Microsoft have some incredible programmers & staff

Well, since I'm on a role with my blogging, I may as well keep it up. Now this is a cool story. So as I posted previously, I was having a problem getting the error:

"Error Accessing Local Post - Unexpected error occurred while accessing local post (TargetInvocationException)"

I did a few searches and found a couple of responses on some forums from one of the developers, Joe, at Microsoft who responded to the posts asking them to email him the "Windows Live Writer.log" file. So I thought what the heck, I'll try the same.

About 5mins later I get a response asking about whether it was a particular post that I had done. I responded saying it was for any post when I published or saved to drafts. He sent me a debugging version to try and then I resent the newly generated log with the same error back to him. Well about 15mins later he responded with the answer referencing an MSDN blog entry that refers to possible problems from setting the FIPS compliant security policy. It turned out that this setting happened to be one I set and obviously forgot to turn back to the default after a lecture to my NTEN111 group! (I usually use a VPC!!!) I must have set it over a month ago, but have had no other issues since. It would have taken me forever, if at all, to solve this one! Anyway, it is something they hadn't considered and he is adding it to the bug database.

So, in about 2.5 hours from when I sent the first e-mail message to this guy I am again up and running with with Live Writer. If Microsoft have guys like this on their team, and I suspect they have many, they will continue to be successful. Some of their business practices may be a little suspect (no more than any other large corporation though), but that should be no reflection on the techy guys in there! My next drink will be to Joe!

Vista bugs and more bugs.

I don't know if this is bug week for me or what, but I hit another two bugs yesterday and today. First of all, I keep getting these long delays when trying to access the Documents folder on my Vista Business machine. I did some checking and after a few minutes came across a great post on Toms Hardware forums that has confirmed through Mark Russinovich's blog of a bug in Vista concerning this time out. It happens after 30mins of being logged in and if you have a machine that is part of a domain and offline. My machine is not part of a domain, but I'm sure I am suffering from some variant of this bug. Apparently the only fix is wait until Vista SP1. This is a pretty horrific bug!

As if this wasn't enough after my RAID fiasco I was also having a problem with an "Error Accessing Local Post" message coming up every time I tried to use Windows Live Writer on my laptop. So I can't even use the damn program to post to my blog. After some checking I found that this is also a bug in Beta 3.0. OMG! Is it a full moon or what? What is weird is that I don't have that problem on my workstation. I sent off an e-mail to the developer at microsoft, but more than likely I'll have to wait until the final release comes out to fix it.

Problem with WD drive dropping out of RAID set

I have four WD5000 drives in a RAID configuration using the ICH7R chipset. Generally these drives have been performing fairly well, but occasionally I've had the odd one just drop out of the RAID set. The first time it happened of course, I was thinking I've landed my self a bum drive, but I was simply able to bring it back into the set with a simple reboot or just marking it as normal in the Intel Storage Matrix manager. Then I would have to wait 12 hours for the set to rebuild while it operated with degraded performance. After this happened for the third time I started getting a little worried, and then last night I have two of the drives drop off. If you know anything about RAID5 you know this means you have now lost access to your data! Arrhhhhhggggg! Fortunately I have been fairly diligent about backing this machine up so everything is safe. Although this could have wasted many hours this weekend.

Anyway when I went into the Storage manager on boot up, I was able to recover one of the drives, and then was able to bring the other one back in the windows intel storage manager. However as I was looking at the specs of the drive in the storage manager, I noticed that the firmware versions were different. So I did a search for my model of drive, and wham! The first hit was a technical bulletin from intel talking about how WD5000 drives can spontaneously drop out of a raid set on an Intel NAS. Interesting I thought. I then linked to the WD site and low and behold this is a problem. The fix is to update the firmware to the version that only half my drives have.

So I took the drives out of the RAID set in the BIOS and then booted up using UBCD. I ran the wd5000ys.exe utility as recommended and waited for the response saying the firmware had been upgraded. I waited....and waited.....and waited.....and realizing that even with 4 drives 20 min wait was more than enough time to give it. In fact it shouldn't take more than about 2mins per drive. I rebooted and tried it again, running in the 32bit command shell and the 16 bit windows dos command shell (run using command.com). Still no success. So rebooted and popped by drives back into the RAID set. Everything came back up, but of course my drives are still using the old firmware. So my next step is to maybe try a bootable DOS disk. If this is the case, then I can't believe that in this day and age WD are still requiring the use of damn bootable DOS diskette!