Monday, February 1, 2010
Webserver down hassles
Around 30-31st of January 2010 this website was as good as down. Unfortunately this was not the first time. But the difference was that it came back on its own, so it gave me an opportunity to trace the cause of the problems. Apparently the server went out-of-memory because of too many smtp-connections (too much spam).
I made some adjustments to prevent excessive memory usage, hopefully the problems are gone now.
I made some adjustments to prevent excessive memory usage, hopefully the problems are gone now.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Virusscan: what works and what not
A quick update on TRK's virusscan, the antivirus program wrapper in TRK.
-Grisoft AVG is broken ever since they upgraded to a newer version. The usage has completely changed and virusscan is not adapted for it. In the next version of TRK, AVG will be thrown out because version 8.5 for Linux has no more cleaning capabilities. For now it has been marked as a "dead feature" and will refuse to work in TRK
-Work is in progress for a new version of TRK and I'm adding Avast as a virusscanner.
-Clamav, although at an obsolete version, still works
-F-prot works
-Vexira works AGAIN! I previously announced it had become defunct since it didn't receive any more recent updates, but apparently they have a new version of the scanner. Luckily the internals and usage haven't changed, so I was able to adapt the download url to the new version and it seems to work alright.
Keep you eyes open for a new version of TRK in the near future.
-Grisoft AVG is broken ever since they upgraded to a newer version. The usage has completely changed and virusscan is not adapted for it. In the next version of TRK, AVG will be thrown out because version 8.5 for Linux has no more cleaning capabilities. For now it has been marked as a "dead feature" and will refuse to work in TRK
-Work is in progress for a new version of TRK and I'm adding Avast as a virusscanner.
-Clamav, although at an obsolete version, still works
-F-prot works
-Vexira works AGAIN! I previously announced it had become defunct since it didn't receive any more recent updates, but apparently they have a new version of the scanner. Luckily the internals and usage haven't changed, so I was able to adapt the download url to the new version and it seems to work alright.
Keep you eyes open for a new version of TRK in the near future.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Mankind's ticket for the future
Every now and then in human history an invention or discovery comes along that reshapes the foundation of our future.
Now may be such a time.
What if an energy source was to be invented that just takes water to generate power between 100 and 200 times greater than that of combustion from fossil fuel?
What if that energy generation was completely environment friendly and the by-product resulted in a new and very useful matter?
Well, that's exactly what Blacklight Power has done.
Blacklight Power or BLP is a company that's invented a way to generate heat from hydrogen atoms, the main compound of water (that and oxygen)!
Shocking isn't it? The method has been known for some time now but the established scientific world has refused to acknowledge the invention because it breaks about any law in known quantum mechanics.
Technically, BLP has found a way of lowering the ground state of a hydrogen atom, thus releasing an enormous amount of energy in the form of heat and light. The ground state of an atom is the lowest known energy state that an atom can exist in. In other words, for a hydrogen atom, the ground state is at 0° Kelvin or the absolute zero temperature.
In normal thermo dynamical laws this means that no potential energy can be extracted from this atom and the atom's electrons are in the lowest possible orbit around their nucleus.
However, BLP and more specific the man behind it, dr. Randy Mills, has invented a method by using either Lithium Hydrid or Sodium Hydrid together with Raney nickel (an alloy of aluminium and nickel) as a catalyst to make hydrogen atoms ionize and release energy in the form of photons (light) or kinetic energy (resulting in heat). After the reaction, the hydrogen atoms now have a lower energy state than their presumed ground state and are now called hydrinos. They bond back together as a pair to form a dihydrino. Dihydrinos are in fact so light that upon release, they immediately leave Earth's atmosphere. Thus it can never accumulate in the air.
The net energy release of this process is in the order of 100 to 200 times more than that of conventional methods. It is somewhere in the middle of combustion and nuclear (fission) power.
Apart from generating heat, other applications of the BLP process are high voltage batteries and a highly efficient UV-laser where a conventional UV-laser the size of a building could be equalled by a desktop sized one.
Another very interesting application is in the development of a rocket fuel that is up to 7000 times more powerful than a normal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen! Compare that to the fuel-to-weight ratio of classic rocket propulsion like that of the Saturn V rocket that was used to get 3 men to the moon (3000 ton for 47 ton of payload) and you see immediately where we could go next!
You think this story is just another hoax?
The claims have recently been completely and independently verified by Rowan University. They have independently acquired and processed all the materials needed for the BLP process and recreated the experiment in their labs.
Furthermore, Blacklight Power claims it has developed a regenerative closed loop solid fuel that basically only needs the addition of water which enables the system to be easily commercializable. They predict commercial application will be much sooner than anticipated. A 3 megawatt demo power grid is to be expected still this year and they have already sold for 8000 megawatt in contracts.
The company BLP has been founded in 1991 after dr. Mills announced the hydrino state theory as an explanation for the erratic ColdFusion claim of 1989. Over the years BLP has raised 60M.$ in funds and refuses any further investments because it just was all they needed. Staff members range from ex NASA and US Navy people to former US Department of Energy (DoE) high profiles. Founder Randy Mills is an MIT summa cum laude graduate.
That all said, what could this mean for us humans?
It would mean that with this invention energy would be abundant, very cheap, safe and especially environment friendly. This could mean the end of global warming and a giant leap forward into space exploration. Not to mention all the wars that would end if oil, gas and other fossil fuels were to become obsolete.
Mankind could very well be at the brink of a new dawn. And it's about time.
Check out the website of BlackLight Power and relevant press releases on the BLP process. Please do pass the news to anyone who might be interested because this event deserves a lot more than the marginal attention it has gotten so far (although it was only recently that the process was 100% independently verified).
As a footnote I would like to state that my elaboration of the theories is somewhat simplistic and not necessarily scientifically correct, let alone complete. The BLP process is indeed much more complicated and I am not physicist (nor native English speaker) myself. But the word should be spread and authorities must be made aware.
At least I'm not trying to explain it as simplistic as CNN as a reaction between water “and a kind of salt”.
Feel free to leave a comment on this article, just be adult in your reaction.
Now may be such a time.
What if an energy source was to be invented that just takes water to generate power between 100 and 200 times greater than that of combustion from fossil fuel?
What if that energy generation was completely environment friendly and the by-product resulted in a new and very useful matter?
Well, that's exactly what Blacklight Power has done.
Blacklight Power or BLP is a company that's invented a way to generate heat from hydrogen atoms, the main compound of water (that and oxygen)!
Shocking isn't it? The method has been known for some time now but the established scientific world has refused to acknowledge the invention because it breaks about any law in known quantum mechanics.
Technically, BLP has found a way of lowering the ground state of a hydrogen atom, thus releasing an enormous amount of energy in the form of heat and light. The ground state of an atom is the lowest known energy state that an atom can exist in. In other words, for a hydrogen atom, the ground state is at 0° Kelvin or the absolute zero temperature.
In normal thermo dynamical laws this means that no potential energy can be extracted from this atom and the atom's electrons are in the lowest possible orbit around their nucleus.
However, BLP and more specific the man behind it, dr. Randy Mills, has invented a method by using either Lithium Hydrid or Sodium Hydrid together with Raney nickel (an alloy of aluminium and nickel) as a catalyst to make hydrogen atoms ionize and release energy in the form of photons (light) or kinetic energy (resulting in heat). After the reaction, the hydrogen atoms now have a lower energy state than their presumed ground state and are now called hydrinos. They bond back together as a pair to form a dihydrino. Dihydrinos are in fact so light that upon release, they immediately leave Earth's atmosphere. Thus it can never accumulate in the air.
The net energy release of this process is in the order of 100 to 200 times more than that of conventional methods. It is somewhere in the middle of combustion and nuclear (fission) power.
Apart from generating heat, other applications of the BLP process are high voltage batteries and a highly efficient UV-laser where a conventional UV-laser the size of a building could be equalled by a desktop sized one.
Another very interesting application is in the development of a rocket fuel that is up to 7000 times more powerful than a normal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen! Compare that to the fuel-to-weight ratio of classic rocket propulsion like that of the Saturn V rocket that was used to get 3 men to the moon (3000 ton for 47 ton of payload) and you see immediately where we could go next!
You think this story is just another hoax?
The claims have recently been completely and independently verified by Rowan University. They have independently acquired and processed all the materials needed for the BLP process and recreated the experiment in their labs.
Furthermore, Blacklight Power claims it has developed a regenerative closed loop solid fuel that basically only needs the addition of water which enables the system to be easily commercializable. They predict commercial application will be much sooner than anticipated. A 3 megawatt demo power grid is to be expected still this year and they have already sold for 8000 megawatt in contracts.
The company BLP has been founded in 1991 after dr. Mills announced the hydrino state theory as an explanation for the erratic ColdFusion claim of 1989. Over the years BLP has raised 60M.$ in funds and refuses any further investments because it just was all they needed. Staff members range from ex NASA and US Navy people to former US Department of Energy (DoE) high profiles. Founder Randy Mills is an MIT summa cum laude graduate.
That all said, what could this mean for us humans?
It would mean that with this invention energy would be abundant, very cheap, safe and especially environment friendly. This could mean the end of global warming and a giant leap forward into space exploration. Not to mention all the wars that would end if oil, gas and other fossil fuels were to become obsolete.
Mankind could very well be at the brink of a new dawn. And it's about time.
Check out the website of BlackLight Power and relevant press releases on the BLP process. Please do pass the news to anyone who might be interested because this event deserves a lot more than the marginal attention it has gotten so far (although it was only recently that the process was 100% independently verified).
As a footnote I would like to state that my elaboration of the theories is somewhat simplistic and not necessarily scientifically correct, let alone complete. The BLP process is indeed much more complicated and I am not physicist (nor native English speaker) myself. But the word should be spread and authorities must be made aware.
At least I'm not trying to explain it as simplistic as CNN as a reaction between water “and a kind of salt”.
Feel free to leave a comment on this article, just be adult in your reaction.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Build 334: network boot bug fixed
Just a minor change but with big impact to network booting TRK users.
As I stated before I was unable to test everything and as it turned out, network booting had some errors.
So a kind user pointed out this bug + solution in the TRK forum. I immediately made the changes and tested it this time.
So now 3.3 build 334 is available for download instead of 333
As I stated before I was unable to test everything and as it turned out, network booting had some errors.
So a kind user pointed out this bug + solution in the TRK forum. I immediately made the changes and tested it this time.
So now 3.3 build 334 is available for download instead of 333
Monday, June 29, 2009
Build 333: read/write support
It's been a while again, but here 's another intermediate version of TRK. I don't have much time to work on it, so this is unfinished but usable.
Main reason to release this is that people are asking me for newer driver support. So there's a pretty recent kernel 2.6.29.3 in it. But the biggest feature is the rpm support which allows you to install packages of your own.
Below is a description of the new features
-mclone version 1.1: this version of mclone supports network compression during transfer. This option adds more cpu load but saves on network bandwidth. Use only on powerful machines. This version of mclone is different from the old one so I changed the ports on which it connects so both can 't get mixed up. Version 1.0 is still available as /bin/mclone1.0
Oh yes: I used mclone at work between IBM Bladecenters hooked to fibrechannel SANs and transferred 25Gb of data in 5 minutes with an average of about 700mbit. The bladecenters booted fine afterwards, so there 's an option for a site move or disaster recovery.
-newer kernel 2.6.29.3: although in the meantime kernel 2.6.30 is out, I have to freeze the TRK kernel somewhere. This TRK also uses a custom Qlogic driver for ql2xxx based cards since the stock driver behaved unreliably on my jobs IBM Bladecenters under heavy i/o.
So a newer kernel should mean newer drivers. I always enable drivers that are out of the experimental phase. If your driver isn't loaded, it must mean he's either unavailable or still in experimental phase.
-read/write support in all areas of TRK: TRK now uses aufs over squashfs which incorporates a cowloop (Copy On Write). In human terms it means that you can write to read-only media by actually making the writes in a temporary, writable location. Cramfs was replaced by squashfs because of numerous reasons. This also means better compression, so the TRK iso has become relatively smaller (119Mb, fits on 128Mb sticks again).
-RPM support: since TRK is now completely writable, I squeezed in RPM support. This means you can install any binary 32-bit rpm. Beware that TRK's RPM database is emtpy, so dependencies will almost always fail. Installing an RPM thus requires the option --nodeps and YOU to test whether the program works. Please don't mail me about an RPM that might not work (except when some file is missing after running updatetrk). Post it on the forum and try to figure it out yourself, otherwise I'm too busy solving custom stuff. On the other hand, a donation might work wonders on that ;-). The only RPM I tested so far -but it's a big one- is the IBM Tivoli SM 5.5 backup client and that seems to work fine.
-because of the above features, there are significant changes in the internals of TRK and not everything got thouroughly tested. Especially the bootscripts were heavily modified. CD booting and USB disk booting were tested and debugged, so this should be ok. Network booting was untested, so please report me any problems with that.
-updatetrk: again, because of all of the above, updatetrk was modified so any changes made can be saved for later use. If you install an rpm, you need to run updatetrk. I've now added the option to skip all updates like antivirus and such. Run 'updatetrk -s all' to just write back whatever has changed without any online added features. It will also rebuild the big trkramfs file which holds most of TRK.
-added screen and now all local consoles run under their own screen session. This allows you to remotely take over a local console over ssh by invoking f.i. screen -x tty1, which will duplicate the output to the local console as well as your ssh session. Handy for admins who need to cooperate with remote hands.
-fixed broken grub by adding missing /usr/bin/cmp
-added script, a utility that allows you to record all console commands and save it in a textfile.
Please note that I haven 't got to work on the antivirus support in TRK, which is largely broken because the vendors changed their version and internals. This will be the next big thing todo.
Main reason to release this is that people are asking me for newer driver support. So there's a pretty recent kernel 2.6.29.3 in it. But the biggest feature is the rpm support which allows you to install packages of your own.
Below is a description of the new features
-mclone version 1.1: this version of mclone supports network compression during transfer. This option adds more cpu load but saves on network bandwidth. Use only on powerful machines. This version of mclone is different from the old one so I changed the ports on which it connects so both can 't get mixed up. Version 1.0 is still available as /bin/mclone1.0
Oh yes: I used mclone at work between IBM Bladecenters hooked to fibrechannel SANs and transferred 25Gb of data in 5 minutes with an average of about 700mbit. The bladecenters booted fine afterwards, so there 's an option for a site move or disaster recovery.
-newer kernel 2.6.29.3: although in the meantime kernel 2.6.30 is out, I have to freeze the TRK kernel somewhere. This TRK also uses a custom Qlogic driver for ql2xxx based cards since the stock driver behaved unreliably on my jobs IBM Bladecenters under heavy i/o.
So a newer kernel should mean newer drivers. I always enable drivers that are out of the experimental phase. If your driver isn't loaded, it must mean he's either unavailable or still in experimental phase.
-read/write support in all areas of TRK: TRK now uses aufs over squashfs which incorporates a cowloop (Copy On Write). In human terms it means that you can write to read-only media by actually making the writes in a temporary, writable location. Cramfs was replaced by squashfs because of numerous reasons. This also means better compression, so the TRK iso has become relatively smaller (119Mb, fits on 128Mb sticks again).
-RPM support: since TRK is now completely writable, I squeezed in RPM support. This means you can install any binary 32-bit rpm. Beware that TRK's RPM database is emtpy, so dependencies will almost always fail. Installing an RPM thus requires the option --nodeps and YOU to test whether the program works. Please don't mail me about an RPM that might not work (except when some file is missing after running updatetrk). Post it on the forum and try to figure it out yourself, otherwise I'm too busy solving custom stuff. On the other hand, a donation might work wonders on that ;-). The only RPM I tested so far -but it's a big one- is the IBM Tivoli SM 5.5 backup client and that seems to work fine.
-because of the above features, there are significant changes in the internals of TRK and not everything got thouroughly tested. Especially the bootscripts were heavily modified. CD booting and USB disk booting were tested and debugged, so this should be ok. Network booting was untested, so please report me any problems with that.
-updatetrk: again, because of all of the above, updatetrk was modified so any changes made can be saved for later use. If you install an rpm, you need to run updatetrk. I've now added the option to skip all updates like antivirus and such. Run 'updatetrk -s all' to just write back whatever has changed without any online added features. It will also rebuild the big trkramfs file which holds most of TRK.
-added screen and now all local consoles run under their own screen session. This allows you to remotely take over a local console over ssh by invoking f.i. screen -x tty1, which will duplicate the output to the local console as well as your ssh session. Handy for admins who need to cooperate with remote hands.
-fixed broken grub by adding missing /usr/bin/cmp
-added script, a utility that allows you to record all console commands and save it in a textfile.
Please note that I haven 't got to work on the antivirus support in TRK, which is largely broken because the vendors changed their version and internals. This will be the next big thing todo.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Meet Sam Verstricht
Hello, I'm Sam Verstricht, born 3 days ago on 17 june 2009 at 11h05 AM.
Tech. specs:
Length: 49cm
Weight: 3,130kg
Mom: Karin Collier
Dad: Bart verstricht (alias Headhunter)
Our personal website: http://www.strikkies.be
Meet you there!
You may also sign our guestbook there :)
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Virusscan: F-prot and Bitdefender fixed
There are new versions for both BitDefender and F-prot and they point to a different download url now.
I have adapted these URLs on my webserver.
The new F-prot seems to work ok.
The new Bitdefender has install problems because the install path has changed and tries to install itself to /usr (which is read-only on CD in TRK). Luckilly, the old Bitdefender is still available, just the download path has changed. So that one works too.
If it hadn't, I had to release a new version of TRK and people had to upgrade (i.e. download and burn new CD)
Now, you will just receive a warning that the download URLs have changed but it will still work (just answer 'y').
AVG, Clam (although reported out-of-date for the engine) and Vexira still seemed to work.
I have adapted these URLs on my webserver.
The new F-prot seems to work ok.
The new Bitdefender has install problems because the install path has changed and tries to install itself to /usr (which is read-only on CD in TRK). Luckilly, the old Bitdefender is still available, just the download path has changed. So that one works too.
If it hadn't, I had to release a new version of TRK and people had to upgrade (i.e. download and burn new CD)
Now, you will just receive a warning that the download URLs have changed but it will still work (just answer 'y').
AVG, Clam (although reported out-of-date for the engine) and Vexira still seemed to work.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Repairing your PC from the AVG disaster with TRK
No doubt millions of people will have the problem with the Grisoft Antivirus (AVG) that had a false positive on the windows user32.dll file.
I had some PCs coming in too. Luckily not too many because ever since AVG 8 came out, I 've been replacing it with Avast.
Nevertheless, some of my 'customers' still had an AVG and now had BSOD's.
Here 's a way you can fix it with TRK.
If you 're lucky, the computer you 're working on has lots of $Uninstall directories from patches and such where you will find older copies from user32.dll. Even better is where you have a folder called c:\windows\system32\dllcache where you will find even more DLLs.
Whatever version of user32.dll you find on the affected computer, always look for the newest and in general, biggest one.
Here 's how I got it fixed:
-An easy way to find your way around is to boot with TRK connected to your LAN.
-run 'fileserver -g' for ease of use when you 're on your own trusted home network. It will report you on which address you can find your PC back.
-browse with a (working) Windows PC to the ip address of the affected PC. F.i. do Start => Run => \\192.168.0.60
-go to the share where the windows system is located, f.i. \\192.168.0.60\hda1
-browse to the windows folder
-right click on it and search (different in Vista, but you 'lll know what I mean).
-search for 'user32.dll' and make sure it shows you the file size and date in the search results.
-look for the newest, generally biggest version of user32.dll
-copy it back to \windows\system32
-reboot the PC
-If this doesn 't fix it yet, it might be possible other files are missing or bad versions are in place. In my case, I had this with gdi32.dll.
-To figure out on what your PC is still crashing, hit F8 before it starts booting Windows and select the option where it says not to auto-reboot after a critical failure -With gdi32.dll, it said it was missing an entry point at some address. This generally is caused because some older version is in place.
-Do the same as with user32.dll: search for the newest, biggest version of this file and put it back.
-Reboot and rerun procedure on other possible files until successfull.
It 's always a good thing too to run the command 'ntfsfix /dev/hda1' (after or before fileserver is running): this will invoke a chkdsk at Windows boot time.
After success, AVG will normally update itself with a decent av signature database, but I recommend to uninstall it and put avast on it since AVG 7.5 will be out of support soon and AVG 8 is as slow and heavy as Windows Vista itself.
Also recommended: clean up the PC by removing all $Uninstall$ folders, clear dllcache folder, clear %temp% (commandline: cd %temp%, cd .., rd /s /q temp),clear temporary internet files (rd /s /q "temporary internet files"), empty recycle bin, uninstall any unneccessary apps and for those who really want to digg in deep: get Hijackthis from trendmicro and remove any stupid programs from startup like Adobe quicklaunch f.i. Also browser helper objects that don 't ring a bell with me always get removed by me.
Never a bad idea is to install SP3 (just be carefull with some wireless cards, activate restore point if unsure).
hope this helps
I had some PCs coming in too. Luckily not too many because ever since AVG 8 came out, I 've been replacing it with Avast.
Nevertheless, some of my 'customers' still had an AVG and now had BSOD's.
Here 's a way you can fix it with TRK.
If you 're lucky, the computer you 're working on has lots of $Uninstall directories from patches and such where you will find older copies from user32.dll. Even better is where you have a folder called c:\windows\system32\dllcache where you will find even more DLLs.
Whatever version of user32.dll you find on the affected computer, always look for the newest and in general, biggest one.
Here 's how I got it fixed:
-An easy way to find your way around is to boot with TRK connected to your LAN.
-run 'fileserver -g' for ease of use when you 're on your own trusted home network. It will report you on which address you can find your PC back.
-browse with a (working) Windows PC to the ip address of the affected PC. F.i. do Start => Run => \\192.168.0.60
-go to the share where the windows system is located, f.i. \\192.168.0.60\hda1
-browse to the windows folder
-right click on it and search (different in Vista, but you 'lll know what I mean).
-search for 'user32.dll' and make sure it shows you the file size and date in the search results.
-look for the newest, generally biggest version of user32.dll
-copy it back to \windows\system32
-reboot the PC
-If this doesn 't fix it yet, it might be possible other files are missing or bad versions are in place. In my case, I had this with gdi32.dll.
-To figure out on what your PC is still crashing, hit F8 before it starts booting Windows and select the option where it says not to auto-reboot after a critical failure -With gdi32.dll, it said it was missing an entry point at some address. This generally is caused because some older version is in place.
-Do the same as with user32.dll: search for the newest, biggest version of this file and put it back.
-Reboot and rerun procedure on other possible files until successfull.
It 's always a good thing too to run the command 'ntfsfix /dev/hda1' (after or before fileserver is running): this will invoke a chkdsk at Windows boot time.
After success, AVG will normally update itself with a decent av signature database, but I recommend to uninstall it and put avast on it since AVG 7.5 will be out of support soon and AVG 8 is as slow and heavy as Windows Vista itself.
Also recommended: clean up the PC by removing all $Uninstall$ folders, clear dllcache folder, clear %temp% (commandline: cd %temp%, cd .., rd /s /q temp),clear temporary internet files (rd /s /q "temporary internet files"), empty recycle bin, uninstall any unneccessary apps and for those who really want to digg in deep: get Hijackthis from trendmicro and remove any stupid programs from startup like Adobe quicklaunch f.i. Also browser helper objects that don 't ring a bell with me always get removed by me.
Never a bad idea is to install SP3 (just be carefull with some wireless cards, activate restore point if unsure).
hope this helps
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Thank you
Thank you to all the American citizens who have voted for Barack Obama.
He will have a hard time cleaning up the mess of the 8 year Republican debacle, but at least he gives hope to the world.
My two cents to the people of the U.S.A.: give this man time, don 't expect things to change in 3 months. He 'll need at least his whole term of presidency and probably even more to fix what's broken.
And even after that I 'd say: people, ALWAYS vote for the Democrats. If you think back to recent history, what presidents have been regarded as being humane and realistic: Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and now Obama. And they 're all Democrats.
Need I say more?
But anyway: thank you again so much!
My two cents to the people of the U.S.A.: give this man time, don 't expect things to change in 3 months. He 'll need at least his whole term of presidency and probably even more to fix what's broken.
And even after that I 'd say: people, ALWAYS vote for the Democrats. If you think back to recent history, what presidents have been regarded as being humane and realistic: Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and now Obama. And they 're all Democrats.
Need I say more?
But anyway: thank you again so much!
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Mass clone: powerful, flexible and fast multicast disk cloning in TRK 3.3 build 321
Yet another version of TRK 3.3, now at build 321.
This is a release candidate for the final TRK 3.3. After that, work should start for TRK 4.0 and probably a long period of radio silenc
New stuff in this version:
-kernel 2.6.26. Hope this kernel is more stable on different hardware. I also eliminated a serious disk performance flaw: it seems that since some kernel around 2.6.23, the generic and slow IDE driver had become the default, resulting on really slow I/O performance on normally fast sata controllers. This "bug" has been present since build 310 and is now fixed. Generic IDE is only available as a modules anymore and so the "good" driver for your controller is now detected. Examples for this were machines with certain ICH8 controllers (and there 's lots of them).
-latest NTFS Tools and Library (2.0.0). Watch out with Windows Vista and earlier version of TRK. It could ruin your NTFS when f.e. trying to resize your volume. I will know, I messed up my own Vista. Luckily tesdisk got my partitions back, but I had to go through a lot of trouble afterwards to get my Vista back online.
-relocntfs: a patched version of ntfsreloc which does great things with the NTFS bootsector.
-mclone: haaa, now this is the finest new feature on TRK. Forget about the old clonexp in TRK, mclone or mass clone is a utility that allows you to clone an unlimited number of computers over multicast at the maximum speed of your hardware.
The main features are:
-make exact copies of any operating system
-optimized for Windows XP and Vista imaging using ntfsclone. Other filesystems are copied with dd
-fast and scalable
-save to image and restore from image (to multicast) with optional 3 compression algorythms (gzip, bzip2 and 7-zip)
-restore original bootsector/ntfs c/h/s values. An old bug in many BIOS' sometimes gave wrong values for Cylinders/Heads/Sectors count. Although CHS is an old method for assigning disk geometry (LBA should be used), Windows XP and family still use it to assign addressing of their bootcode. Recent Linux kernels discard wrong C/H/S values and set it to the LBA values. This resulted on sometimes unbootable cloned Windows machines (the blinking cursor nightmare). Recently a patched version of relocntfs appeared (now called ntfsreloc) which is able to "force" original C/H/S values in your NTFS. Mclone does it automatically for you. Major feature over other cloning tools.
-run up to 50 different sessions separately over your LAN
-optional speed limitation. Just so your LAN doesn't get saturated.
-option to specify disks/partitions instead of just everything automatically
-option to skip bootsector
-option to skip C/H/S check
If you 're an IT guy and you need to install many workstations, or you just like to take an exact backup copy of your computer, then give mclone a try.
This is a release candidate for the final TRK 3.3. After that, work should start for TRK 4.0 and probably a long period of radio silenc
New stuff in this version:
-kernel 2.6.26. Hope this kernel is more stable on different hardware. I also eliminated a serious disk performance flaw: it seems that since some kernel around 2.6.23, the generic and slow IDE driver had become the default, resulting on really slow I/O performance on normally fast sata controllers. This "bug" has been present since build 310 and is now fixed. Generic IDE is only available as a modules anymore and so the "good" driver for your controller is now detected. Examples for this were machines with certain ICH8 controllers (and there 's lots of them).
-latest NTFS Tools and Library (2.0.0). Watch out with Windows Vista and earlier version of TRK. It could ruin your NTFS when f.e. trying to resize your volume. I will know, I messed up my own Vista. Luckily tesdisk got my partitions back, but I had to go through a lot of trouble afterwards to get my Vista back online.
-relocntfs: a patched version of ntfsreloc which does great things with the NTFS bootsector.
-mclone: haaa, now this is the finest new feature on TRK. Forget about the old clonexp in TRK, mclone or mass clone is a utility that allows you to clone an unlimited number of computers over multicast at the maximum speed of your hardware.
The main features are:
-make exact copies of any operating system
-optimized for Windows XP and Vista imaging using ntfsclone. Other filesystems are copied with dd
-fast and scalable
-save to image and restore from image (to multicast) with optional 3 compression algorythms (gzip, bzip2 and 7-zip)
-restore original bootsector/ntfs c/h/s values. An old bug in many BIOS' sometimes gave wrong values for Cylinders/Heads/Sectors count. Although CHS is an old method for assigning disk geometry (LBA should be used), Windows XP and family still use it to assign addressing of their bootcode. Recent Linux kernels discard wrong C/H/S values and set it to the LBA values. This resulted on sometimes unbootable cloned Windows machines (the blinking cursor nightmare). Recently a patched version of relocntfs appeared (now called ntfsreloc) which is able to "force" original C/H/S values in your NTFS. Mclone does it automatically for you. Major feature over other cloning tools.
-run up to 50 different sessions separately over your LAN
-optional speed limitation. Just so your LAN doesn't get saturated.
-option to specify disks/partitions instead of just everything automatically
-option to skip bootsector
-option to skip C/H/S check
If you 're an IT guy and you need to install many workstations, or you just like to take an exact backup copy of your computer, then give mclone a try.