Operating systems

Have you recently installed a new HTTPS SSL Certificate and since then, your Server does not boot any more? Only safe mode is working, but many services do not start?
The Cause is a deadlock beween some services, see this HTTP-CryptSvc-LSASS-Deadlock blog post for information about how to solve this without having to reinstall your system.

The behaviour is often seen many times after installing the certificate, as you normally not do a reboot after doing this. Once you install Windows updates, the servers does not come up again, the services do not start and you blame the updates for this. Having spent about 4 days now, we eliminated the problem using the workaround posted above:
from KB 2379016:
In the registry under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP], add a key DependOnService (type REG_SZ_MULTI - multipart string) with the value CRYPTSVC


german seach tags to help them, too:
Dienste starten nach Windowsupdate von Server 2008 nicht mehr,
Nach Installation von SSL-Zertifikat bootet der Rechner nicht mehr

Nach der Aquisition von VirtualBox durch Oracle wurde das CloneVDIGUI-Tool erneut an VirtualBox angepasst. Der Installations- und Registrypfad von VirtualBox (aktuelle Version 3.2.x) hatte sich wieder einmal geändert, so dass die vboxmanage.exe nicht mehr automatisch gefunden wurde.
Die neue Version unterstützt die neuen Standardpfade und Registryeinträge von Oracle und speichert ggf. den manuell ausgewählten Pfad ab, so dass immer wenn der Pfad nicht automatisch gefunden werden kann der gespeicherte Pfad verwendet wird. Weitere Änderungen gibt es in dieser Version keine.

Hinter dem Klick folgt Download, Beschreibung und Changelog CloneVDIGUI.

The VirtualBox command line helper for cloning disk images, CloneVDIGUI, was updated once more after the Aquisition of VirtualBox by Oracle. The default installation path and registry path of virtualbox has changed once again, so vboxmanage.exe was no longer found automatically. The new version now detects the path correclty again (VirtualBox version 3.2.x) and also saves a manually selected path for use whenever the autodetection fails. No other changes were made since the last update.

Download, Description and Changelog of CloneVDIGUI follows after the click.

I recently changed (i.e. enlarged) the size of my Windows Vista boot partition.
Without thinking, I hibernated my system afterwards...
This seems not to be the best idea, as the result was an infinite loop booting:
Directly after the MBR chainloading the windows partition (no matter wheter it was grub, a basic mbr from linux "install-mbr" or whatever) the screen turned black and the system started over again with the POST.

The reason was that it seems like the partition ID had changed.
If you have a Windows Vista Installation CD/DVD at hand - no problem:
Insert, select "repair" at the screen with the big "install" button and answer "yes" to the question: "should I fix your boot problems and restart the system?" - so easy.
I recommend doing a CHKDSK run after this!

But what if you don't have a bootable Vista CD at hands (e.g. you got an OEM version without recovery disc)?

Well, The NeoSmart Files blog is your rescure:
At http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/ you can find a torrent download of an official (?)
Microsoft Vista recovery disc which seems to be an installation disc that only supports recovery, but not installation.
With a total size of only 120MB, this is a real alternative of downloading a complete Windows Vista DVD!

finally, my system is running again – although I lost some files: my opera config and my pidgin accounts file seem gone...

I had this problem already on several (debian) linux machines:
After updating sun-javaX-{bin,jre,plugin}, iceweasel/firefox still references the old (here: 1.4.2) version of java on about:plugins.

This can be solved by simply deleting the ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginsreg.dat file while firefox is not running.
After that, firefox will re-create the file after finding the "new" java plugin.

edit:
Sometimes, there is still an old java version installed and the plugin is linked in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins folder (or any other plugins folder firefox looks in,
there are at least 3 on my debian machine¹ *gnarf*).
As Firefox simply tries to use the first it finds, you have to remove the link (or the old java version) before searching again using the trick described above.

¹ /usr/lib/{mozilla, mozilla-firefox, firefox}/plugins, ~/.mozilla/plugins

(via linuxquestions.org, thx craigevil!)

When you have a usb multifunction printer like I do and you are trying to use the scanner in linux, you may encounter the following behaviour:

When you try to use your scanner using sane (scanimage, xsane, kooka, ...) it seems that nothing happens or you
may receive an error message "error starting printer: invalid argument".

This is normally caused by one of two things:

1. missing permission to use the usb device


2. usb device is blocked by another driver

Continue reading "Linux printing and scanning with multifunction devices"