Subject: WinNT memory leaks

Jerry,

Your May 17 Byte column points out the effect of memory leaks on NT.

Indeed, a search of "leak" in the MS KnowledgeBase reveals several hundred mentions of known bugs (presumably fixed). Hundred more leaks are probably hidden in the NT code.

It is just unbelievable that MS can SELL such an appallingly bad OS and get away with it. This is indeed the proof that MS lacks a healthy competition in the PC OS business, for bad products can only survive in the absence of normal, free-market competition. Suppose that your trusty Bronco (RIP) had been slowling down to a crawl after 100 miles and had needed a daily oil change. Wouldn’t you have seriously wondered about the car market? Now why do you accept this kind of revolting shoddiness in an OS while it would have driven you berserk in a car?

The example of Unix shows that it is possible to create a good, stable OS. Repected columnists such as you should clamor for stability and graceful recovery in OSes. I can’t believe you are actually writing "get this utility and that program to fix NT" instead of "stay away from NT for serious work if you value your data".

Subject: NT 4.0 service pack 5 and Cyrix

Hi, Jerry,

I was reminded about the service packs when reading this week’s portion of your column at Byte. A couple of days ago I installed the NT 4.0 service pack 5 from the Microsoft site. According to the description on that page, the new SP is mostly a compilation of previous patches and Y2K fixes. So, rather than get the whole bundle and duplicate some files and take hours to download, I elected to use the "install now" feature, rather than use the "download and install later". It went slicker than a whistle, and took only about 15 minutes! It was quite a contrast compared to SP 4 and it’s attendant problems. Of course, one still has to reboot and defrag, but that didn’t take long.

An another topic, I noticed a little blurb in USA Today a week or two ago about Cyrix announcing their cessation of manufactor of computer chips. The competition is too steep and so they’re only going to make appliance chips. I haven’t noticed any computer industry pundits making much of this, which seems sad. What will happen to the low end of the market with this perfectly good chip no longer around? Cheap people like me will have to pay more, I guess....

Thanks!

Ted Borreson

Subject: How to FrontPage /FTP/Publish from NT through LINUX to the Net

Jerry—

I had the same problem as you did. Print this one out!

Solution: You’ve got to load the ftp_masquerade module on your linux box.

---------

This works on RedHat 6.0. Try:

1. Log in as root.

2. Type: /sbin/modprobe ip_masq_ftp.o

 

You should now be able to use the ftp stuff in front page to get to your website. Worked well for me! (Since this is kernel stuff, I’m guessing it works on most distributions.)

Some other stuff:

-----------------

To see the modules you’ve currently loaded:

/sbin/lsmod

To find the ftp module:

/sbin/modprobe -l | grep ftp

To find other modules handling masquraded throughput:

/sbin/modprobe -l | grep masq

To make sure the module gets loaded at ever boot:

pico /etc/rc.d/rc.local # the autoexec.bat of RH linux

# go to the end of the file and type on it’s own line:

/sbin/modprobe ip_masq_ftp.o

And that’s all there is to it!

Are you familiar with the folkways of the penguins? They gather at the edge of the iceflow after a long hunger-inducing winter. No one dives in. There might be sea leopards there. Those in back push one of those in front in. If he doesn’t get eaten by a sea leopard, everyone goes fishing.

Just wondering if this somehow seems familiar to you.

Affectionately, Andy

for a "professional" operating system to lock and crash when a memory ceiling is reached is inexecusable today; M$ wants everyone to believe that NT is mission critical software— just ask the crew of the dead in the water Aegis missile frigate how they felt. actually, the admirals who had the stupidity to accept the system without investigating the rampart crash reports should be criticized more than M$.

your solution of a memory meter is cute, but it is something you should not be required to be concerned with -it interfers with your work.

it’s one thing to have an operating system on the market which claims it is ‘the one’ and mission critical; it’s another to not only make the claims, but to be an agressive monopoly of where dominance is not acceptable, only crushed opponents.

I’ve never run M$, and never will. I give up a lot of great programs, but that is a price to pay for principles. as little as my refusal costs M$, it irrelevant—it’s the statement. 15 years ago I ran a vax-750 for 18 months—it only went down because a drunk took out a major power pole and the diesel generator ran out fuel...—running 4.2 BSD. today, I only reboot to upgrade the OS.

If you decompress it (SP-5, complete install, 128-bit encryption) http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/sp5/128bitX86/ using the -d switch (eg. msnt128.exe -d), you will find a directory according to the TEMP variable set in autoexec.bat. Copy the whole thing elsewhere once it’s done expanding and use _that_ path to update NT when the bloody OS asks for your WinNT Update disk. This will prevent the time consuming process of expanding and updating—assuming you can even figure out how to do it. (I couldn’t).

The directory the service pack unzips to may be hidden and/or read-only, which is why I use Norton File Manager—or you, Norton Commander, to find it. If you insert the following into your autoexec.bat, you’ll always know where the TEMP variable is:

Sorry to hear of your FrontPage woes—I use it only for Layout and Design, then recomplile everything to DreamWeaver 2.0, then control my FTP updates manually; but I suspect DW 2.0 can do a good job at uploading as well.

PS -- In case you didn’t know, there is a patch for FP98 at

As a Network Administrator, I have discovered the secret to getting Microsoft products to work, ( if you are willing to pay the price).

When you get to the License Agreement; highlight the Yes button. Prick your finger and squeeze until you get a good sized drop of blood, then hit the enter button. Microsoft products will then work.

The unfortunate side affect is that Bill Gates will now own your soul.

Like you, I used InfoSelect a _LOT_ ... the first version after Tornado was wonderful on DOS. I then got the Windows version, and "tried" to use their new fancy version from the web site.

They have suffer "suite talk", like everyone else. I used to have a very simple system, that would interface to lots of other things ... and they tried to jam those other things into their product.

It’s terrible ... and even at this late date, I have upgraded to the latest levels of Windows and Office and Browsers ... but I use the DOS InfoSelect to capture the information I really need to remember ... like when I’m on a new project, and the terminology is overloading me ... I just slam it into InfoSelect, and have an easy prosthetic memory.

Enjoy your articles ....

Subject: The Perfect Workstation?

Dr. Pournelle,

Stan Fuhrhop

Subject: Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

Jerry,

firstly a thank you for all the Byte columns over the years and this excellent site, also for the fiction (but I paid for those books so you have already been thanked in a more physical (fiscal) manner).

Secondly I saw an e-mail to you a while back on why we don’t see any aliens out there, supposedly they all sit around watching their version of Star Trek (wasn’t Capt. J.L.Picard asked why he didn’t do his exploring on the holodeck?) or playing doom or in some other VR. I think (like you) that, that is not a high probability (or at least not for a large % of species) my own pet theory is from information theory, apparently the more information dense a signal is the higher its entropy or in other words a "perfect" encoding looks just like noise, so the theory goes there are loads of signals reaching us put we ignore them all, because they are too sophisticated for our current decoding techniques!

seem to have a very reasonable use for any spare compute cycles you have

Thanks and bye for now

Rod

Jerry:

When folks get tired of debating presence of intelligent life in Washington—D.C. or Redmond—you might mention this site for folks with some spare computer time and an interest in such matters. No fees involved and no direct connection required.

You download the application and it grabs a block of data over any internet connection. Can run as application or screen saver. Takes about 24 hours to process a block of Arecibo data on G3 Macs and Pentium II or better. Can be set to only dial when you allow it. Versions available for Windows, Mac and Unix including Linux.

<http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/>

Meanwhile good luck in battling the demons plaguing your server.

Re: SETI

The problem I have with SETI is that there are no plans or controls in place for what we do should our search succeed.

If there are Pak or Moties or Borg or Kzin whatever out there, should there not be some plans to study the nature of a First Contact, rather than shouting "Hey! Alien! We’re here!"

Or they may be listening to us: to a radio telescope on some planet around any star say up to 50 or so light years out, earth must show up like a *beacon.*

Congrats Jerry! You’ve now joined the ranks of the rest of the Press that, rather than demand NT be fixed, offer work-arounds, as if this type of bug is something you _should_ expect from software. Crap begets Crap. You should talk to Leo on ZD’s "ScreenSavers"... he tells people to use a defragger every day on NT. Oh yeah, that’s quality software.

F. Robert Falbo | TheRef™ Drive &; Controller Guide

I greatly enjoy your writing (both novels and columns). Your Chaos Manor columns in Byte really helped me get up to speed on PCs when I got out of college in 1989. I can remember finding my older brother's stack of Byte (about three years worth) and reading three years of your column in a month.

I would like to return the favor by helping you with your map problem. I love playing role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. One of the reasons I learned about PCs was to help me prepare maps and materials for the various games I run. I tried many things over the years and have finally figured out how to make maps on the computer the way I want them.

There are two methods I recommend.

The first involves a software package called campaign cartographer. You can find it at http://www.profantasy.com . This software is based on a AutoCAD like CAD program from England. You know AutoCAD you will feel right at home. It has a extensive symbols library and it very accessible. The basic package comes with all the symbols you need to draw overland maps. Their add-ons include a dungeon designer and a city designer. Their software is available for DOS or Windows 95.

It has a learning curve and it definitely comes from the CAD world as opposed to the graphic world of Freehand and CorelDRAW. It will take some getting used too but once mastered it is a powerful and quick tool to make maps.

The second is CorelDRAW 7, or 8. The reason I choose CorelDRAW because it has several important tools I use for maps. First it can layer this allows me to put land, water, vegetation, hills, and cities all on separate layers and choose which gets printed.

Second, it has the Bezier line tool. This allows you to draw freeform curves and straight lines quickly and easily. You use this to draw islands and continents.

Third, it has what they call powerlines. This feature allows you draw a vector based calligraphy line. You can also set the line to a fixed width. The result is a elongated thin blob that can be filled. I use this to draw rivers. I draw the landforms and then I draw the rivers using powerline feature. In I use the trim feature to subtract the river from the landform. The result is very attractive.

Fourth and last, it has two color bitmap fills. I have a pattern for various types of vegetation. I draw the forest or the swamp has a freeform curved shape and then fill it with the pattern. Then I blank out the outline.

I use CorelDRAW I am sure that Freehand has equivalents although I don't what they are called in that package.

Regardless of which software you use I do have a recommendation for a methodology.

First you take a piece of paper and draw your map. It doesn't have to be precise just close to what you want. I bet you have a hand sketch already done to use while you wrote the novel. The reason for the paper that for me it is easier to get my thoughts together on paper than drawing it from scratch on the computer.

Second, you scan the map in. Then you take your drawing package and import the map. Stretch the map to the size you want. Put it on the bottomost layer and lock that layer so you can't move it. Also disable any auto trace feature your package has.

Third, using the bezier line tool trace out the coastline lines. Draw the rivers. Make your hill and mountain symbols. Copy those symbols many times and start placing them. Then create your swamp and forest patterns. Draw the outline of your forest and swamps and fill them with the different patterns. Make your city and town symbols and place them.

While you are doing this keep all the different entity types on different layers. This will allow you more contol over what is printed as well as making the front to back order of your symbols much easier to control.

While you are placing and drawing refer to the underlying bitmap to gauge where to do things. If a mountain range or a forest obsurce the bitmap and you need to see it turn off the layer the obscuring symbol is on.

I am enclosing a jpeg of one of my small maps. It was exported from CorelDRAW 7

Subject: Linux, bad news

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

First, Linux. After my fun with IE5, described in my previous message, I decided that linux belonged on a different machine. This way doing something bad to one OS won't kill the other. Since I have spare hardware that is Good Enough left over from previous upgrades (old SoundBlaster16, spare 9GB Hd, spare mouse, spare 2X CD-ROM) I decided to just buy the cheapest other components (Processor, motherboard, case and power supply, memory, floppy) to get a Linux box built. The best price I have seen is for a Cyrix 333, 32Mb SDRAM, low end SVGA card and 3.5" floppy for $290. $290!!!

Bad news (for some of us, anyway) follows.

There is also a front page article about the penalty imposed on the person who committed the first murder this town has seen in ten years. Nice small town. Just wish there were good enough job prospects in programming that I could stay.

Kit Case

Subject: Datawave

Just a note regarding a technology you mentioned in one of your Chaos Manor columns back before Byte Mk1 died. I’ve kept watch on the Datawave site (an alternate method of disk encoding which was supposed to allow up to about 10MB on a standard diskette) off and on since you took note of it, as it seemed to be a very promising option. As time passed however, with no sign of any progress (the site was seldom updated, and dates mentioned had all passed), I eventually picked up an external parallel Zip 250 drive with which I am quite pleased. I went back to the Datawave site today, and it’s no longer there. A shame really, because it would have been a nice intermediate step between 1.44 MB floppies and Zip 100 or LS120 formats.

Hi,

Following the recommendation by Jerry Pournelle to try MemTurbo, I downloaded and installed the programme on an NT4 Server SP4 box and a Win98 box. Both of these machines run on 128MB memory and have large paging or swap files.

After a while, not having run anything for a time, as I was working on another machine, I wanted to run Access on the Win98 box. It gave me the not enough memory to run, please close another etc etc that implies inadequate Win98 swap file. Never occurred before. I ran the MemTurbo programme after my forced reboot to check things, and it seemed fine. Except that, some time later the same memory failure occurred. What seems to be part of the problem is that programmes on the menu, such as Sygate, McAfee, RealPlayer will work, but the Start button fails. No programme having an icon on the desk top will run. Uninstalling MemTurbo did not cure the problem. Thus, something that MemTurbo did when installed has resulted in a bug which produces a non-operable computer over a period of a couple of hours or more. To reiterate, had no such problems prior to this install.

Actually, this comment:

complicates things somewhat, since MemTurbo makes _no_ changes to the system that persist while its process is not actually running. The only exception to this is the VCache settings adjusted on the Cache Tuning page, but it sounds as though you (Paul) were working with the evaluation copy where this would not apply.

Thus, if the problem persisted when MemTurbo wasn’t running, and in particular, after you uninstalled it, by definition the problem has to be unrelated to MemTurbo. I suppose Heisenberg could argue otherwise, but for all intents and purposes I think its a safe claim...

- Dave

Dear Jerry,

I tried MemTurbo after reading your comment at www.byte.com. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deal with the leakage of User Resources, which is what forces me to restart Win 98 at least once every two days, sometimes two or three times in one day. I mainly use IE 5.0 for browsing, Netscape Messenger 4.6 for email, and Freecell Pro.

I’m happy to see you back in action at the new web-based Byte.

Memory leaks and windows nt

Dr Pournelle,

I read your article about memory leaks and Win NT. I too have a dual Pentium system that used to have severe leaks. FWIW, it was cured for me by moving up to SP 5. The system has not BSD’d one time in over a month since installing SP5. I have so many services and device drivers on at startup that my initial memory is at 59meg (out of 288) and barely moves past a hours of heavy graphic work.

Subject: web colors.

I have once written about this, and I’ll once again write about it, ‘cuz it’s really annoying.

You have a light pink background. I have white as default character color. The two don’t match. Please, if you have something other than default as the background color, have something else than default as the foreground character color too.

--

Hello,

My name is James Snover, and I am a big fan of your books. I think I’ve read all the sci-fi, and I’m working on the non-fiction. I think "A Step farther Out" is as important today as when it was written. I think that when history looks back on the 1960’-1980’s era, "A Step Farther Out" will have to be credited as one of the major forces in getting the US population (if not all of western civilization) out of the whole "the future is doomed" mind set.

One of the ideas you have written of is the "Alderson Drive," which you have stated is based at least in part on the work of Dan Alderson. does Dr Alderson have a web site? I looked in your links section on your web site and didn’t see it.

The last book of yours I read was "Starswarm," and I thought it was terrific. Keep on hitting those keys, sir!

James Snover

Subject: High Speed Access

A report from the heart of the Valley...

Marcia &; I live in Sunnyvale, near the heart of what many refer to as Silicon Valley. We both work for reasonably high tech companies, and pay unreasonably high rent. High speed access to the Internet at home? We very nearly couldn’t get it. ISDN is available, but I hear it’s a bear to install and configure. Besides, the sign on the side of the VTA bus said "In 1994, we thought ISDN was a good idea. Of course we thought the Macarena was a good idea then, too!" This was an ad for Pacific Bell DSL service.

We have two home computers, two phone lines, marcia writes plays and screenplays. I take online classes and run a couple of websites. We _*DESERVE*_ high speed access. There are two options "available" (in a range of speeds). @Home Network (through TCI) and Pacific Bell DSL. Now I have family members living on the Berkeley side of the SF Bay, with @Home access and they said it screams. I can live with "screams." Last August I called TCI, they said that we should have service in our area in late September ... well December... maybe in January... hopefully before the end of the summer, ‘99.

At that last, I did a little research, and discovered that in Sunnyvale, which was the original test market for @Home, the equipment which they installed two or three years ago is outmoded, and doesn’t work with their new system, so even though Sunnyvale was first, it will be near to last. Sigh.

So, on to Pacific Bell we go. Not a bad choice by any means - after all, they own the copper, right? We have had our internet accounts and access through Pacific Bell for more than a year, with narry a hitch in service. DSL is problematic though, you have to be within a certain radius from one of the PB CO’s (Central Office, where the switch from copper to fiber happens). It took nearly 4 weeks for PB to decide our location qualified for DSL.

That is the end of the sad part of this story. They sent out a tech, and together we hooked up the boxes. I set up the TCP/IP stuff, and we were live. I mean LIVE. I could download and view 5 Meg Tiff images from JPL in about 23 seconds. Big Grin.

Now for the network... with very little pain, a Gateway Win95 box with WinGate was up and serving the internet to both my local machine, and across our home 10BaseT net to Marcia’s Win98 box. Then I transitioned the Gateway to Linux, set up something called IP Masquerading, and we were live again (in something less than 3 days - Linux is cool, but considerably more opaque for the uninitiated).

I pass on this experience because you wrote about bringing your ISDN online. Also you mentioned online charges... The DSL service was a couple of hundred installed, $50 per month on 24/7, no additional connect time charges, and the monthly includes our PBI account, email boxes, home page, etc. So DSL is really only $30/month more than a standard ISP account.

--

I am for quite some time a regular reader of your columns and I was quite pleased when BYTE "came back from the dead" - I hope this time things will get better :)

However, regarding your column regarding Mem Turbo I do have some observations:

• first of all, there is NO WAY under Windows NT for a normal program to "solve" MEMORY LEAKS IN THE KERNEL - if you find any program that claims such things you should be very suspicios regarding the knowledge of the programmer or more likely the honesty of the "publisher"; the only consistent way to fix this kind of problems is to apply the latest Service Packs - at least SP4 or better yet SP5!
• the only program I know that really hooks itself DEEP inside NT is Sunbelt’s AutoPilot P/SA (Performance/Scalability Accelerator) - there was a special offer for the members of the Sunbelt Windows NTools E-News and I think there is a shareware version somewhere on http://www.sunbelt-software.com together with a benchmark program; HOWEVER this a program STRICTLY for Windows NT which uses device-driver hooks into the kernel (and whenever M$ launches a new SP they have to also launch a new version so that they can hook into the right place!) The program is interesting and I tested it on three of my NT systems (a dual PII/375 with 256 MB, a PII/400 with 128 MB and a DELL Inspiron 7k mobile PII/366 with 128 MB). Unfortunatly the only one which was consistently showing an improvement (small) was the Inspiron (and I suspect this might have something to do with by-passing some of the power-management advanced functions of the Inspiron that simply go to a lower CPU frequency when the system is idle).
• there are some other programs out there claiming to do some sort of memory cleaning (APK is an old one but there are some others), HOWEVER most of them do next to nothing under NT since they only have access to the memory space of their own process;
• I do have a "memory cleaning" module in my own product (called XDESK - and I think you have an honorifical licence :) which is based on "system-wide hooks" - but this only hooks SOME programs (for instance does NOT hook most of the services) and is usually trying to do "non-invazive memory cleaning" in order to improve the responsiveness of the "foreground programs". The official version 2.90 will be launched during next week and ALL existent useres will get a free upgrade (unlike some companies (which I’ll leave unnamed :) that were selling a 5% improvement of an old buggy program as a new product and which now seriously think about charging even for service packs :)

I don’t believe that was the gentleman’s point at all, Jerry.

The point I believe he was trying to make, with which I agree wholeheartedly, is that NT’s engineering, from a function and reliability standpoint, is—shall we say—less than optimum. That it can be done right has been proven for 30 years now—as much trouble as you are having migrating to Unix, the operating system (correctly installed) is as reliable as the hills. I’ve had Unix machines run for over a calendar year without a crash.

More importantly, I believe he was also trying to say: Microsoft needs no apologists. If they can sell such a broken operating system, of course, more power to them, but it doesn’t improve the world any to say (approximately) "well, since there’s no better alternative, here’s a way around the breakage"... when there _is_ a better alternative.

Several of them, in fact. _Any_ system requires a learning curve; and I think you’re getting just a bit less objective about that these days than you used to be... but he’s right: you swing a big blade, Jerry. Those of us who are tired of Microsoft being an 800-pound gorilla really need some (well-read, notable) help.

You fit that category.

Whether you like it or not. :-)

Subject: AOL and MIME with multiple files

This is a long standing problem with America On-Line. I’ve learned to send only one binary attachment at a time to my friends on AOL, as it’s E-Mail program gets confused if there are more than one and simply sends the raw MIME code instead.

There are three solutions:

1) Send Larry one file at a time

2) Have Larry locate a MIME decoder he can run at his end

3) ZIP up the files into a single ZIP archive, and show Larry how to use Unzip.

Actually, there is a fourth solution: Get Larry off of AOL and onto a real ISP...

After installing, usually the default settings will work fine for any AOL file that has been encoded.

I have found that repeatedly running MemTurbo will seem to make more and more RAM available. Is this a correct surmise, or am I fooling myself. I haven’t seen anything that addresses this question on your site or help screens.

Anyway, this is to thank you for recommending MemTurbo. It does all you say. It has not only kept me from locking up, a frequent occurance due to multiple open windows, etc., but it also helped identify a major trouble maker on my system.

I noticed that MemTurbo, kept kicking itself off (I had it set to run at low mem warning). I pulled it up and could see memory disappear, it would run, memory would restore to 40MB free, then fall to 5MB, restore, fall, etc.

I used the emperical method to determine the culprit, by closing applications one after another until I found the perpetrator. A pull from an outside database via a somewhat jury-rigged spreadsheet interface I got from a friend. I still will need to run it on occasion, but now I know to go to barebones application-wise when I do.

Anyway, thanks for the tip.