System Uptime: 97 Years

As always, when I tag something here as IT, its usually something crazy, hard to find, or mind-blowing, or perhaps falls under the “I learned something new today” realm. This is one of those things: System Uptime.

As always, when it comes to Windows systems, its best to do a shutdown every night for general maintenance, updates, and system hygiene. That said, its not 1997 anymore so Windows is usually pretty reliable, and could likely run for days if not months without an actual reboot, but then you don’t get the usual monthly updates, and things may slow to a crawl if you’re running software memory leaks and such.

Anyways, so as part of pushing out some new software (a management agent), I noticed some computers not checking in despite nearly a week after the software was pushed out. I looked at my auditing agent and found that it was reporting uptime of nearly a month+ for some of the affected computers, so naturally since the group was relatively small, I just emailed everyone telling them to reboot if they haven’t recently (and adding that they should be shutting down nightly). Of course, I got a few replies where people were saying that they WERE in fact shutting down nightly.

So as someone who’s OK eating his own dog food, I checked my own computer in the auditor, and found that in showed my computer having 6 days of uptime despite the fact that I FOR SURE did a full shutdown yesterday and had to do a full startup this morning. Wow, the auditing software must be broken, so I sent in a ticket to the vendor to have them check it out.

After doing so though, I figured I’d look into this a little more, and found that in fact, my computer WAS reporting a 6 day uptime, which is likely what the auditing software was pulling from, so its not the software, but Windows, so, WHY?

That led me to this Reddit post, showing that despite the visible states Windows could be in as on, off, hibernating, and sleeping, there’s another “hidden” state if you have fast boot enabled, where its a pseudo hibernate mode (think hiber-sleep-inate). Great, more tricks!

That said, when shutting down a Windows computer with fast boot enabled, it actually puts the computer into that hiber-sleep-inate state, and not a full “off” state as one expects. The only way to get a true “cold boot” is to actually restart.

Link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerShell/comments/1emwqmh/why_isnt_my_event_logs_last_boot_date_time/

So yet again, I learn something new, and really, I’d love to know how people find out about this crazy stuff??

January 2025 – My How Time Flies

In coming in to post this, I saw some old drafts, one of which was from late 2023, talking about how my life was reduced to commuting between work and a hospital to visit my dad (he’s since recovered and back home!). In that draft I mentioned a quote by Winston Churchill:

If you’re going through hell, keep going!

I can certainly say that I think I was certainly there. Over the last 2 (nearly 3) years, I’ve experienced a major medical event myself, then lost now two family members and a good friend, all under the age of 60, and nearly lost my dad. I’m not out of the weeds yet, I certainly wouldn’t even blink if a meteor landed in the parking lot of the restaurant I’m at, but at the moment, I’m at the “keep going” part, for better or for worse.

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RIP Johnny (My Big Brother)

One of my last posts of 2023 – titled ‘3 Funerals and a Crappy Breakfast’ talked about the pitfalls of 2023, the people I lost that year, and just generally how “crappy” the year went (despite its upside). In that post, I looked forward to 2024 being new, different, and “better”. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

I’ll post a “year to date” review of this year in a separate post, but for now, I’m sad to report that my brother John “Johnny” has passed away in July of 2024.

Nearly a week and a half since, I can at least talk again, but I’m still in shock and dealing with the mental fallout of all of this. I’ve been to many funerals in my life, but this was the first one where I’m one of the people greeting the visitors. It wasn’t easy, as they never are. I felt bad for people walking up, who just don’t know what to say, and often, they just admit that, and thats OK. There IS NO right thing to say.

My brother pushed me to be nerdy since I was old enough to know what that was. He often got me awesome Christmas gifts, including things like a CB, stereo speakers, a ham radio, and more, almost all from Radio Shack.

Over the last decade or two, we shared a common interest of going to hamfests, whether we we’re vendoring or just buying. Over the last few years he had a stroke in 2020, which impacted his right side. As such, I only really vendored at one hamfest since then, and his ability to get around at a hamfest involved solid ground and using a cane.

Hopefully I’ll put up a better post in the near future; seems I just haven’t had a chance to update this site like I hoped to, and really life has just been kicking me in the nuts over and over again. I have done some cool nerdy things this year, I have picked up some neat stuff, but I just can’t seem to catch up.

RIP Johnny…I MISS YOU BRO.

Windows Server and Corrupted Files

As always, I try to post up IT fixes that may be a little tougher to find, and only if the fix is proven to actually work, so you’re not scrolling amongst 100s of forum posts. One useful command from back in the day, “sfc /scannow” used to be used to fix corrupted files in Windows installations, although its been a bit of a meme over the past few years (decades?) in that it was almost universally suggested by online Microsoft support, yet rarely ever fixed anything. (Rarely being used liberally here – it DID work…sometimes). Yet, what happens when SFC doesn’t work, and instead spits out an error?

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Fiery Print Server ignores DHCP/DNS Changes with Papercut

Another (Wasted) day…another dollar. Its not unheard of for a typical IT person to rant about dealing with printers. It seems they’re constantly the bane of any admin; not printing, needing special treatment, buggy drivers, buggy settings, etc. I often think I’m immune to a majority of the issues; I’ve been through EVERYTHING, fixed it all, and hey if I can get 1960s teletype machines working, I can get a friggin modern printer working. Well today, I was put back in my place…

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