Evidence WinXP "security updates" may break Linux

[zipster]

Harry -n- All

Thought I would add my latest experiment to the pile of confusion. I got my hands on an old PII 333 that had only ever seen Win98. Booted the old 3.1 10-22-02 release of knoppix, saw the net just fine, I then installed it, changed the Debian network dongles, and it saw the net just fine, ran it for a bout a week, no issues. I then installed the 5-20-03 knoppix - now not only cannot it see the net, it wont even acknowledge that it has a NIC! mii-tool, and netcardconfig all give no eth0 errors. I am going to try to reinstall 10-22-02 to see what happens.

P.S. this may be my own ignorance but one of the errors I get is something to the effect of "Ignoring lo=lo" now I know that it has to do with the iface file in etc/network ...but any help here?

-Zipster

[Harry Kuhman]

.... I then installed the 5-20-03 knoppix - now not only cannot it see the net, it wont even acknowledge that it has a NIC! mii-tool, and netcardconfig all give no eth0 errors. I am going to try to reinstall 10-22-02 to see what happens.

This is interesting, although I'm not sure what it might tell us. My initial sucess with Knoppix and the Internet was also with version 3.1. As I've mentioned before, I don't know if I ever got a good internet connection when I booted v3.2 or not; I did boot 3.2 before the problem and think I went to the Internet with it, but I'm not 100% certain.

Your symptom sure seems to be different than mine, no longer being able to even see the NIC! I haven't installed to hard disk, so that is a big difference too. I would suggest the following: Before you reinstall, try booting 3.1 from the CD and see if it still can connect to the internet. If it can then there is likely something wrong with the hard disk install. But if you can't connect to the network from the CD that used to work, then there's nothing to be gained by reinatalling everything to hard disk again.

I'm guessing that you didn't record your NIC's eeprom values while the system was still working, since you didn't mention that. But by chance did you? It would give an excelent way to compair them to what they are now and confirm that the eeprom is being changed. You might also want to get the diagnostic for your card from Scyld. The diagnostic might still be able to see the card even though the rest of Linux does not (if you're lucky). Also, at least the one diagnostic I looked at has an "emergency eeprom reset" option (look in the source code itself, I didn't see mention of it in the documentation but if you read the source code it might be there). If you can dump your eeprom with the Scyld diagnostic and/or with ethtool, please do so before you do any emergency eeprom rewrite, and if you do an emergency rewrite please let us know if it helped and if so what the new values for the eeprom are.

[zipster]

Harry-

(best Paul Harvey voice) And now, for the rest of the story ....

(a quick clarify -

mii-tool, and netcardconfig all give no eth0 errors

- means "No eth0 card detected errors" not "no erros with the NIC )

So, I boot up the old gal under 3.1 ...and nothing , no net cant get it to even see the card .... so I have another hany - and I switch them out and boot under 3.1 ...still nothing...boot from HD under 3.2 ...nothing ....finally I install Mandrake 9.1 ... and it goes to auto detect the card on install, fails - asks me to manualy tell it what it is (never seen mandrake do this, kinda odd) - and then it corrects me as I have chosen the wrong card.. I finish the install and on rebbot it takes a long, long time at the DCHP part, but comes up and sees the network fine. Hmm. So I ( irritated) slot the 3.2 disk into the WinXP (up to date patch wise) machine next to that one, boots fine sees the net, but I just tried 3.2 again in that same windows machine...no dice...I have 34 Win XP machines all ghosted to the same thing....should I try to get eeprom readings ( how again in xp?) and post them?

-Zipster

[guylan]

I did not give M$ the permission to modify MY HARDWARE!!!
How dare them!!!
If we can prove that one of their patches and which patchi it was that changed the bios of our cards then we should be able to win this in a court of law easy.

I am not a M$ basher but there are limits to what a company should be allowed to do in the name of profit.

Dave

[garyng]

I did not give M$ the permission to modify MY HARDWARE!!!
How dare them!!!
If we can prove that one of their patches and which patchi it was that changed the bios of our cards then we should be able to win this in a court of law easy.

I am not a M$ basher but there are limits to what a company should be allowed to do in the name of profit.

Dave

I doubt you can win. With their shear financial strength, they would have everything covered, somewhere in that user agreement when you install XP. You allowed them to install something on your machine which already means modifying your hardware. I can't see the difference between modifying the content of a harddisk and flash, be it bios or NIC. The only chance you can win is to prove that they do it deliberately for the purpose of not allowing other OS to function, but that is very very hard.

[guylan]

Probably true...garyng.

Although I can not figure out any reason for them making this mod other than to disable linux from running on this machine on a network.

btw we still do not have any fix for this atm? do we?
I am running an HP laptop with that National Semiconductor NIC.

thanks again
Dave

[Harry Kuhman]

btw we still do not have any fix for this atm? do we?
I am running an HP laptop with that National Semiconductor NIC.

The two fixes I have that each seem to work for me on the HP notebook with the NatSemi NIC are:

1) Boot. Confirm failure. Open a shell. type sudo mii-tool -r. type netcardconfig and reconfigure the card with either DHCP or put in your expected values. I can then access the network fine.

2) Boot Knoppix, put in the expert option at boot time. Answer n to all boot questions, particularly the first one (do not let the system auto-probe for scsi devices). Knoppix starts for me with the network working. I don't know what effect not running autoprobe is really having. Clearly I have no scsi devices but I might be impacting my ability to write CDs. Not a big issue since I'm running Knoppix from CD and have only 1 drive on the system.

Any insight on why this second "fix" seems to work would be welcome. I've confirmed it back through my oldest Knoppix CD, V 3.1 8-August-02, which did work in the past when booting with the default options, not expert.

[garyng]

does NOSCSI(i.e. no scsi probing) always work ? If that is the case, I believe it is more like a bug, well MS may be partially responsibile for exposing, causing it.

BTW, noscsi on a machine without SCSI controller won't hurt and everything would work just fine including CD-burning etc. It is only a flag for loading/not loading SCSI controller drivers.

[Harry Kuhman]

does NOSCSI(i.e. no scsi probing) always work ?

Well, not sure what always means and I didn't know about the noscsi command. Expert always worked for me with the all n response options every time I tried it, but that has been perhaps 20 total. It failed the few times I did it with a return for autoprobe in the first response. The sudo mii-tool -r and netcardconfig trick always works for me (under Knoppix, but curiously not under Morphix) and I've done that a lot more.

knoppix noscsi worked for me too. always? Well, so far I've tried it once and it worked once, so at least that's 100% if not always.


Yes, it certainly could be that there is some flaw in Knoppix or Linux, but this exact same computer worked fine with Knoppix (at least with v 3.1 and I think but am not certain with v 3.2) for several weeks before it suddenly stopped working. The CDRs did not change, and I even had several 3.1 CDRs that I went back and tested this with. So in some way something else has changed. If you have an HP notebook too then you know the BIOS is pretty brain dead, there is not much there to affect this. Just to be sure I've tested it with different boot orders and with USB legacy support both off and on, but in all cases I fail to connect to the network unless I do one of the work arounds I've given you. Something external to the Knoppix CD is contributing to this. Also there are others who seem to be seeing the same thing I did, their CD booted and connected to the network for them fine, but then it stopped doing so. I'm still trying to get some hard proof (Someone at a major networking company supposedly has a Windows program that will watch the contents of the NIC eeprom and generate a debug interupt the instant it is written to, but my contact there has only gotten a commitment that some thest will be run; no results, positive or negative, yet).


What are your results? Is the HP notebook failing for you? Did it ever work, and when did you first try Knoppix on it? Do the work-arounds work for you?

By the way, there is a third potential fix that I forgot to mention, since I have not tried it. If you get the diagnostic for the National Semiconductor chip at Scyld , you'll find that the diagnostic has an emergency eeprom reset function. I don't think it's mentioned in the documentation for the program, but if you read the source code it is there. This just might resolve the problem completely (or would be even more interesting if it resolved the program until the next time Windows or Windows security updates were run). Wanta do an experiment?

[stevethayne]

Hi Harry,
The booting in expert mode does not work for me, even when typing n each time. Will try and fiddle with the boot order in the bios in case it helps, but not convinced it will.
Steve.