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September 08 XP SP3 'Delayed Write Failed' keeps me up at night (4226, 26 and 50 / c000020c in Event Viewer) with NVIDIA network adapter(UPDATE: please see update at the end of this post.)
Yawn. It's late and I shouldn't be doing this. But I've just spent several late nights trying to track down this file copying error on Windows XP SP3. So I am recording it here for others.
It's taken me 3 days to figure this out, on and off.
Recently a Windows XP SP3 machine started to report "Delayed Write Failed" messages when writing files to a Windows 2008 Server. I was copying photos from the desktop to a UNC path like this \\server\share\path\path\... When the error happens, the network connection becomes unresponsive - I can't see the server nor the internet. I have to disable and re-enable the network connection to restore connectivity.
In the event log (eventvwr) I saw these messages among others. The 4226 wasn't that frequent but the 50 & 26 occur whenever the error happened.
ID 50: MRXSMB {Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\LanmanRedirector. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere. ID 26: Application Popup
Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the file ... ID 4226: TCPIP
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts. I followed various avenues to try and understand and resolve this. Thankfully it was a reproduceable error:
Then I found this blog post by grinthock about the changes in XP SP2 to deliberately limit the concurrent TCPIP connections to 10, as a security measure. Given that file copying as well as web browsing and also Live Mesh are using TCPIP connections, this might be the cause in my case.
Unfortunately this is not a configurable parameter - not in the registry, nor in a config or INI file. To increase the number of allowed TCPIP connections, you have to modify the TCPIP.SYS binary directly. Yeuch.
First I made a copy of TCPIP.SYS as TCPIP.SYS.ORIGINAL (in c:\windows\system32\drivers).
Then I used this tool to change the connections allowed, and I set my TCPIP connections to 256 (it was 10; I also tried 50 without success):
(I have no idea if this tool contains spyware etc - I just took the chance. Hmmm.)
There is an alternative tool for the same task - I didn't use this:
After a reboot, my machine now appears to copy the files reliably to the server, using the same test as previously. I will monitor the situation.
I also note that the TCPIP.SYS file can be updated by Windows Update, so this 'connections limit' might return to the default. So the problem may come back!
Important - I also changed the settings on my NVIDIA nForce 10/100/1000 network adapter, this might also be part of the solution. In Device Manager (Start -> Run DEVMGMT.MSC) I changed the following settings (Properties -> Advanced tab):
PLEASE NOTE - this 'solution' is a hack, no question. I am NOT responsible if this messes up your system. Seeing as I spent ages trying to fix this error, I hope this is helpful to someone else.
UPDATE: the above solution didn't work for long -- the symptoms returned. But the following does appear to have helped my setup, by making these changes to my Windows 2008 Server machine and rebooting:
October 28 Elevenses!Now this is a very funny blog! Worth checking out:
"Corporate disruption through the medium of tea and cake"!!
January 09 Shake 'n VacIn his autobiographical book, "Tis", Frank McCourt says something about how advertising affects the minds of the young.
Strange how things come back into your head. We didn't watch as much TV when we were children as they do today.
Even so, every ad made its imprint.
So there I am in the aisles of the supermarket, thousands of miles from where I lived as a child, and I can still recall those jingles for ads about:
...and of course I must mention the joyfully dancing housewife jigging to the tuneful Shake-and-vac carpet cleaner:
More here, if you really want them.
December 31 Sydney to Hobart yacht raceTook a great photo of Wild Oats as it crossed the line to win the Sydney to Hobart yacht race for the third time, on December 27th.
The traditional firing of the cannon as the boat crosses the line leaves onlookers temporarily deafened!
October 25 Bowel cancerAustralia has the highest incidence of bowel cancer in the world. Each year, the national road toll claims about 1500 lives while bowel cancer claims about 4000 lives.
Apparently, drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, according to an urban legend that floats around the internet, unproven.
Then again, you could always try All Bran.
October 22 Twenty years since the crash of October 1987I've been reading various things about the stock market crash of 1987, being compared with the recent ASX market correction. Although the ASX and US now appear to have resumed since August, some analysts think that China is on the boil and ready for a big dive (e.g. Dale Gilham, Alan Hull). Others, such as Daryl Guppy, say "2007 is not 1987. Modern market crashes take on a different character because the nature of the market mechanism and participation has changed."
I found an article at the weekend in the Adelaide Advertiser with the title, "Crash of '87 still so fresh in the mind." It recounted the happenings at the time of the 1987 crash of the ASX and around the world. The Dow Jones dropped 22.5% in one day (508 points at the time). A similar drop today would remove 3000 points from the Dow Jones and 1500 off the ASX S&P/200 index. The crash of Wall Street on October 19, 1987 was bigger than Black Friday in 1929 which started the Great Depression.
I am writing this on Monday 22nd October, 2007. This week is 20 years since the 1987 crash. So it is obvious that people ask these questions, comparing one crash with another. They compared 1987 with 1929. And we're comparing 2007 with 1987. But nobody knows.
The Advertiser reports that by the end of 1987, Australian shares had fallen 50% from their high point immediately before the crash, compared with the US markets, which were 35% down. The USA recovered within 2 years, but Australia took nearly 7 years to recover to the same point. Australia follows the US market profile like a smaller shadow, but clearly the restoration time is much longer.
This time, the ASX fell nearly 12% in response to the US sub-prime mortgage problems, but recovered fully within 5 weeks and has gone past previous highs. So clearly we're looking at something different in terms of structure and connection with overseas markets. Some people say that a lot depends on China, which has a large number of small private investors (80%) who will flee if trouble appears. The Chinese market is high and apparently flattening, but who knows when the correction will come, or what damage will result worldwide.
October 04 "Gracefully surrendering the things of youth" (aka My Skateboard)When I was fourteen I had a great skateboard. It had ACS 651 trucks and 60mm red Kryptonics wheels which were fast and grippy. The wheels were fitted with smooth running sealed bearings, I think they were by NSK. At first I had a flexible yellow fibreglass Benjyboard deck ('fibreflex?') which I then replaced with a solid multi-ply timber one, it had a Rolling Stones (mouth) logo in red cut into the black 'sandpaper' top. The wide ACS trucks (6.5") were great for slalom and were fasted with cross-head screws and lock nuts, and a 1/2" red plastic spacer block lifted each truck away from the deck. I had a truck spanner to make adjustments.
My Dad helped me fit a tough white poly tail-guard under the tail of the board with two brass screws and washers. I had a white Norcon helmet but I can't recall using the knee or elbow pads very much.
I took a black marker pen and carefully coloured in the indented lettering on the edge of the red wheels which said K R Y P T O N I C S. Some of my mates had blue or green Kryptonics which were faster due to the harder compound used. I liked the red ones because they were good for tricks and fast enough! Now I think about it, we used to call them, 'Krips".
One weekend in my early twenties, I just gave that thing away to a charity shop. Because the shop was shut on a Saturday afternoon, I left it at the side door with some other gear - including old computers - which I was getting rid of. Somehow I doubt the skateboard was still there on Monday morning.
Happy days. I loved skating on that board: I kind of regret letting it go.
Years later I was still able to do the basic moves when I stepped onto a modern board. I also went snowboarding and managed it quite easily - I loved it! I guess I had an earlier training...
-- Max Ehrman, Desiderata.
August 30 Between any two extremes...Between any two extremely held positions the truth probably exists in blended patches somewhere in between.
April 03 The Royal, royal mailAndrew stood in the Adelaide central Post Office and wondered about the look on the faces of the plush dolls on sale. Had all the romance and drama of the Royal Mail service, the Penny Black and thieving highwaymen, come down to this?
March 27 Luka Bloom in Adelaide, The Gov - Monday 25th March 2007Last night we went to see the wonderful singer songerwriter from Ireland, Luka Bloom, at The Gov in Adelaide. Wow, just fantastic! I'd forgotten how good he is, how his songs and performance stir something inside you.
This is my third Luka gig. This time I noticed that many of Luka's songs are about people displaced, about people searching, and the fragility of peace. Despite the lofty ideas in the songs, Luka is unpretentious, walking on stage with a cup of tea and greeting the audience of about 250 as if they were old friends. And many funny stories.
Luka said this was his 9th tour of Australia, and this time he's performed at a number of folk festivals as well as his own gigs. He told us that an Australian reviewer in the newspaper described Luka as "the folk music equivalent of a chic movie." LOL!?
From the classics he played Sunny Sailor Boy, To Make You Feel My Love, but sadly not Cold Comfort nor Diamond Mountain
 Here is Luka in full thrum (I think that word describes his hard strumming style pretty well):
And I got me a picture with the man!
I recommend Luka if you like folk music with energy and harmonic range. He makes an amazing sound on that guitar, unique I think. Try his album "Turf" for starters. And if you play guitar, this site has the best information about Luka Bloom's tunings and guitar chords.
Play on Luka! Looking forward to the next time.
March 16 Chapman Stick in Adelaide, Rundle MallMy friend Andy Salvanos has started busking on his Chapman Stick in Rundle Mall.
In global terms, this is a rare thing because there are only about 3000 Sticks in the world today, each one being hand-made by Emmett Chapman in California. (This makes them not quite as rare as Stradivarius' instruments, LOL!! ... he made about 1,100).
Here's Andy playing to passers by:
Andy has a new album out, called Fragments, which demonstrates the range of sounds and textures you can get from this amazing instrument. You can hear tracks from Fragments on Andy's myspace.
To find out more about the Chapman Stick, visit www.stick.com
March 14 My neighbour gives bad parkMy neighbour in the car park today left me a very small space to park in. And lots of space on the other side. This seems to happen every day! Take a look at the picture, mine is the car in the middle.
So I checked Flickr and found a whole world of people reporting bad parking!
December 11 Australian Values, according to John HowardPrime Minister John Howard has proposed a test for immigrants to test their willingness to integrate into Australia. Apparently the test is designed to check agreement with these Australian values:
Democracy
Free media Equality of men and women Mateship Having a go Reported by Channel 10 News (11th December 2006).
I don't know how you check for Mateship through a questionnaire? Jolly clever these politicians.
November 14 Rundle Mall, AdelaideI walk along the gum-spattered pavement of the mall, passing minor building works hidden by a vinyl tarpaulin which is covered in bright images and a slogan that repeats,
November 10 Working in Adelaide: the truth about piesPies, pies - what is it with Adelaide? Must be the Balfour's heritage. City Cross food hall. A food booth called "King Pie Gourmet". Sells pies. Harris Scarfe, Grenfell Street. A sign on the street points inside: "Balfours Products All Available At Scarfe's Café ==>" Currie Street: A sign stands on the pavement advertising pies. "Balfours Original Footy Pie, 'The pie with kick' 100% BEEF". The proprietor of the newsagent who sells these foodstuffs has padlocked the sign to a lamp post with a heavy bike chain & lock. As if anyone wants to steal a sign about pies... Bev waited for a lull in the foot-traffic before spiriting a bolt cutter from her trendy coat. Snipping the lock, she ran off with the pie sign. Yesss! "In other news this evening, detectives are investigating the snatch and run theft of a pie sign from a pavement in Adelaide CBD. A young woman is helping Police with their enquiries after being apprehended at a pedestrian crossing carrying industrial tools." November 01 How thick is the ozone layer? Or how thin?It is interesting to compare the earth to an apple. Which has the thicker skin?
The earth is a ball hanging in space, and has a diameter of 12,875 kilometres. (The Sun is 100 times bigger, with a diameter of over a million kilometres, actually 1,392,082 kms. The sun drenches the earth in lots of energy every day.)
The ozone layer protects the earth from all kinds of nasties from space, including big doses of UV radiation. The average thickness of the ozone layer around the earth is 50 kilometers. That's pretty thin, and explains why it's easy for us to make holes in it with our waste gases.
Another way of saying this, is that the thickness of the ozone layer is just '4 thousandths' of the diameter of the earth:
50 km / 12,875 km = 0.004
Now to put this into perspective. A large apple has a diameter of 10 centimetres (or 100 mm) and the skin of an apple is about 1 millimetre thick.
So the skin of a large apple is '10 hundredths' of the diameter of an apple:
1 mm / 100 mm = 0.01
That means we can say that the skin of an apple, proportionately, is nearly three times thicker than the ozone layer that protects the earth (i.e. 0.01 compared to 0.004). So, how thick is the ozone layer? - Or, how thin?
October 17 Adelaide Metro: bad customer service todayI am fed up with the stupid ticket validating machines on Adelaide Metro buses. They are unreliable and a waste time for driver and passengers. Sitting on a bus, you can see the trouble they cause - you could measure the time in wasted hours per week. Surely there is a way to simplify the receiving of fares?
Last night I got a bus home after Uni. I have a multi-trip metroticket (10 trips) which saves $1.30 per trip. When I put my ticket in the validating machine, it gave a loud beep and an ERROR! So the driver wrote me out a green docket for my journey.
This morning, when I took the bus to work, the driver said I must buy a full fare because my multi-pass ticket didn't work. So when I got to the city, I went to the Adelaide Metro shop and the cashier replaced my defective multi-pass ticket. But she blankly refused to reduce the full fare ticket I had to buy.
So I stood my ground and insisted they did the right thing: why should I pay full fare when their system is unreliable? I paid $25 for my multi-pass and it doesn't work - so I have to pay extra to travel? Uh? She admitted they replace tickets because they often go bad. But she couldn't help me. (Do you think people actually like being officious?)
I asked the girl to get her manager, and they fixed it up. I asked her if she understood my point of view? She said, "I'm not saying it's fair, it's just how it is."
"It's just how it is" means "we aren't thinking". And that's very bad for a business.
Adelaide Metro need to think about customer service. They may have grinning faces on fading posters at bus stops, and promises of saving you money for exotic holidays, but the reality is an antiquated and process-bound system long due for an overhaul.
Nobody needs agro at the start of their day.
How pathetic is all this, honestly.
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September 22 Steve Irwin: Australia's Diana?Steve Irwin's passing is very sad. The world has lost a great worker for the environment, no question about it.
And the greatest tragedy is the loss of a loving dad and husband to a small family.
Even so, I think many Aussies are surprised by the wave of response around the world. I was recently on a conference call with some guys from the USA. During a lapse in the conversation, one of them asked, "Did you guys all have a minute's silence for the Crocodile Hunter?" Evidently many US folks did.
This is strange to me because my impression was that most Aussies tolerated him rather than liked him? Perhaps I was wrong.
Steve's father, Bob Irwin said, "He wants to be remembered as an ordinary bloke." Perhaps the outpouring we are now seeing is similar to the Diana experience - a phenomena heavily fanned by the media.
Mother Teresa died the day before Princess Diana's funeral, but the passing of the Nobel Prize winning nun hardly made a dent in the wall of Diana news. But Mother Teresa's effect was not in her passing, but in her life's work and the legacy she left behind.
Steve Irwin's real legacy is not in the pictures on magazine covers around the world, nor the TV coverage, but in the habitats and species his work has preserved.
September 19 Happy anniversary, DaveOne of my virtual friends in the blogosphere is Dave Wallace.
I am proud to know Dave - a thinker, a man of spirit, a survivor.
Today (19th Sept) is Dave's anniversary - see the picture and read his blog:
Happy anniversary, Dave. September 13 Getting things done. With paper actually.Cameron has just written a very interesting piece about returning to paper and ditching the PDA (see moving to the moleskine).
This made me smile. I totally agree about PDAs and Outlook... do these things bring productivity? My wife would say not. Recently I posted an item on my MSDN blog about the new Outlook 2007, saying it was new chrome but nothing significant to help productivity: it doesn't even have hierarchical tasks to organise your personal projects. Certainly they don't appear to have included Dave Allen / Sally McGhee's ideas on Getting Things Done. Melissa Macbeth from the Outlook team in Redmond emailed me about my post, I don't think she appreciated my comments.
I have a mate who knows someone senior at MS Research. Apparently, the MSR guys have been mining the Outlook database for years, finding connections, filtering noise, establishing relevance. But for some reason, the Office guys don't want anything predictive to appear in Office today. So while Outlook knows everything about you -- people you connect with, how you spend your day, who you mail, who you call, your tasks -- it does nothing with this. You have to manage the chaos yourself, process bound. Hardly frees space in your head for creativity, does it?
I really think there's a huge opportunity if someone chose to start again with an app or service that gave you a clean slate for emails, tasks, docs -- all organised the way you want, using open space and establishing links between things, not using endless undifferentiated folders, a poor tagging (categories) system and rigid lists of items. I've been asking around, and many people have 500 mails in their inbox, some as high as 2500, one guy even 6000. How do you shape up? This has to represent some kind of economic cost to a business. Both Google's and Microsoft's answer to this digital chaos is not to address the systemic aspects, but to introduce Windows Desktop Search so you can locate things among the swill.
An elegant moleskine notebook may be expensive, but in fact, the cost and quality brings a certain respect for your thoughts. You won't throw that thing away when it's full, and the book itself is robust enough to preserve your thoughts for years. In time to come, you'll pick up that elegant moleskine book and flipping through, you'll recall what you were thinking about in 2006, what you were trying to achieve, what you aspired to and what you were struggling with. This is beautiful. Dare I mention PDAs and Outlook in the same paragraph? Those things are disrespectful of human markings, they are almost programmed to forget. They aren't trustworthy containers (remember 'trustworthy computing' ?).
To touch another of Cameron's themes, these tools lack energy (or if you like, spirit). Try and flip back through an Outlook calendar from 2000... not easy at all. Your kids won't be able to look wistfully at Dad's old electronic calendar in decades to come (that is, unless you print it now). A friend of mine says that ours is the generation that will be lost to history -- people won't know what we were doing or saying or thinking, because it will all be gone. Writing and printing on paper is an ancient and wise thing.
So... time for a move (back) to paper? A mix of digital and analogue, so that you feel in control and the future preserves the past?
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