Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Glo Networks team sharing their technical experiences and thoughts.

Removing E-Trust – Simplified

2011 October 17 – 3:41 pm

In our experience changing between anti-virus software can be more hassle than it first seems. Even if the new antivirus vendor will claim to remove the previous software sometimes it just can’t, and often if a small part of the former remains the new software will not install correctly.

To this end some anti-virus providers offer their own tools for removing, but recently we found we were having difficulties in removing a deployment of E-Trust anti-virus from our customers machines, the customer was locked out of the admin consoles, and we couldn’t see any suitable tools. So rather than walk up to each machine and manually remove, we did what us IT geeks love best and created a script to fit our needs:

@echo off
REM Stopping Services
net stop "eTrust Antivirus Realtime Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM Job Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM RPC Service"
net stop "iTechnology iGateway 4.2"
REM ITM Server
msiexec.exe /qn /X{4A2635AD-91E0-4758-BD1E-CA57C9294F1F}
REM ITM Agent
msiexec.exe /qn /X{85F88F9C-6EB2-426B-88AB-28DA4A3526B9}
REM iTechnology iGateway
msiexec.exe /qn /X{847501DF-07C0-4691-B04A-893929F108AE}

Bear in mind that this works for our customers specific version of E-Trust, and for different versions the Product Codes (those bits in parenthesis after “msiexec /qn /X”) may differ.

We ran this on all computers in the Active Directory using PSExec, DSQuery.

cmd.exe /v:on /c "for /F "delims=, tokens=1" %i in ('dsquery computer -limit 0') do set name=%i & set name=!name:~4! & psexec -u Administrator -p AdministratorPassword \\!name! \\server\share\path\to\script.bat"

Be aware that the result set for DSQuery is by default limited to 1000 rows. In the example above we’ve explicitly set it to 0, which is unlimited, and generally speaking a bad idea. We’ve included the limit argument just incase you try and use this verbatim and get confused.

This won’t be executed in parallel, so the more machines you have the longer it will take.

DSQuery is part of the RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools), installed by default on Domain Controllers, and optionally on other machines. PSExec is available from Sysinternals.

We would recommend creating a one time special administrator account, or you could pass in the administrator password via an environment variable, or read in from a file. Not providing the account may result in funny results depending on the target.

We also found one at least one or two machines there was a problem with UAC, however there did not seem to be a pattern, and we didn’t take the time to investigate the cause.

Oh, and just one more thing. Alternatively you could assign the removal script as a start up script.


@GloNetworks

2011 October 13 – 3:44 pm

TwitterWhile we’ve had a GloNetworks twitter account for some time our tweets up to this point have been few and far between. But now we feel we’re ready to up our tweet game and we’ll be tweeting far more regularly. If you’re interested on what we’ve got to say, or want some real time updates on what’s going for Glo, then please follow  us here.


SSD Speeds: Are we being mislead?

2011 October 12 – 2:33 pm

In a previous post we talked about the difference in disk read/write speed when enabling and disabling FileVault on a MacBook Pro fitted with an SSD. The software used to test was ‘Blackmagic Disk Speed Test’ which is available straight off the Mac App store.

Since that post there’s been an update for the software, and this update has brought something a bit fishy to our attention.

First let’s discuss what this update has changed. Directly from the product page on the App Store:

What’s New in Version 2.1

Some SSD’s use hidden compression when writing data to make their benchmarked speeds appear faster. Disk Speed Test will now measure the true speed of these SSD’s so you know if they are suitable for high quality uncompressed video capture.

The people that produce the software say the new update takes account for the ‘hidden compression’ used by SSD manufacturers, and measures the  ‘true speed’. So what difference does it actually make?  Here are some results we came up with:

After Update
Before Update After Update

As you can see there’s a HUGE drop in the speeds the software reports! The SSD in question, a Corsair Force 3 240Gb SSD, is sold with the following specs listed:

Read Performance (max)             550 MB/s

Write Performance (max)            520 MB/s

The two logical conclusions that can come from this are:

SSD Manufacturers are artificially inflating the Read/Write speeds in order to put better looking specs on their SSDs

OR

The software, post update, is reporting things wrong or in an unorthodox manner.

There’s a few bells ringing here, this reminds us of the old hard drive capacity description discrepancy argument that went on for some time or possibly of the IPS broadband ‘up to’ speed claims issue.  Could we be seeing a similar overstatement from SSD manufacturers regards typical speeds?

 

 


Windows 8 News and Features

2011 October 11 – 5:13 pm

Windows 8 MetroFor a little over two months now the Building Windows 8 MSDN blog has been providing an insight into the new features and improvements currently in development for Windows 8. If you have even a slight interest in an early insight into the next Windows release then the blog is the place to look.

If you don’t fancy reading through the all the posts on there then allow us here at Glo Networks to summarise a few of the features we’ve found interesting just for you.

Improved file management: File copy jobs (copy, move, rename and delete) make up a large percentage of Windows 7 command use. As such Windows 8 looks to improve these functions. There’s a new centralised copy interface (no longer one dialogue per copy job, all will appear in the same) which has new monitoring and control tools, including the ability to pause individual jobs and a real-time throughput graph.

Improved “File Name Collision”: This is the situation that arises when copying a file to a location which already contains a file with the same name. The new conflict resolution dialogue displays the files from the source on the left and the files in the destination on the right. There’s a thumbnail image for each file, as well as information (modified date, size etc.) to help you make the decision on which file to keep.

ISO and VHD Access: ISO’s (virtual DVDs) and VHD’s (virtual hard disks) are now mountable natively in Windows 8. Simply double click the file and it will appear under Computer as either a DVD drive or hard disk, allowing easy access to the contents.

Hyper-V: Formally the domain of Windows Server editions, Hyper-V will be enabled in Windows 8. Hyper-V is a machine virtualization technology that will let you run more than one operating system at the same time on the same computer. One new Hyper-V feature developed specially for Windows 8 is the ability to use a wireless connection for your virtual machines to connect to the network.

Metro: This one’s a biggy. Windows 8 will have two user interfaces (UIs) available. Firstly the Windows Desktop UI that we know and love from previous versions of Windows makes a comeback, with improvements and new features aplenty. But available alongside this, or even instead of this should you prefer, is the new ‘Metro’, app based, touch friendly, UI. If you’ve seen the UI on the Zune devices, or the new Windows Phone (both interfaces are also called Metro) then you’ll already have an idea of the look and feel of this new UI. The idea is to bring together the power user capabilities of the PC and the more casual, app centric focus of tablets into a single device, with no compromise of the capabilities of either.

This is just a small selection of what has been discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog, there’s much more information on there and it also offers a way to give your feedback (via the comments section and the forum).

We’re excited to see what other new features and improvements will be present in the new OS, and will certainly be taking part in the open beta when the time comes. Keep an eye out for our thoughts and opinions in the future!

 


VMWares Memory vTax

2011 August 4 – 4:35 pm

In the virtualisation game VMWare are big competitors.  They’ve been selling virtual machine software since 1999 and their products are the ‘go to’ virtualisation tools for many businesses (not us at Glo). But since announcing their most recent price structure changes VMWare have experienced a huge amount of criticism from their customer base.

And we can understand why. The basic gist of the change is a cap on the RAM you can apply to your virtual machines per license. Formally licenses were required on a per processor basis alone, now, if you reach the virtual RAM cap for the number of processor’s you have licensed, you will require extra licenses to cover any additional RAM. This increase caused the change to be dubbed the ‘Memory vTax’.

When VMWare first announced this pricing change the memory allowance per license were rather low, meaning (obviously depending on the configuration of the virtual machines) some VMWare customers were looking at their licensing costs being several times what the old pricing structure would have cost. Reacting to the complaints of their customers VMWare have now raised the cap, which should keep the license costs to a more reasonable level for most customers.

Here at GloNetworks we’ve always tended towards the Microsoft Virtualization software ‘Hyper-V’ over the VMWare options, and right now we’re more confident than ever in our choice. It could be argued that WMWares virtualisation software is more ‘feature-full’ however we feel that Hyper-V’s pricing has always been more appropriate for us and our customers’ requirements. And since Microsoft have appeared to confirm they have no plans to use a similar ‘Memory Tax’ in its next Hyper-V product (Windows Server ‘8’ Hyper-V) we’re sure this will continue to be the case.


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