the echothis blog

Windows 7 is of course, out, and after painlessly upgrading to it, from Vista, on my laptop (and hearing other people have trouble-free experiences as well, I took the plunge a few days ago and decided to upgrade my main PC from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate.

First a few points of background:

1. I am not an idiot. Before starting, I did a Complete PC Backup of the entire C: drive, to an external hard drive. Just to be safe, I also made an image using a LiveCD of the excellent, and free, CloneZilla.
2. As a very early adopter of Vista (I was in several beta programs starting in 2005), I was prepared for some hiccups. Microsoft took plenty of well-deserved lumps for their poor rollout of Vista, in particular their poor coverage of device drivers – in my experience the video drivers were the worst culprits. But since I understand how hard their job is (by relying on 3rd-party manufacturers instead of the homogeneous market Apple has cultivated), I was going to be a somewhat tolerant of potential problems, just as I was with Vista.
3. I’m on 32-bit, and will stay there. I know better than to switch. No need for 64-bit since this computer is for business, not video games.
4. My PC is a medium-to-high-end Dell, with a decent nVidia graphics card. I don’t have any “old” devices so I think it is fair to demand 100% driver support.
5. Since this is my primary PC, it has a lot of programs and settings installed on it. So a Clean Install is not an option (I couldn’t even find the many boxed CD’s anymore if I wanted to). Note to Microsoft: if you want to sell a new OS every 2-3 years, it’s totally unreasonable to expect anyone to either buy a new PC or do a Clean Install on an old one and then have to reinstall and reactivate everything, just to get it. So don’t try to push those options on me!

I took a deep breath, clicked “OK”, and then set it on its way while I went to bed. Now, two days later, I’m feeling pretty negative on the decision right now. Vista, for all its faults, at least installed like a charm. Windows 7, not so much…

Attempt #1: the installation failed and it rolled back to Vista.
I happened to see it give me a Blue Screen of Death and the reboot. A bit of Googling while the PC goes about rolling back to Vista, and I find that someone else has had the exact same error. I hunt for the installation log (which inexplicably is not linked in the error dialog I get when Vista finally loads!) and see an error relating to some Bluetooth driver (by the way, I have no Bluetooth devices installed). But given the horrid experience I have had with my nVidia graphics drivers since Vista released, I have no doubt that the stupid video card is somehow involved. So like the guy in this post, I shutdown the PC, removed the nVidia video card entirely, then rebooted and tried to upgrade again.

Attempt #2: Installation hangs at 62% done.
This has been reported tons of times, and apparently has to do with some service not running. I followed the Microsoft recommended solution, rebooted to make sure the new environment system variable was set, and then tried again.

Attempt #3: Installation actually got LESS FAR ALONG this time, now hung at 42% done.
Unfortunately I can’t find any reports of failure at this specific point so I figure it’s just a weird temporary problem and then hard reboot (since there is no “Cancel” button on the installer screen). Sadly this then hoses the Vista rollback process – upon reboot, I get an error message saying some file cannot be found and I should run chkdisk. OK, sure I’ll do that – but that means I have to hard reboot again, which promptly brings me to a command prompt. So I run chkdisk, it finishes successfully after fixing a few things, and I hard reboot again (since “shutdown /r” for some reason doesn’t work), and I get brought back to the same command prompt. Which means I am stuck in a loop, great – in a horrible limbo between Vista and Windows 7.

Good thing I made an image with CloneZilla, so I reboot again and restore to that. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t try to use a Vista (or Windows 7) DVD in “Repair” mode, there’s a simple answer: given the state, I couldn’t figure out which one would be appropriate! And instead of risking choosing the wrong one, I just went with the CloneZilla image. Two hours later and I am back to square 1 – but at least I have a functional Vista PC again. And at the risk of belaboring the obvious, please note that the only product I have used so far in this ordeal, that has worked perfectly, is the free, open-source one. ‘Nuff said.

So the good ending to this story, finally, is that this last attempt was successful. There were a few stressful points where it appeared to hang again (probably for at least 20 minutes at a time), but I stayed patient and finally have it booting into Windows 7. Let’s all hope that the grandmas out there don’t have the same horrible time I did.

Plesk warns you, emphatically, not to mess with the auto-generated conf/httpd.include:

# ATTENTION!
# DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE OR ANY PART OF IT. THIS CAN RESULT IN IMPROPER PLESK
# FUNCTIONING OR FAILURE, CAUSE DAMAGE AND LOSS OF DATA. IF YOU REQUIRE CUSTOM
# MODIFICATIONS TO BE APPLIED TO THE CONFIGURATION, PLEASE, PERFORM THEM IN THE
# FOLLOWING FILE(S):
# /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/conf/vhost.conf
# /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/<subdomain-name>/conf/vhost.conf

Believe them. As tempting as it is to just put your customizations into that, don’t. Plesk will overwrite that file if you’re not careful (and yes, I found out the hard way).

So indeed, put your customizations into conf/vhost.conf as it recommends. But just creating the file isn’t enough, you also have to notify Plesk that it’s there as described here, then just bounce Apache.

# /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a

(Feature request for Plesk: create an empty vhost.conf by default and include it so it’s ready to go).

In setting up passwordless OpenSSH connections between two CentOS boxes, I was surprised to find that I could connect from the client the server, but it was really, really slow. As in, it took over a minute to connect, after which it was snappy.

Fortunately, a quick Google and I find that the OpenSSH manual has this relevant FAQ. I tried all the suggestions (couldn’t get far testing ssh-rand-helper, though, since it wasn’t apparently installed), but editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the server, to set

UseDNS no

was the trick. Restart sshd, and it works like a charm.