Windows Server 2003 looses default gateway with multiple NICs

I have a server that is connected to two network interfaces. Both interfaces are assigned addresses and gateways via DHCP. One is a fast gigE connection to a private test/NAS LAN, and the other is a connection to the intranet and to the world.

The connection to the world is through a crappy router/firewall that has difficulty handling full bandwidth transfers without quivering to a temporary state of stasis. Over the last few months, and in particular over the last week, I had noticed that the server machine was losing its default gateway connection to the world. So all incoming connections were being routed back through the lower priority/metric gateway on the test LAN -- and going to a black hole. Odd. Users annoyed, too.

It turns out Windows Server 2003 has a feature called "dead gateway detection" -- if the highest metric/priority gateway requires more than X retries on a send, Windows flags it as bad, drops it from the routing table, and moves on to the next default gateway. Here are some Microsoft links on the setting:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc960464.aspx
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324270

Interesting that Windows essentially supports "fail-over" to secondary gateways, but does not appear to "fail-back" to the original gateways later once their connection is restored. So Windows has no way to recover the lost connections once the condition has triggered the fail-over. Since MS themselves recommend disabling this feature as part of "hardening" the TCP/IP stack (to prevent a DoS vector), I went ahead and did this. Tweak the dollowing registry settings:

1. HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameter\
2. Add/set the DWORD key value "EnableDeadGWDetect" to 0
3. Reboot the system to apply the change.

Another alternative is simple to only have one default gateway on your TCP/IP stack -- which is the approach many network gurus advise. With only one gateway to work with, "Dead gateway detection" does not activate. I did this as well, and set up numerous persistent direct routes for those connections that needed to go through the test/NAS LAN as opposed to the rest of the world.

So far with these changes, things are going good.

rinetd fills your syslog with errors

I recently made some changes to the rinetd configuration on the linux development server here. Everything seemed to work fine, but a few days later I noticed the follow wharrgarbl in my syslog:

Jul 27 14:28:11 easserv rinetd[14712]: accept(0): Socket operation on non-socket
Jul 27 14:28:42 easserv last message repeated 546042 times
Jul 27 14:29:43 easserv last message repeated 1077719 times
Jul 27 14:30:21 easserv last message repeated 680478 times

After searching around, it turns out I had made a typo in one of my rules. Instead of using the currentl 10.10.10.254 address, I had this new entry:

0.0.0.0 38254 10.10.10.255 80

So having an invalid IP address in those rules, causes rinetd to have a fit. Changing the 255 to a 254 and restarting rinetd solved my problem.

Adobe Lightroom 3 hangs on Import with JungleDisk

I've been playing around with the new Adobe Lightroom 3 for Windows, now that it's released. So far, it looks pretty good!

One thing I noticed right away was that its Import functionality (which is completely redesigned for LR3) appeared to hang indefinitely on my system. After quite a bit of research, I found this Adobe Forums thread that helped me solve the problem: JungleDisk drive mapping presents itself as a Removable Drive, which LR3 automatically attempts to scan.

Because the mounted JungleDisk drive connects to the Amazon S3 storage service, it is a slower WAN connection and Lightroom will probably sit there for minutes or hours trying to scan the entire drive. The solution is to configure JungleDisk to present its mounted drive as a Network Share instead:

• Go into Jungle Disk Desktop Monitor
• Click on Configure
• Select Network Drive::Local Drive Mapping
• Make sure "Show Advanced Options" is checked at the lower-left
• Change the "Drive Type for all Online Disks" option to "Network share"

Once you do that, the Lightroom Import dialog should be much smoother.

D-Link DIR-655 and Logitech MX Mouse interference

I haev been trying to troubleshoot some performance issues between my Lenovo X200s with Intel 5300 802.11N network, and my D-Link DIR-655 routers. After trying things including updating firms, drivers, and the like, I also noticed that the performance of my desktop mouse was very choppy whenever I was doing wireless transfers.

My desktop mouse is a wireless Logitech MX Revolution, which is of course a 2.4GHz device just like 802.11. After some research, I found that the MX mouse receiver can interfere with a wireless router if it's "too close". In my case they were about 5" apart, since my USB hub is very close to the wireless router.

I moved the mouse received directly to the PC, about 20" away from the router, and all "mouse chopiness" has disappeared. I still don't know if it was ultimately the cause of my problems, but for better performance, make sure you physically separate your wireless router and wireless mouse/kb dongles!

TortoiseSVN overlay icons broken after JungleDisk 3 installed

I run TortoiseSVN as a source control tool on my desktop. As is usually, files and directories under source control have various icon overlays to indicate their control status.

After installing JungleDisk 3.0, I noticed that these TortoiseSVN overlay icons no longer worked. Following a bit of research it turns out that something else was interfering with the overlay icon settings in Windows. In this day and age, Windows apparently still has some hardcoded internal limits on this sort of thing. Geez.

In Windows, you can have at most 11 defined overlay icons. Due to the nature of source control, tools like Tortoise legitimately use up a lot of these slots. However, JungleDisk as of version 3.0 includes a feature called "Synch" which is some sort file backup scheme.

Unfortunately, JungleDisk forces installation of its own overlay icons for the Synch feature. Not only that, it rudely injects them with reference names intending to keep them at the top of the Windows list. So if that install makes the total overlay count exceed 11, the JungleDIsk install breaks the behaviour of other tools already running fine on your system -- without even asking you.

To fix this, use the registry editor to open:

 HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
    \explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

And remove the keys installed by JungleDisk; they are the ones that start with "1Sync", "2Sync" and "3Sync". After removing them, you will need to reboot for the change to take effect.

I have sent a note to the JungleDisk people asking them to fix their installer.

Automatically run a command after waking up from Sleep/Standby

I came across a situation recently where I needed to have my Windows system run a command automatically every time the system woke up from Sleep/Standby/Hibernation: a custom monitor colour calibration profile was lost and needed to be explicitly restored every time the system woke up (see previous post.)

In my quick research, by no means exhaustive, I found three ways of doing this under Windows:

1. If you're (un)lucky enough to run Vista, you can set up a Task Scheduler job that reacts to a System Event
2. Alternatively, you can install a Windows utility whose exact purpose in life is to run stuff whenever you suspend or resume the system.
3. You can write a simple tool, service, or Windows script to respond to and process the Windows power events, and do whatever you need to to.

In either case, the idea is that you will run a tool or script or batch file that you create and control, and you get the system to run it.

In my case, the machine is running Vista so I first explored option 1. For my needs, it works very well. Under Vista only (as far as I can tell this is not possible under earlier versions of Windows) here are the steps to create a Task Scheduler entry to run when the system resumes:

• Run "TASKSCHD.MSC" to bring up the Task Scheduler
• From the Task Scheduler Library actions choose "Create Task"
• Fill in the General information as needed
• Under Triggers, choose New and Begin the task "On an event"
• Set basic settings Log:System, Source:Power-Troubleshooter and Event ID:1
• Click OK and go to Actions
• Set Action:Start a program, and enter the location of your script/tool
• Review the Conditions and Settings tabs and adjust as needed

Once this is done, save the task and test it by choosing "Run" with the item selected. Once this is working, test it by suspending then resuming your system, it should work!

Another alternative for all versions of Windows is Hibernate Trigger. It is a simple tool that is easy to install and configure, and doesn't require any additional information here really. Basically:

• Create your script, e.g. C:\WAKEUP.BAT
• Install and run Hibernate Trigger
• Configure it to run C:\WAKEUP.BAT on Resume

The third option is if you want to roll your own tool (similar to Hibernate Trigger probably) that responds to the Windows power events directly and does what you want. I have not investigated this option since the first two alternatives meet my needs, but there are two main options you can use:

• Old-school WIN32 programmers can process the WM_POWERBROADCAST Message (include SERVICE_ACCEPT_POWEREVENT if writing a service)
• You can also look into processing the Win32_PowerManagementEvent triggers in scripts

So those are a few solutions to meet the need of running tasks after system sleep. Most people don't need to do thise, but those that do it's a good trick to know.

Make a Spyder2express color profile "stick" after standby/sleep

I recently bought a new Thinkpad X200s and it's quite nice. One symptom that affects many notebooks, perhaps exacerbated by newer LED backlights now in frequent use, is that LCD displays have a very "cold" or "blue" tinge. Apparently this makes them look "better" in store compared to older, yellowing screens; anyway...

As any photo or design pro (which I am neither) will tell, doing any photo processing on a screen that has incorrect colors leads to bad results. For very "cool" screens, this results in garish and darkened flesh tones, and a some colour over-saturation. Since I will be on the road with this laptop and taking pictures, I decided to get a basic hardware screen colour calibrator, the Sypder2express from Datacolor which is under $100.

Now for my basic needs, this simple unit (pro units can cost hundreds or thousands) worked as advertised and as designed, and the software is kept up to date (Vista x64 support was a download away.) The problem that became apparent immediately was that the new colour settings in Windows were LOST every time the system resumed from sleep/standby.

According to Datacolor's support response (prompt, if a bit flippant) was that this is a Windows problem, not a product problem, and that they had a software workaround in, you guessed it, only in their more expensive products.

Not surprisingly, many tools out there are available that can help without a costly upgrade. The one I ended up using was xcalib, a command-line calibration tool for Windows and X. To solve my problem, I configured Windows to invoke on Resume, a script that runs the following commands (after copying xcalib.exe from the download link into my PATH):

1. xcalib -clear
2. xcalib

The first command clears any existing color settings in your video card. The second one (re)applies your default color calibration settings that the Spyder2express tool generated and installed into Windows.

Alternatively, you can configure the second command to run "xcalib " to apply a specific color profile. For example, to explicitly apply the Spyuder2express color setting installed into Windows, you would run:

1. xcalib -clear
2. xcalib c:\windows\system32\spool\driver\color\Spyder2express.icm

I found that for some reason, xcalib would on occasion not apply the color file properly. Adding the "-clear" command first fixed this; it may not be necessary on all systems.

To figure out how to configure Windows to run a script on Resume (after Sleep/Standby/Hibernate) see my next blog post. In my case, I created a "WAKEUP.BAT" system batch script and added the xcalib commands to it.