Ask DACS
February 2012

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Q – How do I "eject" a thumb drive in Windows?
A - Eject is a term used with removable media like a CD. In Windows Explorer, if you right click on the drive letter for a CD/DVD drive, one of the options is "Eject" which will stop the drive and open the drive door/tray. On slot-loading drives, the CD is literally spit out. Hard drives, whether rotating or solid-state (flash), should be "stopped" using the little widget that appears in the Task Tray at the bottom right of the screen when a removable drive is inserted. Stopping the drive checks for open files and flushes the cache for FAT drives. In Windows 7 the icon has a USB plug with a green check mark and appears only when a removable drive is inserted. The danger from not stopping a drive before removing it from the system is that a file may be open possibly resulting in data corruption or in the worst case scenario; the system is updating the master file table (MFT) of an NTFS drive or the file allocation table (FAT) which could leave the disk in an inconsistent state. Naturally there is more than one way to do this task, but most people right click on the icon, a list of removable devices appears and you can click on the one you want to remove. A "Safe to Remove" message will appear if the device has stopped. If not, an error message such as "Drive cannot be stopped" or something similar will appear. In practice, if I know there are no open files and drive is "quiet", I often just rip it out of the socket. Windows will forgive you.

Q - Jim R paraphrased this question at the meeting, but here is the question from his email: "We had an odd thing the other day, and it persisted for several days.  We were shopping for a vacation on www.cheaptickets.com. Halfway through the shopping selection screens, it would suddenly reroute us to www.vast.com, a nondescript site that looks like one of those you get when it can't serve the page you requested. This happened numerous times, on 3 different computers, Windows 7, Kubuntu Linux and Mandriva Linux, but was rather unpredictable as to when in the process that it would happen.  Restarting, rebooting, etc. didn't help. I eventually used a work machine that VPN tunnels to my work site, and it worked fine. I have to think that it was something that my ISP (Comcast) was doing in their routing, but I can't imagine why.  A similar re-routing happened months ago on a completely unrelated site.
A - This is "routing weirdness" of the n-th degree. In addition to the discussion at the meeting, one member was inspired to dig a little further. I have no confidence in any of the possible explanations offered at the meeting. These included the possibility the target site had made a recent change to its DNS and this change was propagating. This would be unlikely for a large commercial site and would not explain why it occurred on multiple computers over an extended period. The evidence does point to Comcast's DNS servers (see below) as using a VPN tunnel to an employer's network would use the DNS servers at work, bypassing Comcast.

After the meeting Bill D. sent me a link to a Cisco support forum entry discussing "DNS Problem with Comcast Nameservers" (tinyurl.com/6wyzp73) that points to a configuration error in some DNS servers somewhere. Could this be the problem? It is the most logical possibility so far. The domain name system (DNS) is simple in concept but incredibly complex in the real world implementation. That it works as well as it does is one of the miracles of the Internet. And IPv6 is coming...

Q - I'm being prompted to install an update, what should I do?

A - There was much confusion over where the prompt was coming from and for what. We finally determined that the prompt was to install a newer version of Internet Explorer. How this update behaves is slightly different between Windows versions (XP, Vista, and Win7) and your setting for Windows Updates. Plus Microsoft has announced that it began pushing out IE version upgrades automatically starting in January. The goal is to have all Windows users on the latest version supported by their version of Windows. XP users will be upgraded to IE 8, while Vista and Win7 will get IE 9.

Back when Microsoft released IE7 as a "priority update", corporate customers resisted, so they were allowed to manage the update process using Group Policy. Meanwhile MS backed off and made IE version updates "recommended". Up to this current change, the IE upgrade required the user click on a license agreement prior to the installation. Since I have not experienced an update under this new "automatic" policy, I don't know what user interaction is required, if any, but this is what I suspect the member asking the question is seeing - a prompt to proceed with the IE installation by accepting the license agreement.

Many users like me prefer to see the updates included in each batch before they are applied. Thus I have Windows set to download new updates and then prompt me to install. Even with this setting, it will now be difficult to prevent installing a new IE version by accident. I like to keep Windows installations around with older version of IE for compatibility testing on websites. I suspect this will become an exercise in frustration.

Q - Some of my Facebook friends post meaningless stuff that I don't need to see. Is there a way to stop those updates?

A - Yes, recently Facebook added the option to "subscribe" to a person's updates. When this feature was first implemented, everyone was automatically subscribed to all of their friends. So you can now remain friends with some people while "unsubscribing" from their postings. The best part is that they will never know. To unsubscribe, go the "problem" friend's page and uncheck the Subscribe box at the top of their page.

The new Subscribe feature also works to allow you to follow people like David Pogue, Walt Mossberg, or Steve Wozniak, the three people to whom I have subscribed rather than sending them a friend request. I suspect they really aren't interested in my grandchildren's activities, anyway.

To find more information about Facebook features and security, search the New York Times website. Using Google or Yahoo, you can search using "facebook site: nytimes.com". All of the search engines have advanced search features that are documented somewhere on the site - just look.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warranty as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!

 


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