that expensive local tech or reinstalling.

Until now.

I’m currently writing software that will give Tritech access to a 100% clean environment remotely–free from viruses and spyware, which enables us to perform these horribly difficult virus removals remotely.  The details will remain a secret, but suffice it to say that there are precisely zero computer service providers in the industry today that can perform this kind of service right now: the kind of custom software needed poses a significant barrier to entry, and the alternatives are so much easier and safer to rely on.

It’s revolutionary.  Plain and simple.  No one else we’ve found does anything like it.  We’ve checked.  Regardless of whether you need to remove Antivirus 2010, remove Antivirus 360, remove Antivirus 2009, remove SecurityCenter 2009, or remove any other disgusting infection, we’re rolling out a campaign that can get it done, regardless of your location.  You don’t have to find a local tech and you don’t have to pay out the yin-yang.

Imagine getting this done wherever you are in the world, even if you’re in a hotel in Germany, and paying as little as $30 to have it done.  Geek Squad charges a minimum of $199 (I really hate that whole “$999.99 can be advertised as under $1,000″ pricing scheme! GRR!!!) to do this in-store, and they don’t even offer over-the-internet virus and spyware removal.  PlumChoice charges nearly $90 just to hop on their “SmartPlan,” and they can’t do what we do without an on-site appointment either. iYogi…well, if you think you’ll get this kind of quality and experience at their pricing level, you deserve what you get…they’re like a version of Dell’s Indian tech support that you actually pay money for, and you shouldn’t be supporting the iYogi Craigslist spammers anyway.

Bottom line: only Tritech Computer Solutions in Siler City, North Carolina, USA can remove difficult infections of viruses and spyware over the Internet.  No one else does this, period.

(Edit: a commenter objected to this statement, indicating that it implies other remote computer service providers are ill-equipped to handle difficult virus infections.  The distinction lies in the fact that no one that we have looked at currently does anything like what we’re rolling out; they certainly COULD do it, but they don’t; that’s why it says “no one else does this” instead of “no one else is capable of doing this.”  What we’re rolling out is unique, and fills a niche currently worked around by hiring a local technician…which sort of negates the purpose of “remote computer support” in the first place.  See comments on this post for more information.)

The only bad news is that this is still a work in progress.  I’ll update this post when that changes, as well as post a new one.  We’re looking to have this support platform completely up and running within about two weeks; more testing is necessary before release to ensure maximum reliability, but when this service of ours officially opens for business, it’s going to completely pull the rug out from under all of our competitors, and we can literally say that NO ONE ELSE does it.  We’re truly one of a kind in this industry.

STOP 0×0000007E after upgrading to an AMD platform?

[EDIT: We've got a more easily understood and elegant solution to this problem that only requires an XP CD.  See our update post on the subject.]

If you get a STOP 0×0000007E error after upgrading to an AMD platform from an Intel platform, i.e. replacing an Intel-chipset motherboard with something like a VIA or AMD or nForce or ATI chipset for an Athlon64, here’s a little hint that’ll help you avoid a complete reinstall from scratch:

It’s the “intelppm.sys” driver.

Pop in an XP CD or a KNOPPIX (or other live Linux distro with read-write NTFS capability) CD, find your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, and rename intelppm.sys to something else, such as intelppm.old, and that’s the end of that problem. (%systemroot% is your Windows installation folder.)

We’ve been running into this a lot lately and just recently took the time to figure it out instead of reinstalling completely clean.  Don’t let it bog you down the same way.

Hooking up a wireless router to DSL service

One of my customers recently contacted me because she had moved her computer equipment and her DSL service subsequently stopped working.  I had to explain to her that she should plug her DSL modem into a COMPUTER (LAN) port on her router, rather than the INTERNET (WAN) port.  Problem solved.

“But that’s not how you’re supposed to connect a wireless router!” you might exclaim.  Let me explain the why and how of the situation.

DSL connects using a technique that essentially amounts to “dial-up for high-speed connections” known as PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet), and back in “the good old days” when you got a DSL connection, you also got a DSL modem that directly connected your computer to the DSL network.  The problem with that is that you still have to “dial up” to get on your DSL, one of the annoyances that cable Internet service providers conveniently remove from the user’s experience.

In order to compete better with cable, the telephone companies started using a different kind of DSL modem that would perform almost all of the functions you get in a non-wireless router.  Modern DSL modems typically “dial up” and maintain the DSL connection for you.  One of the side effects of this is that the vast majority of these “self-dialing” DSL modems also provide router functions as well.  This means that it assigns each of your computers a private IP address and is capable of “splitting” the connection such that more than one machine can use the DSL connection at once.

The big nasty problem: many of them don’t have wireless capability, nor do they have more than ONE port for you to plug a computer into.  They appear to work just like cable modems, where you can almost “plug-n-go” (after setting up your user name and password for the “dial-up” part), but they don’t look like they have any router functions at all.

Enter your own $50 wireless router.  You plug it into the DSL modem and…maybe it works, but typically it just doesn’t.  You also can’t forward ports e.g. for gaming if you use a DSL modem with an internal router connected to yet another router doing routing yet again.  What happens if you follow the directions in the router’s manual is sketchy at best.

(Before you read on, you need to make sure that the DSL modem works and you can browse the Internet without issues.)

Now, enter my solution to the problem!  All you need is the IP address for the router, which can easily be acquired from the ISP, or quite accurately guessed if you connect the computer to the DSL modem directly, go to a command prompt [Start, Run, "cmd"] and type in “ipconfig,” and use the “gateway address” that appears there.  (Type “exit” to close a command prompt.)  Once you’ve got the IP address for the router, connect the new wireless router only to a computer.  You can use the same “ipconfig” trick as above to get the router’s IP address, and type that IP address into the web browser of your choice.  It will likely ask for a user name and password; the most common combinations for a brand new router tend to be the following:

• admin, (blank password)
• (blank user name), admin
• admin, admin
• admin, password

Your router’s instruction manual should tell you these if you’re not sure.  Once you’re in the router’s configuration controls, you can then proceed to do the following:

1. If the router’s IP address doesn’t start with the same three numbers as the DSL modem, you have to change the router’s LAN configuration so that the first three numbers match.  For example, if the router is at 192.168.2.1 and the DSL modem uses 192.168.1.254, you need to get the router to switch over to start with “192.168.1.” first.  This may be called the “router IP address” or the “LAN IP address.”  When you change and apply this setting, you may have to re-type the IP for the router so that the first three digits match the new settings (192.168.1.1 in this example) and log back into the router.
2. With the router’s IP address and the DSL modem’s IP address in the same “range,” you now must ensure the DSL modem and the router don’t have the exact same IP address.  For example, both cannot be 192.168.1.1 at the same time as this will cause them to “break” each other when they are connected together.  Change the router’s IP to end in 1 or 254, depending on the DSL modem’s IP.  This may also be under LAN settings, however I have seen Linksys routers where this is on the first page and you don’t have to even look hard for it.  If you change and apply this setting, you’ll have to re-type the IP for the router as at the end of (1) above.
3. Your DSL modem and wireless router both start with the same three nunbers (192.168.1 in this example) but end in different numbers (1 for wireless router, 254 for DSL here).  The final step is to disable DHCP or “IP address assignment” on the wireless router.  This prevents the wireless router from giving computers its own configuration, and allows the DSL modem with routing capabilities to do so instead.  This is usually just a check box that you un-check.  Once you’ve applied this setting, you’ve completed the hard part of the router configuration.
4. You may want to take the opportunity to set up your wireless router’s encryption options since you’re already in there.  The best bet will be WPA-PSK, as this is generally compatible with almost everything out there today and does not require any patching for most Windows XP laptops.  WPA2 is stronger but somewhat incompatible, and WEP is weak but extremely compatible with practically every wireless device under the sun.  All of these options keep the neighbors from, say, robbing Bank of America blind via your Internet connection (not that they’re using $100’s as napkins right now, given the current financial market crisis) and BofA and the FBI tracing it back to your house!
5. Connect the DSL modem to one of the Computer or LAN ports on the back of the wireless router, not to the Internet or WAN port because it is guaranteed to fail if you do.  Plug any computers into the router’s remaining Computer or LAN ports, connect laptops to the new wireless network, and things should Magically Just Work(TM).

Why go through all this complicated stuff to set up the DSL connection?  The alternative is setting up the DSL modem in “bridged mode,” setting up the wireless router to dial-up via PPPoE, giving it your username and password, and setting it to be a keep-alive connection.  Some DSL modem firmware doesn’t even give you the ability to use “bridged mode” at all, meaning that you may not even have that option!

This method essentially converts your wireless router into a “wireless bridge with 3-port switch.”  The computers and DSL modem don’t know that anything has changed, and generally speaking it hasn’t.  The big difference is that now you can connect your wireless devices to the same network.  By cutting out a second routing system, you give yourself the ability to open ports on the DSL modem for applications such as gaming, if needed in the future, and if you replace your DSL modem with another that works the same way, you don’t have to make changes to anything at all because the DSL modem being in “bridged mode” is no longer relevant.  (What if your ISP took away bridging?  They wouldn’t, but what if they did?  Your loss, eh?)

I connect all DSL clients this way.  It’s more easily serviced by the client if something goes wrong, and it’s far faster and more reliable to set up than mucking around with PPPoE and DSL modem network bridging.

What’s most important, though, is that it works and works well.  Ultimately, that’s all we care about.