If traffic statistics are any indicator, my previous post “The Failure of a SysAdmin – A Tale of Laziness, Good Fortune and Self Loathing” seemed to resonate among my fellow technologists. Perhaps each of us can share a story or three about some self inflicted near-catastrophe being spryly avoided by mere happenstance. I suspect that many a SysAdmin, below the oft feigned bravado and BOFH platitudes, suspects that he’s lagging several steps behind everyone else’s level of competence. As a result, there seems to be something cathartic in listening to the failures of another admin. Or maybe those of us who feel that way are just slackers after all and enjoy listening in on confessionals just to salve an aching conscience. I really don’t know. Perhaps I’ll explore it more in a later post.

Nonetheless, I received some good responses on Twitter about my tale of woe. One of the responses I received about the post was by Shane Madden via Twitter:

@Nonapeptide Why not just have KeePass automatically keep backup copies of modified entries, instead of managing them manually?

I thought about it for a minute. “KeePass? Keep backups?” Puzzled, I did a Google search for KeePass backups. I didn’t find exactly what Shane was talking about, but I did find plenty of things that I was not aware of. Did you know that KeePass has plugins? Lots of them? There are plugins to help backup the database, automatically reorder entries, extend the forms to accept other information like credit cards, enhanced search capabilities and much, much more. Oh, and apparently I’ve been using a three year old version of KeePass Classic and I wasn’t aware of the Enterprise Edition that allows for all sorts of new features, one of which is syncing password files!

Okay, all of that info is great, but it really wasn’t helping me understand what Shane was telling me. I mentioned it to him directly and he pointed me to the advanced options of KeePass under “backup”. Technically mine is under “General (2)” because I’m using KeePassX on Linux. To understand the rest of the post, you’ll need to know a bit about KeePass itself. In KeePass, there’s a folder at the bottom of the Groups pane called “Backup”.

I’ve seen that folder, and even poked through it on occasion. The problem is that I did not understand that folder. I did not know what its function was. I’ve been using KeePass for so long that I grew astigmatism against seeing that backup folder. From KeePass’s own help files on version 2 of the software:

Each entry got its own history. Each time you change an entry, KeePass automatically creates a backup copy of the current, non-modified entry before saving the new values. These backup copies are listed on the History tab page. You can delete backup copies if you are sure that you won’t need them anymore, or you can restore any of the backup copies.

While that’s the documentation for KeePass Professional and not KeePassX, it appears that the behavior is the same. So everytime a change is made, the pre-change entry is copied and dumped in the backup folder. My own actions for backing up my entries was redundant and inefficient (am I the only one that sees humor in putting those two words side by side?).

I. Am. Brilliant.

I wondered if my recent panic in this previous post was even warranted. Remember what happened? I went pitched a fit because I thought I had mishandled the domain admin password. Well, in reality, I did mishandle the password and apparently the suicide-bomber levels of cortisol that the incident must have triggered in my body were completely warranted. Why? When I opened up that KeePass file, even though I was able to see a historical list of all the times I modified the domain admin entry, I still did not see a fourth domain admin password (I’ve had to change it five times since deploying that domain, and the fifth time was as a result of losing the fourth password).

Here’s what I think happened and why it still ties back to not knowing enough about KeePass. I have a bad habit of keeping KeePass open all the time, and specifically I keep individual entries opened and don’t close them. My habit is to open an entry, copy and paste the password into where I need it and then go about work, completely forgetting about the open KeePass window. Hours later I’ll see that there’s an open window for an entry. I won’t trust myself that I might have accidentally changed the information, so I merely click the close box. However, there are some times when I have no recollection if I’ve made legit changes to an entry or not. Am I closing a window with a change that really needs to be committed? I usually take my chances and just close the window since so far most of the time I just open an entry to retrieve info and not change anything.

(I do believe that KeePass has a small shortcoming in this: If you have edited an entry and “X out” of the entry’s window, there is no confirmation dialog box if the entry has changed. No “are you sure you want to close this windows? Information has been changed!” I am willing to believe that my unfamiliarity with the program is biting me once again, and perhaps there’s an option somewhere to change this behavior.)

Ultimately though, the fault is mine in two areas. First, my workflow and discipline are broken. I need to just make a small tweak to how I behave and close the darned entry window after I’ve either modified the entry or used the password. That way I’ll never have to worry about being able to remember if I’ve modified an entry legitimately, modified it errantly or just forgotten to close the window. To quote “Nick Burns, Computer Guy” – “IS THAT SO HARD?!”

The second mea culpa is that my worries about errantly modifying entries is a moot point if KeePass makes copies of an entry as you modify it. Even if I twiddled some characters around in the password by accident it not a huge problem! KeePass makes a copy of the pre-twiddled entry. Of course, the better option is to pay more attention and not twiddle things, but just in case, KeePass has my back. I just didn’t learn enough about the program to know that my worries about wrongly modifying entries as well as concerns over keeping my own history of passwords were completely foolish.

The Takeaway

I’m stuck in a dilemma. I’m the kind of person who when opening a book for the first times feels an obsessive need to read the copyright and edition printing information. I read the dust cover, all forewords, dedications, introductions, the table of contents, table of images, index, appendices and if I could do it I’d analyze the paper stock to see what mill it was manufactured at. Oddly, those compulsions are exactly why I can’t seem to get much out of books because I’m obsessed with minutia and can’t sew sentences into larger fabrics of thought. Part of the reason I get that obsessive is a long standing desire to know everything. Over the years, I’ve had to calm myself down and realize that I can’t know everything about everything and that I need to be content with not knowing some things. The problem is, I think I’ve had too much success with reigning my obsessions in and now I’m too content with ignorance.

Just like the many reports that say humans only use a small part of their brain (although the science behind those claims is sketchy), most of us sysadmins only use a very small percentage of the apps we use each day. How much is a responsible amount to know about each of those apps? Are we supposed to know as much as the developer? Should we be able to teach advanced classes in them? It seems to be humanly impossible to be able to teach advanced classes in more than a handful of applications and topics. That’s why such a premium is put on certain people who are known to be gurus. They have intimate knowledge of a thing that can only be gained by much use and learning. But that takes time and a person can only know so much.

Each app that we launch is much larger than we really know. Maybe in some cases we can know the app front to back, but when you consider its possible interactions with other apps suddenly it becomes almost infinitely complex. What is the limit to our responsibility to know an app? How can we gauge just how much we need to know? What determines which apps we should learn about since being deeply knowledgeable in virtually any app that we come in contact with can have amazing benefits?

Here’s what I’ve come up with as I’ve grappled with this dilemma:

Sort all of the applications you use in the course of a week by the time you spend using them. Pick the top three. Even if one is just an email app. That can also mean web apps (Constant Contact, PeopleSoft, Joomla, WordPress, whatever). To make that list, you might want to use a program like RescueTime that automatically tracks active apps or use something more manual like kTimeTracker or even one of the time tracking tools I listed out in this post. Once you know the top three apps you spend time with, you can move on to the next part.

This one is a little trickier. Make a list of the top three most important apps based on the value of the information you are interacting with. Maybe KeePass isn’t opened for a long time on my computer so it won’t show up high on the list that I made above, but it is by far one of the most valuable tools I use since some of the most important professional and personal information I have is in there. Another app that could be of high importance to me is either phpMyAdmin or MySQL Workbench. I don’t often crack open a MySQL database, but when I do it’s for either backup or restoration purposes. I’m touching very important data, and I need to understand the tool I’m working with better. For example, I really have no idea what 90% of the options are on the export tab of phpMyAdmin and yet that’s what I use most often when needing to get data.

If you’ve done what I suggested above, you’ll have a list of six apps that are of great importance to you. Now you know what to do. Get to learnin’. Perhaps make a plan to spend an hour a day simply reading about it. Get some books, do some Google searching or maybe get a subscription to Lynda or Safari. One of my favorite things to do is intentionally hunt down menus and drop down boxes that I’ve never seen before or always wondered “just what does that do anyway?” and learn about them.  One hour on each program six days a week. That’s not a heavy investment for the amount of benefits you could reap.

So how do you handle the apps that you use everyday? Do you dive into them or are you content to skate on the surface? Have you ever been bitten by not knowing enough about an app? Oh, and if you decide to take my advice about organizing and learning your most important applications or you make your own spin-off of it, let me know how it works out for you!

P.S. For my next confessional post, does anyone want to hear about the website that I help out with that went down last week without proper backups?

I sat staring at a blinking insertion point in an open KeePass window. My mind was having trouble processing what was being seen. Moments earlier I had the need to log into a client’s Microsoft SBS 2008 machine that was humming along happily in an office about 600 miles away from me. That SBS box’s domain policy requires the password be changed every three months and I had changed the password about a month or so earlier. Since I hadn’t done much work for them recently I couldn’t remember the new password.

“Not a problem,” I smugly thought to myself, “for I am the password master!“. I keep a rather meticulous KeePass file on their network which I manually update with all account passwords for that office. I opened the file and found the domain admin account’s entry. “That’s strange…” I thought while glaring suspiciously at the “password” field. It contained the previous quarter’s password. I keep a running history of each quarter’s password for a “just in case” scenario, so I looked back to see if I had mistakenly labeled the entry for the new password as an old password. I noticed that two of the old password entries had the same password. I stared as the underweight hamster in my mind turned the flywheel of salient thought. My breathing was surprisingly even considering what possibilities were only just beginning to be seen on the horizon.

It appears that when I last changed the password, I typed it into KeePass like a good little button masher, but then when moving the old password into a historic entry, I must have been careless and pasted the old password over the new password and saved the file. Either that or I closed the KeePass file without saving changes. I’ve certainly done that before (once just today on a VPS’s root account; Yay for keypair SSH tunnels!). Certainly something in my password documentation workflow could be improved (not the least of which is my concentration). Regardless of what I could do in the future to prevent this from happening, nothing was changing the fact that I didn’t have the new password documented in the proper place. Oh, and did I mention that my domain admin passwords are nearly incomprehensible strings of 16 or more characters? That means I had no chance of remembering it.

Hark! There was another possibility. I occasionally sync the remote office’s KeePass files to my local network for convenience. Perhaps I entered the new domain admin password into the local copy of the files. If by chance in my carelessness I edited a local copy and not their copy I might be saved! “Oh please, Oh please, Oh please be in there…”

It was not to be so. My local copies were identical to the office’s copies. Apparently I studiously synced their KeePass file to my local network after mangling the entry for the domain admin. The noose was tightening and I was getting angrier at myself by the second. Had I just been more careful and double checked my work…

But Wait! I have a simple Word document that I keep updated with that office’s most important information (safely stored, of course – but still it makes me uncomfortable. Alas). It’s an old-fashioned hard copy of the most important passwords and disaster recovery information for the office’s computer systems. I check it for freshness at the beginning of every month and print two copies out. One copy gets kept at the accountant’s home (he also swaps out the backup hard drives every week and keeps them in his home office as an offsite backup) and the other copy goes to the Assistant to the Board of Directors. Both fellows are former bank managers, both are sufficiently concerned with security for the needs of that organization. I trust them to keep good care of those hard copies. In theory I could simply look at the hard copy information and get the domain admin password.

I didn’t even need to check that document, however. I knew I hadn’t updated it in months. The last update I performed was well before the last domain admin password change. The time it took for hope to spring up inside of me over the idea of the hard copies only to be let down by my dereliction of duty took about half a second. I winced at how I had shirked those responsibilities.

“Breach of contract!” “Lying down on the job!” “Filthy moocher taking their money!” All things many people would be justified in shouting at me. However, this office is a non-profit, run by family friends for which I do all of my work on a volunteer basis. They know and are okay with me giving them whatever time I can spare to them between my other responsibilities. Does that mean that I can glibly botch domain admin passwords with nary a care in the world? Well, no. If I’m going to take on responsibilities, then I need to either carry them out to the utmost or divest myself of them entirely. However, at least I didn’t have the added guilt of taking money for a job not done.

I slumped in my office chair. Visions of taking a 600 mile road trip to reset the domain admin password SRVANY / INSTSRV style passed before my eyes. Of course, the SBS 2008 machine has an onboard ILO chip that would have helped me handle the situation nicely from the relative comfort of my desk chair, but as fate would have it, the firmware has some issues preventing me from logging into it and I needed to schedule my yearly trip there to physically handle that procedure (I don’t trust anyone locally to do it with me coaching them over the phone). The mishaps just keep stacking up.

“What a monumental convergence of carelessness and stupidity…”

“Wait… what?” A sparkle in my memory glinted like a distant Tinkerbell swerving between stacks of mental cruft. “I seem to recall… yes… I think I did…” If anyone has been reading this blog with regularity, they’ll know that I’ve been migrating to Fedora 14 from Windows 7. I’ve been using Fedora about 85% of the time; only booting into the Windows partition for apps I haven’t migrated or virtualized yet such as QuickBooks and Steam. My Windows-based remote connection manager of choice is mRemote. That SBS 2008 machine is one of my saved connections, and I made the habit of saving the password in the connection as well. It was possible that I connected to the SBS 2008 machine at least once right after changing the password and saved the new password! I wouldn’t be able to see the password’s characters (of course it’s hashed in the connection file), but I’d at least be able to log into the machine and reset the password to something else.

I nervously rebooted my machine and dropped into my Windows partition. I launched mRemote with great trepidation. mRemote itself doesn’t have a great track record for keeping saved connections safe. If memory serves correct, I’ve had two XML files that had my entire saved connection library suddenly go corrupt with no ability to repair it. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the connection file was corrupted when I most need it? Fortunately it wasn’t.

I found the saved connection to the SBS 2008 server within mRemote’s interface. The password field was filled out with obfuscating black circles so I now knew that I had saved at least some password. Was it the correct password or was this old information as well? I could only hope as I opened the connection. With my breath held captive, the RDP connection began to open. Would I see the remote screen whine “Incorrect Password”? Part of the RDP protocol’s henavior can be something of a tease. You will still get to see the remote login screen if the password is wrong.

Never in my life have I been so happy to see the words “Loading User Profile” across the Windows login screen. I could breathe a bit easier now. After resetting the password and making sure to document it properly, I did a bit of a post mortem on my actions.

Post Mortem

To my knowledge, I exhibited two kinds of laziness here, and neither were of the admirable “Lazy Admin” variety. Most greviously, I did not take care to document my actions. I carelessly handled the single most important secret in that organization’s technology infrastructure.

The second kind of laziness that I showed is a bit borderline. I feel that I was lazy in saving a password in a connection. I’m sure most of us save passwords in a similar manner, and perhaps that’s okay if you know the security level of the encryption used to store the saved password. You also need to secure against your PC being attacked and connections being made using those saved connections. I’m a bit iffy on this part of the story, but maybe I can get a pass. I don’t work for the DoD or need a Top Secret security clearance. Saved passwords do make things easier, especially since the passwords I choose are so complex. Even if the practice itself gets a pass, I don’t believe it’s even close to the kind of laziness in an admin that’s a virtue. Having to fall back on my kind of laziness is frighteningly arbitrary. An especially bad reflection on my character is that several times before this incident happened I wondered as I opened one of the saved connections “What password is this connection even using and have I written it down?” but I did nothing about it.

When it comes down to it, I have all the head knowledge and all of the resources I need to make proper documentation so that things like this never have to happen. I just screwed up. Okay, fine – I’m busy, but who isn’t? Starting a business, transitioning away from a lot of volunteer work, attempting to get some new contracts, working on an existing contract, doing many other different projects and that’s not even mentioning non-professional items (not that there are very many at this moment in my life). But regardless of all that, nothing can excuse performing a job poorly like that. There’s nothing wrong with the tools (unless you count me). That non profit could very well have been in some serious trouble if I had lost the domain admin password. Trouble in the form of lost productivity or even broken compliance and fines.

The Result:

I woke up and smelled the coffee. I’m trying to make it a long term change. It made me stop and take stock of if I’m just too busy to have all the responsibilities that I currently do. It’s made me taste what I already know: You can’t take things for granted. The problem is that if the responsibilities that I have right now are taking up so many hours of my time when I’m really only performing a 60% job on them, then to do a 100% job on them I’ll need to drop some things. Time to make some decisions.

Have you ever had a painful moment that made you take stock of your attitude toward work? Ever had some unknown or unacknowledged irresponsible actions shown to you in a painful way? You can comment below, and I promise I’ll never judge you or reveal your true identity. =)

As a result of a tweet of mine, I had some rather funny responses that I agreed with.

It’s long been a frustration of mine, however my ire was most recently raised over this topic by a certain company who makes a remote control appliance. To be fair, the company makes a fine product and they totally blow away their competition. However, they leave no clue on their site how much their appliances cost nor a ballpark figure for their Standard or Enterprise licenses. I resorted to Googling to find what their customers are chattering about on the webs concerning their pricing and found that they are indeed one of the highest priced offerings in their market space. Fortunately, word on the street is that they work with you on the prices, but still… why should I have to resort to trolling for water-cooler banter to find out something simple like the price?

There are a number of things that go through my mind when I land on a vendor’s pricing page only to see the dreaded words “Request a Quote!” Here they are:

Our prices are so absurdly high that we know you’ll walk away from us in disgust and consider our competition if we publicly reveal them.

Isn’t this what we all think immediately? It makes the most sense. You only hide what you’re ashamed of or are afraid of being misunderstood over. So why not just fly your flag high and show how much you cost? At least show some guts and don’t apologize for yourself. I’d have more respect for a company to come out and show their prices as being very high than to keep it hidden to ellude me.

On the positive side, perhaps they’re hoping that the product will speak for itself and don’t want people to be distracted by the price. If that’s the most positive spin I can put on this topic, that’s pretty sad.

We don’t trust the merit of our product enough to sell you, so we force you to contact a sales “engineer” so that they can pressure you into buying.

This is actually my biggest fear. I’m already convinced that the product is insanely expensive. However, that doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the likelihood of an army of soul-less sales reps descending on me like Cessna-sized zombie mosquitoes intent on exsanguinating my budget as a light snack. And oh yes, it happens. If you will not be forthright with me about your prices, I am fearing for my privacy that an overzealous sales rep will be air-lifted to my house looking like Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

We’re living the high life sipping Dom Perignon from empty Almas caviar containers in the driver’s seat of our Pagani Zondas.

No, I don’t believe that your profit margins are being used to feed starving orphans in Namibia. I think you’re trying to live like Google by having free snack machines in your lunch room and masseuses roaming the halls looking for any kind of billable work. At least send a masseuse to me when I have to buy one of your “Platinum Service Contracts”. And some chocolate covered malt balls. I love those things.

Our business is in such financial peril that we have to charge heinous amounts of money for our product and we require yearly support contract updates to keep us afloat.

Honestly, rather than the vendor living the high life this is what seems more likely to me. Your business is failing, you can’t figure out what to make your margins on, no one will give you VC, buy equity or offer you a loan so now you have to jack up your prices. You’re really re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and you’ll be out of business in 6 months leaving me with 18 months left on an overpriced support contract.

We want to research what organization you work for so we can tailor a special price gouge just for you!

My suspicions about this are confirmed when the “organization” field is made to be mandatory. Do you want to see if I’m an upstart so you can assign your least responsive reps to my lower-end account? Or maybe I’m a major corporation so you can upsell my boss’s boss on your latest cash blackhole? Better yet, perhaps I’m a government entity or government contractor! Damn the capex limits… FULL INVOICING AHEAD!

Thanks to @SrslyJosh for this one.

We believe that our product will eventually be commoditized and until that happens we will be as opaque as possible with our business.

Really? I mean… REALLY? A lack of transparency makes me fear that your business model has cracks in it and you’re fluctuating your price drastically and frequently to ride the waves out.

Thanks to @JohnLockie for this one.

In order to hide the real cost of our products they are arranged in such a byzantine structure with so many variant pricing schemes that you won’t know how to decipher them anyway, so please contact us to be put in touch with a pricing ninja (+5 Confusion Spells against C-level execs).

We’ve all seen tiered edition and pricing structures that made us have to brush off our UML skills to chart out the possibilities. Wouldn’t it be nice if the vendor just obscured all of our choices and chose what was best for us? ಠ_ಠ

Thanks to @j_angliss for this one.

Are there any vendors out there reading this? Can you please explain whythere’s secrecy over your product’s pricing? It only engenders suspicion and distrust on the part of potential customers. Then again, if you A/B tested your pricing page and found that it converted better, who am I to get in the way. You’d better have an awesome product though, because if you’re barely better than the competition I’ll choose the more transparent company’s products most of the time.

Finally, if you’re a purchaser, what else do you think of when your vendor doesn’t show their prices at all? Any suspicions that I didn’t hit? Let me know in the comments.

As Preston Kutzner recently said to me, NTFS is a harsh mistress when accessing it via Linux. I am using Fedora 14 and have a LaCie 2big external hard drive connected via USB. The 2big is configured as a RAID 1 set using it’s own built-in RAID hardware. When I try to open the drive in Nautilus I receive the following error:

Unable to mount LaCie 2Big.

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (1953519615): Invalid argument

HINTS:

• Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn’t setup yet,
• or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm –build …),
• or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
• or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
• or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).

Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Invalid argument. The device ‘/dev/sdc1′ doesn’t seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Being new to the world of Happy Little Penguins I spent a full day Googling, learning plenty of new things at every step and button mashing in the form of running shell commands that I had only just learned about moments earlier.

I’m certain that through this whole ordeal a solution existed and that evidences of the problem were staring me in the face the whole time. I am further certain that a more elegant solution existed than the scorched-earth one that I chose (that you will find out about in just a moment), but I am too much of a neophyte to pick up on them much less be able to act on anything I might have noticed.

I could see the 2big in the /dev folder at /dev/sdc1. The 2Big is listed in /dev/disk/by-id as the following:

usb-LaCie_2_BigQuadra_00D04BA80A0443AE-0:0
usb-LaCie_2_BigQuadra_00D04BA80A0443AE-0:0-part1

It is listed in by-label as the following:

LaCiex202Big

It is listed in by-path as the following:

pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:3.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:3.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1

Finally, it is listed by-uuid as the following:

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root  10 Mar  2 14:29 3E421CD2421C90AF -> ../../sdc1

fdisk -l /dev/sdc shows the following:

Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000153686016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121595 cylinders, total 1953425168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe7479c04
 
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1            2048  1953521663   976759808    7  HPFS/NTFS

I created a new folder /mnt/2big and ran mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/2big and received the same error as I did in Nautilius (as if I wouldn’t have?). I decided to search the generic error, rather than focus on anything to do with the LaCie drive. “Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12” brought back some interesting things. One of the “solutions” was to reformat the disk with gparted. That is not an option I wanted to exercise unless as a last resort.

I then tried: ntfsfix /dev/sdc1

Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdc1 was processed successfully.

I then rebooted into Windows expecting that a chkdsk would be automatically requested to be performed. It was not, so I booted back in Linux to try a few more things before attempting a manual chkdsk within Windows. I installed testdisk thinking that I could perform some kind of partition table rebuild with it. After analyzing the 2big I received this interesting error:

Disk /dev/sdb - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121596 255 63
The harddisk (1000 GB / 931 GiB) seems too small! (< 1000 GB / 931 GiB)
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...
The following partition cant be recovered:
 
Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 121601  25 24 1953519616 [LaCie 2Big]
 
[ Continue ]
 
NTFS, 1000 GB / 931 GiB

At about that point, someone wondered what NTFS driver I was using so I made sure that I was using ntfs-3g. I then decided to use Cfdisk to do some probing. Cfdisk /dev/sdb1 got me this error:

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends after end-of-disk

So apparently the partition was sized larger than the disk. And Windows is okay with this and will perform without complaint? No attempt to fix it is made? Insert angry face here.

I then plugged the 2big into a Windows Vista machine intending to chkdsk it, but as the disk was being mounted I saw a dialog box warning “Do you want to scan and fix LaCie 2big? There might be a problem with some files on this device or disc. This can happen if you remove the device or disc before all files have been written to it.” Interesting, so suddenly there was some kind of file system error detected. There was an option to scan and fix, but since I was not 100% sure what command would be run, I continued without scanning. Instead I manually ran chkdsk using the /F /V and /X options (Fix errors, show messages and force volume dismount respectively). I plugged the drive into Fedora but still received the same errors as before when mounting it.

At that point, quite a lot of time had been spent researching and testing, so I decided on the easy fix. I had already synced the 2big to another drive before attempting this project so I gparted it (I was too lazy to even try parted), created a new partition and then copied everything back to the 2big. Problem “solved”.

I know that there was likely a less destructive way of ending that saga, but I haven’t had sufficient beatings with the Linux cluebat to know how. Is dealing with NTFS always this frustrating on Linux? What practices and standards has Microsoft been using with how Windows interacts with NTFS volumes that it can apparently have an unhealthy partition table and still work without warning or fixing the problem? I’d seriously consider using ext4 for all my drives and using a plugin like Ext2Read within my windows machines if I didn’t often physically share some drives with other people’s Windows machines.

What are your experiences with NTFS on *NIX machines? Exceedingly painful or am I doing it wrong?

My Problem:

Trying to use Virtual Box 4 on a Fedora 14 installation receives these errors in succession when starting a virtual machine:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine [machine name].
The virtual machine ‘[machine name]‘ has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1.

Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005)
Component:
Machine
Interface:
IMachine {662c175e-a69d-40b8-a77a-1d719d0ab062}

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing ‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’ as root. Users of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary.

My Solution:

This sounds too simple, but it is potentially the solution: Make sure that you are running the latest version of VirtualBox straight from the VirtualBox website and not just the latest version from whatever repositories you’re using. In my case, I was running VirtualBox 4.0.2 which had some issues with my latest Fedora kernel. I had to go to the Virtual Box website and download the RPM for version 4.0.4.

There’s something of a mystery as to why this even works for me since I can’t see that any Virtual Box kernel modules have been installed. Read on for more.

The Long Story:

Trying to get a Windows 7 VM running on Fedora, I launched Virtual Box and made a new virtual machine. When starting it, I received the errors above. I took the advise of the second error dialog box and installed the Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework (dkms-2.1.0.1-1.fc12). Supposedly, the kernel module needed for Virtual Box to work will need to be recompiled after every kernel update. DKMS helps that. Being a Linux noob, I learned about DKMS for the first time through this. I rebooted thinking that would force the rebuild (based on something I read), but that was not the case.

I checked for the existence of the Virtual Box KMOD. lsmod did not show anything that matched *vb* which worried me. Just to make sure, cat /proc/modules | grep *vbox* was also empty. Trying to build the kernel module with vbox_build_module received the dreaded “command not found” error. Many, many different suggestions are made about this error online and different ones work for different situations. Reading on some forums, it appeared that some have had this issue and had to make sure they had the latest version of virtualbox to be compatible with the latest kernel. I was running 4.0.2 and 4.0.4 was out. I uninstalled and then installed the latest version. Voilà! I could launch a VM.

However, I probed a bit more and found something puzzling. I checked the installed kernel modules but found none relating to Virtual Box. vbox_build_module was still not found when run as root in the terminal. No idea yet why this all worked for me in spite of no visible kernel modules. Nonetheless, my ultimate solution was to go directly to Virtual Box’s site and get the latest package for my OS. Don’t rely on your repository to have the latest and greatest version.