[Info-vax] FreeAXP loses network connectivity when laptop is woken up from "sleep"

[Paul Sture]

On Tue, 15 May 2012 05:11:34 -0700, John Wallace wrote:

> 2) The strange "file is there, file is not there" behaviour is a feature
> introduced in Vista. It's related to apps that want to write files to
> system-protected directories. When such a write happens in Vista or
> later, it doesn't end up in the real system directory, there is a shadow
> directory elsewhere that will get the file, that *some* (but not all)
> APIs know about. It's a band-aid on an elastoplast to work around a
> Defective by Design security model, but this is Windows. I had a link to
> a brief writeup, but I forgot where I put it; it's more secure that way

That's interesting to know thanks.  I recently came across another 
"feature" which appears to have appeared in Win7 / Server 2008 R2.

According to advice I have received from various sources over the years, 
it was a Good Thing to put third party apps in their own directory tree, 
preferably off the system disk.  Apart from spreading the load across 
spindles, this apparently reduced disk fragmentation.

This works fine with XP and plain Server 2008, and the permissions in the 
apps directory tree look sensible.  However if you do this on Win7 / 
Windows Server 2008 R2, the top level apps directory gets created so that 
Authenticated Users have modify permission and that gets inherited down 
to all your apps.

How did I discover this?  Firefox 12 managed to install itself from an 
unprivileged account.  I was not happy with that.

Status: 100% reproducible in my environment.
 
> And one for Paul: there are backup vendors that claim their "solution"
> can do a "bare metal" restore onto dissimilar hardware. I'm not 100%
> convinced. Nor am I 100% convinced by the backup vendors who claim to be
> able to back up open files. But hey, what do I know. As long as the
> vendor has got the sale and it looks like the backup has succeeded, what
> does it matter if the restore doesn't work right.

Apparently it was a design goal of Windows 2008 to be able to do a "bare 
metal" restore onto dissimilar hardware.  As I understand it, this 
doesn't just mean slap a disk copy onto another box and boot it, but to 
use the Windows Restore utility from a standalone boot.

Source:

http://bit.ly/JjguaZ

--- start quote ---
However, using the standard built-in Backup and Restore infrastructure in 
Windows Server 2008 and derivatives (SBS 2008 and EBS 2008), it is 
possible to restore an entire system to dissimilar hardware. In a 
presentation he gave at SMB Nation 2008, Jeff Middleton MVP stated that 
hardware independent restore was actually part of the design 
specification of Windows Server 2008.

And we tried really hard to break it. We did all sorts of ridiculous bare 
metal restores - from AMD to Intel, from single core to dual core to quad 
core, from single to dual CPUs, RAID to no RAID and vice versa.

And it worked flawlessly each time.
--- end quote ---

I found that while I could certainly migrate from a VMware to a VirtualBox 
environment and vice versa using Windows 2008 Server, Windows 7 collapsed 
in a heap here.

While I am on the subject of VBox, I have noticed that in the last couple 
releases or so of VirtualBox, creating a brand new VM allows the guest to 
see more of the hardware it is running on than previous versions.  
Clients created on earlier versions were more likely to report an Intel 
CPU when the host was actually an AMD etc.

-- 
Paul Sture