Nate's questions

I have a drive—part of a RAID 1 mirror—that has two bad blocks. Adaptec Storage Manger e-mailed me when it detected the blocks. It shows 4 medium errors for that drive, but state is still “optimal”.

This is my first time using Adaptec RAID controllers. I don’t know if an occasional bad block is normal, or if I should immediately replace that drive.

Update: The drive failed later the same day!

The disk subsystem is:

• Adaptec 6405 with ZMM
• (2) Seagate near-line SAS drives (ST31000424SS)

The other drive hasn’t reported any bad blocks yet. I am running a consistency check.

We use WSUS on our LAN. We have to complete some testing before I can let users upgrade to IE 9.

I would like to block it prevent it from being auto-installed until testing is complete.

The Microsoft document here refers me to KB 946202.

However, the information in KB 946202 seems dated and vague. Basically it tells you to disallow automatic approval of Update Rollup packages.

I have the following questions:

• Is there a better way to block IE 9 using WSUS?
• Will turning off auto-approval of Update Rollups block IE 9? I never would have guessed that a browser upgrade is an “Update Rollup.”
• What other effects will this have? Will we be missing other important updates?

I’m testing IPv6 on a corporate network and having problems with OS X. With most IPv6 commands, such as telnet -6 or traceroute6, I get the error:

connect: No route to host

For example, I have a web server. This fails:

$ telnet -6 fe80::… 80    # this fails

I know the server is reachable because ping6 works (note that I have to use the -I argument):

$ ping6 -I en1 fe80::…    # this works

And I know the web server is running because I can telnet to it from Windows:

C:\> telnet fe80::… 80  # this works

I suspect there is some configuration flag or command-line argument that I am missing.

The operating system is Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 with all updates applied.

I have an external hard disk enclosure (one of these) with a 1 TB drive (garden-variety Seagate). When I right-click in Explorer and choose “Format…” the only option is exFAT. I really want NTFS.

• If I do try to format as exFAT, I get a generic error message: “Windows was unable to complete the format.”
• Other external drives give me a choice of NTFS or exFAT.
• Problem occurs over both USB or Firewire.

Workaround: I was able to use diskmgmt.msc to format as NTFS.

But I am wondering:

• Why wouldn’t Explorer offer NTFS as an option? Is this a red flag for problems?
• If NTFS is not a formatting option in Explorer, should I do anything with the disk? Re-partition?

On an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server, I want to list installed packages and see what repository they come from.

It’s easy to list installed packages, but it does not include the name of the repository (such as “main” or “universe”). And this information isn’t in /var/lib/dpkg/status, so dpkg-query doesn’t show it either.

I want to get a list of “unsupported” software—that is, software that doesn’t come from the “main” repository, and for which Ubuntu does not guarantee security updates.

Note: This is a server. It does not have X, GNOME or KDE installed.

Java is constantly prompting users to upgrade and, when they do, it tries to install all sorts of other things which we must uninstall. Lately it installs a backup program called Carbonite.

We’ve banned Java unless the user has a specific reason why they need it. Those people are getting upgrade prompts with “ride along” software.

How can we stop this?

• What site is it contacting to see if there’s an upgrade? It should be easy to block that at the firewall. (We did the same thing with RealPlayer.)
• Is there a registry entry or group policy that can stop it?