My biggest gripe about Windows 7 is the impact User Account Control has on the command line. Unless you turn UAC completely off, every time you run something on the command line that Microsoft has deemed requiring your password – even if you’re in the local Administrators group – you get an Access Denied error.

Screw. This. Noise.

This is the “ZOMG!!! If you run things as root you’ll destroy the planet!” Linux model.  I don’t like it in Linux, and I definitely don’t like it here. Which mean, yes, when I’m working in Linux I log in as root. Why? One reason is that I want to be able to break things, software-wise.  I want to understand why something has broken, how to avoid breaking it again in the future, and how to fix it. Knowing these things makes me a better admin.

The SU/SUDO model doesn’t really stop admins from breaking things, it just gets in their way.  Ordinary users need the protection of SU/SUDO, not experienced administrators.  It also gets in the way of doing certain things on the command line.

Which brings me back to Windows 7.

Microsoft made UAC much, much better in 7 than it was in Vista.  Still, even on its lowest setting, it’s getting in my way.  For example, I have a batch file on my computer.  Been using it for years.  The name of the file is DC.bat and it contains a single line: “defrag c:”.  That’s it.  In Windows XP, any time I want to defrag the hard drive I hit Windows + R, type “dc” and hit the Enter key.  Boom, done.  UAC prevents me from doing this in Windows 7, along with a lot of other things on the command line.

Forgive me while I repeat myself: Screw. This. Noise.

I completely understand the need to lock things down on a company network to protect the network from users who don’t know how to not break things, but this is a standalone computer with a single user – me.  Also, to toot my own horn, I’m a freaking expert when it comes to Windows.  I, and people like me, don’t need to be hamstrung by UAC.

So, finally, I turned it off completely.  My computer is now in the undocumented “You’re damned right I’m an expert” mode.

The website Mashable.com reports this morning that there is a fake password reset e-mail for Facebook circulating. The e-mail comes with an attachment that, if executed, will install a virus on your computer. This is obviously something you don’t want to have happen.

I’d like to take this opportunity to explain the importance of considering context when you receive such an e-mail.

Let’s suppose you have a Facebook account. If you receive this e-mail but you not request that your Facebook password be reset, the likelihood is pretty great that the e-mail is fake and should be deleted. It’s a good idea to make sure you can still log into your Facebook account, so go ahead and do that. It should go without saying that you should NOT click on any links in his e-mail to get your Facebook account. You should have it separately bookmarked already.

If you don’t have a Facebook account, there is zero chance that the e-mail is genuine. Just delete it and be done with it.

Context also applies when you receive an error message of some kind. Many websites will display advertisements that look like Windows error messages. At best these ads want to sell you something, at worst clicking on them will install a virus. Either way, simply ignore these ads and you should be safe.

This morning Twitter stopped working in our house.  None of our computers could access Twitter, either through a Twitter client like TweetDeck or directly at Twitter.com.  Every other site was working fine.  We just couldn’t get to Twitter.

I checked http://www.isthisdownforyou.com/, which reported that Twitter.com was up.  I could also get to Twitter through my Blackberry.  What the heck was going on?

Things like this are incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. I’d already verified repeatability, which is the first rule of troubleshooting. I finally rebooted the cable modem, leaving it unplugged from power for two minutes. That solved the problem.

Allow me to take this opportunity to let you in on a little secret in the world of IT: Just because we fix a problem doesn’t mean we understand or can explain it.

ETA: I have heard some reports that Twitter was down hard during this time, but that’s not what I saw on my end.  There was no update on the Twitter status page, and I could get to Twitter through SocialScope on my Blackberry. That latter point means that the Twitter API was working.  It’s not at all uncommon for Twitter.com to be down, but I’ve never seen the API go unresponsive for more than five minutes or so.  TweetDeck remained unable to get updates for a full hour. This should imply that the API was down, but again, I could get to Twitter using SocialScope on my Blackberry. So, who the heck knows. It makes even less sense that the API would work for one Twitter client and not another.

I use Firefox as my primary web browser.  One of the extensions I use is Gmail Manager, which checks my Gmail accounts) and tells me when I have new emails waiting.  Here’s what it looks like in use:

A few days ago, I noticed that I wasn’t getting any new emails.  I receive a ton of email, so this was unusual.  I logged into my Gmail account to find I had about 25 new emails waiting.  Gmail Manager obviously wasn’t reporting correctly.

I’ll spare you the troubleshooting steps I went through.  Suffice it to say I spent a couple of hours looking into this problem, and I was not the only person experiencing this problem.

My research led to one, and only one, potential solution.  There’s a service that every internet-connected computer uses called DNS – Domain Name Service.  See, computers don’t understand terms like www.gmail.com, they understand numbers.  The website www.gmail.com resolves to 74.125.47.17.  Now, any DNS server on the planet can resolve this address, and my computer was resolving it just fine.

Every ISP from AOL to Comcast to Mindspring provides DNS servers to their customers.  The internet would not work without DNS.

However, there is also a free third-party DNS system called OpenDNS.  You can manually tell your computer to use their servers rather than your ISPs servers.  When I set my computer to use OpenDNS, Gmail Manager started working again.

This makes no sense at all.  My computer resolved www.gmail.com to 74.125.47.17 both with and without OpenDNS. The DNS server I use should have no effect whatsoever on any service that uses it – yet, here it is.

The first rule of troubleshooting is to look for repeatability.  To that end, I went back to my ISP’s DNS servers and sure enough, Gmail Manager broke again.  I checked this on two other computers. Same result.

I can’t come close to explaining this, and I’ve worked with Microsoft Windows for over fifteen years.