What I did on the 4th of July...

I originally wasn't going to write this up, but Valorie thought it was a cute story.

I need to describe some terminology first.  Here on the Windows team, we call a full build of Windows a "timebuild" - normally, you don't build the entire Windows product to make a change to your component - you typically just have to rebuild the individual DLL (or EXE) and test it in isolation.

But before you check any new feature, especially a feature that affects multiple major subsystems of Windows, you need to do a full build (among other reasons, to insure that any changes you made to headers don't break other components in Windows). 

One other thing that a timebuild provides is a baseline for the test team.  You see, the test team can run tests with privately built bits (from the developer) and they can get a reasonable degree of confidence in the fix, but for a significant change, it's better to have a complete build of the world - that ensures that the testers are testing a system that's as close to a real system as they can possibly get.

Anyway, I'm close to finishing up two of my features for Longhorn, so it was time to do the timebuild.  I started it on Friday, found some issues and fixed them, and left for the weekend, figuring I'd check up on the timebuild over the weekend (not surprisingly, it takes more than one or two hours to build all of Windows).

I was busy on Saturday, but didn't worry about it.

Sunday morning, I decided to check on the timebuild, so I RAS'ed in to check on the build.

The RAS connection worked just fine, but during the post connect security checks, I got a wierd error, something I'd never seen before (fatal execution error or something like that).

So it was time to get on the horn with Helpdesk and see if they had any idea.  One of the nice things about working for a big company is that they have a helpdesk that's staffed 7x24, even on holiday weekends.  So I got on the phone and waited for about 10 seconds for the tech to pick up.

She worked me through a couple of suggestions, none of which worked, so she escalated the call up the chain.  While this was going on, I drove into work and fixed a couple of problems and restarted the timebuild.

Later that afternoon, we had a BBQ at some friends, so I didn't bother trying again.  On the other hand, I enjoyed myself immensely at the BBQ, so it was worth it.

On Monday morning, I had an email from helpdesk waiting for me.  It turns out that since my machine at home is joined to a corp domain one of the scripts was depending on a tool that hadn't been pushed to my machine yet (classic chicken and egg problem - the tool would be pushed when I connected to the domain, but since I couldn't RAS in, the tool couldn't be pushed to my machine).  Silly, but stuff like that happens.

The suggestion from helpdesk was that I unjoin the domain and re-join the domain.  They were very careful to remind me to ensure that I knew the password for the administrator account on the machine since my domain account would no longer work for logon (this is the only one of my machines on which I routinely run as an admin, because our RAS logon process requires admin access - there are workarounds but I'm lazy :().

It turns out that I HAD forgotten the password for the local administrator account.  So, being the bright boy, I reset the password to something known and unjoined the domain.

I then logged in as the administrator account and tried to connect to rejoin the domain.  And I got an error.

That was weird, the error was the exact same error you'd expect to get when you're not running as an admin.

So I did a "NET LOCALGROUP ADMINISTRATORS" from the command line.

There was only one entry, "Sharron".

Oh crud.  Then the memories came flooding back.  Five years ago, when I set this machine up, I had just gotten DSL, and didn't have a hardware firewall, and the machine was running W2K, so it didn't have a built-in firewall.  I was running ZoneAlarm at the time, but I wanted an additional level of security (stupid, I know, but that was 5 years ago).  So I tried to set up a sort-of "honeypot" - I renamed the administrator account to be "Sharron" and created a new account in the guests group (this was on W2K) called Administrator.

Not only that, but I couldn't remember the password on the "Sharron" account.  So now I have a machine on which the only account that I have a password is the guest account.

The phrase "Hoist by my own petard" comes to mind.  And I was SO PROUD of myself for remembering to ensure that I knew the administrator account password.

 

And now, the mistakes start piling on fast and furious.  For some reason, instead of trying to boot to the recovery console and resetting the password on the Sharron account, I decided to re-install Windows XP.

But, of course, the only copy of Windows XP I had was a Windows XP RTM disk.  This isn't a problem because I trust the hardware firewall to keep my machine safe while I install XP and download SP2 onto it.

No big deal, right?

Wrong.

About 2/3rds of the way through the installation, I get a popup about the setup failing.  The setup log doesn't have anything reasonable in it, and the setup is past the point where you can undo the setup.

The installation of Windows on that machine is toast.  I'm swinging in the wind here, folks.  The old installation is toast, the new installation didn't work, I don't know what to do.

So I hauled the disk out, and restarted the installation, this time doing a clean installation.  Any apps will have to be reinstalled, etc, but at least I didn't have to reformat the drive.

Oh yeah, the product key.  That's right.  This machine is owned by Microsoft, I got the product key from Microsoft, and I don't have original media for it (I do for all my other machines, just not this one, since it's Microsoft's machine).  The product key's sitting on a server at work, if I could RAS into work, I could get it...

Fortunately, my other machine is more than capable of running RAS (it's the "good" machine).  So I installed RAS on my other machine, dialed in, and got the product key off the server at work.

Installation continued on the newly-reinstalled machine, but for some reason XP RTM didn't recognize the NVidia TI-4400 adapter in the machine (I think the TI4400 came after XP RTM).  I installed the antivirus software and SP2, downloaded all the security patches, and I was good to go.

But even though XP recognized the NVidia adapter, it STILL didn't stick.  It wasn't until I downloaded the latest WHQL drivers from NVidia that the driver stuck.

At this point, it's about 4PM on Monday, and I'm back to where I was back on Sunday Morning

So I reinstalled RAS and try to connect, and...

I get a different error code, this one coming from the smartcard reader.  I've still not resolved that one (tonight, if I have the time).

Sometimes, it's just not worth waking up in the morning.

On the other hand, the timebuild worked great, I installed it on my test machine when I came into work yesterday and the feature worked!  Now I'm doing a timebuild of my OTHER feature, when that one completes (in about an hour or so), I'll be installing that to ensure that that works.  And I finished the latest Misty Lackey novel (Sanctuary) and a Judge Dee novel (The Chinese Bell Murders, by Robert van Gulik).

So the day wasn't a total loss.  And I haven't had to reformat the C drive (yet). 

But it sure was annoying.