Tag Archives: command line

Windows Update… from working to non-working.

Posted on 2010/04/27 | 1 Comment

Broken Window by judepics on FlickrWell it’s been pretty quiet around here lately, I have had nothing to blog about and I’ve been very busy with work and uni.

On Sunday I ran Windows Update on my laptop. Applied all available updates and upgraded IE from version 7 to 8 (so when I use it at uni some sites will no longer nag me to upgrade to a browser that works). All was good.

Until today, when I turned it on and logged in. Instead of my desktop, Windows taskbar, etc. all I got was the wallpaper and an error message saying Explorer “failed to start because Normaliz.dll was not found” and suggesting reinstalling Windows “may fix this problem”. Installing Linux would be a better fix but since there are no Linux versions of some of the software on there, I need Windows XP.

Pressing ctrl+alt+del still brought up the task manager so I knew part of Windows was still working (hooray!). From there I was able to use “New Task” from the File menu to bring up a command prompt.

My plan was to start a web browser and find a solution. Being at uni, I was forced to use IE for the web (since it has the proxy information, which I couldn’t remember). Sadly, Internet Explorer relies on Normaliz.dll too! I tried starting Firefox and it worked (but couldn’t connect), which shows the value of having software from different vendors.

I wasn’t sure if USB support was working on the laptop, and CDs are as cheap as chocolate eggs at the moment, so when I got home to my other PC I burnt the file onto a CD. Onto the laptop and into the command prompt, then:

C:\> CD C:\WINDOWS\System32
C:\WINDOWS\System32> copy "E:\normaliz.dll"
1 file copied
C:\WINDOWS\System32>

That looks like it should fix it! Ctrl+F5 to refresh the cache (at least that’s what it does in IE, not sure about Windows proper) and at the command prompt type “explorer” and… the same error message popped up! Gah! Turns out that, despite many claims that Windows file names are not case sensitive, Windows file names are case sensitive in some cases. Back to the command prompt window…

C:\WINDOWS\System32> rename normaliz.dll Normaliz.dll


C:\WINDOWS\System32> explorer

And up popped... a different error message! It was almost the same but the missing file was iertutil.dll. So I did the same trick - copy the file to a CD (should have made the first one multisession!), use DOS commands to copy it to the right place, ctrl+F5, try again...

...and it worked! My desktop and taskbar came up and the programs that are supposed to start when the machine boots started. Just to be sure I rebooted to check, and it still worked. This is one of those times that I'm glad I started using computer before GUIs were available.

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Fancy a BOINC? Part 3 – software

Posted on 2010/03/13 | 2 Comments
Flu Virus Analysis

This is part 3 of a short series. You might want to read part 1 first.

So far in my project for turning an old laptop into a BOINC box, I’ve been over what BOINC is and prepared the hardware. In this post I get the software running and do some actual number crunching. You need an internet connection for this, my old laptop has an ethernet port which is plugged in to a spare port on my router.

I discovered BOINCpe (site is in German) which is a Windows-based live CD for running BOINC. Just download it, edit a couple of configuration files, burn to CD or make aload it onto a flash drive and you’re all set.

BOINCpe turned out to not be the solution for me because it requires a minimum 256 mb of RAM and the laptop only has 128 (which was a lot when it was made). So because I already had some Ubuntu discs lying around I used one of those instead.

Use the “alternate” install CD (obtainable from here among other places). At the welcome screen, press F4 and choose “command line only”. Answer the questions that come up and away you go.

After installation, login as the user you created during instal. Now it’s time to install the BOINC client and manager. To do that, just type:

sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager

and then your password.

After a bit of Googling, I figured the easiest way to do what I wanted to do was to use a BOINC account manager. I chose Boincstats BAM because it was first on the list. So, sign up to the site and choose from the projects list. Boincstats will try to login to projects using the same email and password you used to sign up (I had to change my SETI@Home password). For projects you haven’t participated in before, Boincstats will create accounts using your Boincstats details. How many times can I say Boincstats in one sentence?

Anyway, having done that, you need to then tell BOINC to use the account manager. So on the Linux box, type:

boinccmd –join_acct_mgr http://boincstats.com/bam/ username password

where username and password are of course replaced with your username and password. I kept getting an error message at this point. You can probably fix it by editing the right configuration file, but I just navigated to /usr/bin and ran it from there.

We’re not quite done yet though. Now back on the Boincstats website, you need to login and go to the host list page. Select the machine you’re setting up (following these instructions, it will be the only one). Then check the boxes for the projects you want to run on that machine.

Then on the BOINC box, run the join_acct_mgr command again. When you get the command prompt again, run

boinccmd –get_state

This shows what the BOINC client is doing right now. You should get a whole lot of statistics that are really interesting to boring people like me.

And that’s about it. You can attach the graphical version of BOINC to the account manager with a couple of mouse clicks and some copy/paste. In future I might play around with configuring things for better performance, but this will do for now.

Links and resources:

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