Back to Netnewswire and Newsgator

I’m addicted to RSS. Although it can sometimes be overwhelming, it is my number one source of information. I’m subscribed to 350 feeds or so, and I feel that this is about the most I can handle.

My first encounter with RSS was many years ago with a product called Feed on Feeds. I was running a Debian server at that time, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the program because I had never used RSS before. Needless to say, I discovered the power of RSS pretty quickly

I not sure why I stopped using it, but I changed to Bloglines after a while. Bloglines was (and still is) a very popular online reader at that time, and I really liked it. However, it’s interface was so boring that I started looking for alternatives. After some disappointing experiences I stumbled upon the new version of Google Reader. It was fast, had a good looking interface, keyboard shortcuts and could handle more than 200 unread items per feed (when you reached the 200 limit with Bloglines the feed just stopped updating). Later, Bloglines removed this limit.

One thing that’s still missing in online readers is the ability to create smart lists. When you read a lot of feeds it’s almost a must to setup smart lists so you can instantly see the topics you’re really interested in (or kill certain topics right away). Most desktop readers have this feature, but miss the ability to sync among different workstations. Netnewswire was a product I liked from the beginning, but I never considered paying for it. Why ? Because I could live with Google Reader’s lack of smart lists. A couple of months ago, Google Reader implemented a search feature and I could do some basic filtering with that.

And then this article caught my attention:

NewsGator Consumer Products Are Free at Last

Cool. A new chance to try Netnewswire and see how the syncing with multiple computers work.

So far, I’m impressed. Netnewswire is still a great product, and I was really pleased by the speed of the program, since the last years I’m only used to web-based readers. I installed FeedDemon on a Windows XP machine, and syncing the two products through Newsgator Online seems pretty good.

One other cool thing is that I can choose which feeds I want to read in NNW or FeedDemon, or online in Newsgator.

For example, I have a lot of feeds dealing with all kind of work related feeds. When I’m at home, I really don’t want to read about all kind of work related things in NNW, so I enabled those feeds only in FeedDemon and Newsgator Online. If I have the urge to read them from home, I can always login to Newsgator. Simple as that.

For now it seems I’m back to Netnewswire.

Trashed ISA2004 while importing destination sets

At my company, internet usage is free for everyone. We do very little monitoring at the moment and the only thing I sometimes do is generate a report in ISA2004 to see who/what is generating the most traffic.

Over the last couple of weeks I noticed an increase of traffic generated by video on demand, social networking sites and chat sites. Especially the video sites are generating a lot of traffic. Now, if those sites were only visited during lunchbreaks, I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but for some people it’s just too hard to stay away from those sites throughout the whole day. Time to block some of those annoying sits. But while I’m at it, why don’t I block a lot of unwanted sites at one time ?

On Isaserver.org I found Steve Moffat’s block lists which provides some excellent destination sets which can be imported into ISA server right away.

I downloaded some of those lists and imported them from my workstation, using the ISA Server management console. I then create a firewall rule to block all sites in the newly imported set, and tested it. It worked, so I wanted to import more lists.

During that second import, something (I still don’t know what) went wrong, and the import was terminated. Immediately, the management console stopped responding and internet access was down. I opened a remote console to the ISA server and found out that the Firewall Service had stopped. I tried to restart, but it refused.

In my eventlog I found event ID 11004:

Microsoft Firewall failed to start. The failure occurred during Initializing policy rules because the system call failed. Use the source location 912.294.4.0.2167.887 to report the failure. The error description is: The system cannot find the file specified.

It seemed that the second destination set was corrupt, and was confusing the firewall rules. Ok, no problem I thought. I’ll just delete the last imported destination set and everything is OK. It turned out it wasn’t that simple. When I launched the ISA server manager, I could not access the toolbox. It came up with a “cannot find the file specified” error, so there was no way to get to the destination sets.

Searching for the event id on the net didn’t get me very far. The only solution I found was to delete ISA 2004 and do a reinstall. I did not want to do that yet, because I could not understand that a corrupted destination set could bring ISA down to it’s knees.

After some thinking and searching around in the ISA program directory, it dawned to me that the ruleset had to be somewhere in the registry. But where ? I searched the Isaserver.org forums on registry issues, and found the following key:

 

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fpc\Storage\Array-root\Arrays\xxxxx\

RuleElements\Domainnamesets

And there it was. My imported rulesets where there. The first imported set and the second one. The second one had some keys missing, so it was obvious that that was the one which had been interrupted during the import. I deleted the key, and rebooted my machine, and voila: the Firewall Service did start again.

Since the ISA server was down anyway, I decided to also upgrade to ISA 2004 SP3 right away, which installed without any problems.

Note to self: before importing destination sets in the future: do it on the machine itself, instead of a management console on a workstation. Oh, and make sure you make a backup of the ISA configuration. My last backup was almost a year old… I guess time flies when you’re having fun

Event ID 2019: something eats my memory

Once in a while, one of my Windows 2003 servers suffers from some kind of misbehaving application that eats all resources and forces the server to hang/crash. It usually begins with users complaining that the network is slow, or some DFS share cannot be accessed anymore.

I never really investigated this problem, just a quick reboot to keep my users happy, and that’s it.

Last week, it happened again. Just when I was on vacation. Since I’m the only IT guy in this company, nobody knew what was happening. We have a support contract with a third party, so things got resolved pretty quickly, but now this problem has to be dealt with.

Time to dig deeper into memory/resource management on Windows. I found this article on the MSDN debugging blog. I’ll see if this can help me find the culprit.

If I still can’t find the problem, it might be an option to reboot the server every weekend. See how you can schedule a reboot in this article at Intelliadmin.

Let the hunt begin !

Update 08/10/07

I think I may have found the culprit: McAfee Virusscan Enterprise 8.0. The McAfee Framework service is eating all resources. My server crashed again a few weeks ago, and after the reboot I disabled all McAfee stuff. Since then, everything is still running smoothly. If the problems stay away for a couple of more weeks, I will look for another antivirus solution, since I have been having troubles with desktop installations of this product as well…

Google Reader out of Labs

It seems that Google Reader is not “experimental” anymore. Cool !

This reader has almost anything I want in an RSS reader. The new search feature is awesome, but needs some extra features like:

• Save searches

• Hide already read items in the results list

I think like many of you, I have been a long time Bloglines user, but switched to Google more than a year ago. I tried the new Bloglines Beta recently, but it hasn’t won me back. The “view all items” feature in Google Reader, and the ability to put feeds into multiple folders is something I really like. Also, the trends feature is a great way to filter out “dead” feeds.

Update:

Hmm. Something weird going on. Lots of feeds are showing incorrect unread-count numbers. I know for sure that some folders had more unread items than they show now… I’m not the only one experiencing this. It seems that my oldest unread article is from september 7th. I’m sure I had unread articles way older than that.

Also the interface language has changed to Dutch, instead of English.

So here I am once more…

Hey everyone, I guess I’ll just write a first short message like most people do with a new blog…    The speed509 nick comes from my motorcycle, which is a ‘98 Triumph Speedtriple T509. It’s my first motorcycle and I absolutely love it, but more about that later. First I need to find out more about this whole blogging thing.