Interesting Information on Windows “Blue Screen”

Reasons for Windows Crash

Your Windows system / server can crash due to:
- memory access violation,
- kernel subsystem inconsistencies
- driver operational (e.g. USB, display) inconsistencies
One might argue that Widows might as well (in some cases) isolate the hardware and continue operations, but chances are that it might (generally does) lead to memory space inconsistencies, and hence Windows follows a "fail fast" policy attempting to prevent corruption in RAM from spreading to disk.

The Blue Screen

Could be any reason, but actual function responsible for (managing?) system crash is KeBugCheckEx. It makes use of a "stop code" and four parameters which are interpreted on a per-stop basis. This function then switches resolution to VGA mode with blue background and some comments on what user shall do next. It then calls for KeRegisterBugCheckCallback function allowing drivers opportunity to stop. It then calls KeRegisterCheckBugReasonCallback so drivers can append data to the crash dump.

To summarize:

KeCheckBugEx -> paints the screen blue -> KeRegisterCheckBugCallback -> KeRegisterCheckBugReasonCallback.

In rare occurrences, even the blue screen display stage isn’t reached and server crashes before that.

Microsoft Vulnerability Research Team: Meeting Social Responsibilities

There aren’t less people who count MS among Evils out there. No one would ever know the truth. But hey, why is that Evil and Good are said to be always co-existing !

True to that, MSVR (Microsoft Vulnerability Research Team) doing some good work out there. Identifying vulnerabilities in even third party apps and software. Read the full story here. 

Microsoft Cloud Offering–Windows Azure–Pros and Cons

I guess am a little late to join the party. But nonetheless, I wanted to start with a quick review of what all it has to offer, in what specs, and at what price. Though in this write up I want to concentrate upon the pros and cons of Windows Azure.

What’s the push from MS? Windows Azure does score well on three aspects for sure:

1. Partially, no Server Admin on your premise. And it covers, server hotfix/patching (not in all cases though), license audit taken care of by default and less worries for High Availability of your solution (key here is, how much MS can stick to its offered SLA).

2. Flexible Billing cycles (Pay-as-you-go). But one side note here. We all know how such billing cycles leave behind some clients feeling over-charged. It would be interesting to see how MS works on that because service billing (specifically pay-as-you-go) is quite different from one-time license provisioning. Biggest advantage is for SMBs who can beef up resources as they grow and dont have to fall in OpEx traps (at least from Infra-Licensing point of view).

3. Giving power back to the users to concentrate on Application and take away all their worries from hosting and provisioning point of view. But am sure, excluding SMBs, large scale applications would still be looking upon the ROI aspects, own cloud/datacentre vis-a-vis MS cloud (or any other cloud for that matter).

But nothing comes easy or free in this world ! While you can dream around some advantages as above, be ready to:

1. loose account control to MS

2. Increased competition (yes, your competitors can reach as easy too as you did, plus experienced & specialized development resources requirements ! )

3. MS have calibrations to compute how much you used them, how you plan to validate it !

4. Increased integration avenues / costs

Using Command Prompt during Windows 2008 R2 Installation

You would have heard of Command Line based installation of Windows. Though in Windows 2008 R2, you can even use command prompt to a great extent right from the moment you see “Where do you want to install” screen. This is enabled by something called WINMINPC environment which is used by Setup itself. Complete list of commands and when you shall use them can be referenced at http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/magazine/gg491396%28en-us%29.aspx.

 

Vikas Rajput (http://vikasrajput.wordpress.com)