Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 March 9

= March 9 =

I want the host to send PIO cmd only, how can I do it?
the way  disable   DMA  mode  is   needed ,too. THX — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruce sage (talk • contribs) 02:36, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Are you sure you need to do this? Anyway, you can probably disable DMA in the BIOS settings. If not, if your operating system is Windows, you should be able to disable it from the adapter properties in Device Manager. -- BenRG (talk) 08:19, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Hypervisors or virtual machine software that can perform signature checks on the VM it is loading
I like to play around with cryptography and I want to try on x86 platforms, but I don't want to buy a computer with a TPM (nor do I have the resources to buy a computer). So, is there any hypervisor, virtualization software, or emulator, no matter how obscure, publicly available, that can be run on a Mac, that provides such a feature? --Melab±1 &#9742; 03:44, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

How are URLs containing semicolons handled by common web servers?
The semicolon is a reserved character in URIs generally but it doesn't seem to have a prescribed meaning in  URLs. How do common web servers handle URLs with semicolons in their paths? Are they treated just like unreserved characters?


 * Here's info on how Apache interprets them - it views them as a separator: the end of the URI, with parameters to follow. Other websearching suggests behaviour isn't particularly well defined in many cases. --Colapeninsula (talk) 11:54, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Transferring HDD to new machine
I bought a laptop a few days ago; however, I'd just purchased a desktop about 8 months before that. If I just take the (larger) hard drive from the desktop and put it in the new laptop, will Windows sense it is on another computer and stop running? (I know that Ubuntu doesn't care; also, they are mutually compatible hardware types). Magog the Ogre (talk) 18:20, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * The desktop drive probably won't fit (physically). Next you have to deal with Windows Activation; it will definitely notice, but whether it just counts it as one of your handful of reinstalls or just stops you dead is a mystery.  If the desktop licence is an OEM licence (rather than a retail install) it will probably refuse to run (or not: there are different kinds of, and different restrictions on, OEM licence types).  If all this does work, you'll have to install a bunch of drivers for the laptop that the desktop didn't have (motherboard, display, eth, wlan, cardbus, storage, etc.) - and if that all fails, moving the disk back to the desktop will be ... another activation! I'd avoid doing this. 87.112.245.215 (talk) 18:55, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree that a desktop hard drive just won't fit into a laptop. StuRat (talk) 22:41, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * To bypass that problem, you could of course use Norton Ghost or Clonezilla or a similar program to copy the contents of the desktop's hard disk to a 2.5" hard disk that will fit in the laptop. 87 is correct above, though; Windows may fail at the activation step (or may not).  Comet Tuttle (talk) 02:09, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I believe the OP wanted to use the larger capacity of the desktop's hard drive, so the issue isn't how to get it's contents onto the laptop, but it's capacity. StuRat (talk) 02:19, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * In reality, the OP (myself) does want to use the larger HDD capacity, yes, but he also doesn't want to have to go through the headache of reinstalling an operating system and its preferences (I mostly use Ubuntu) and reinstalling the games he uses on Windows. Magog the Ogre (talk) 02:29, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * In that case, you could put the 3.5" desktop hard disk into an external USB case and attach it to your laptop as an external USB device. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:13, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Cannot access one particular site (issue has persisted for months)
Hello,

For the past three months, I've been unable to access the main Project Gutenberg website (gutenberg.org). Prior to this, I'd never tried to access it, so I have no idea if it would ever have been accessible to me in the past.

I believe the problem is isolated to my router or whichever one of my ISP's thousands of servers I connect to (some sort of DNS problem, perhaps?), as I've tried hooking up different computers to the router and none of them can access the site (using the "ping" command elicits no response, too, so it's not a browser issue either). I've never had this problem with any other sites and Project Gutenberg loads properly at my workplace.

Is there anything I can try on my end to fix this, or will I simply have to make do with the Canadian and Australian Project Gutenberg sites (both of which load without incident)?

Any help would be appreciated.

Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 20:36, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Try http://gutenberg.ibiblio.org
 * When you ping www.gutenberg.org, what IP address does it show? Mine sees 152.19.134.47 (which is also gutenberg.ibiblio.org)
 * 87.112.245.215 (talk) 21:09, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, I can't connect to http://gutenberg.ibiblio.org. When I ping www.gutenberg.org, I get the following result:


 * Pinging gutenberg.org [152.19.134.47] with 32 bytes of data:


 * Request timed out.
 * Request timed out.
 * Request timed out.
 * Reply from 128.109.246.62: Destination net unreachable.


 * So the IP address matches your result, but no luck otherwise.


 * Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 23:58, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I've had this exact problem on other sites. It is almost certainly a problem with your ISP. Performing a traceroute to see exactly where along the line the connection drops (at the command prompt type tracert gutenberg.org) may help with diagnosing the problem if you decide to contact your ISP over it. 82.45.62.107 (talk) 21:27, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I haven't previously heard of that command - good to know! I ran tracert on gutenberg.org and the result was the following:


 * C:\>tracert gutenberg.org


 * Tracing route to gutenberg.org [152.19.134.47] over a maximum of 30 hops:


 * 1    1 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  mymodem [192.168.2.1]
 * 2   11 ms     9 ms     9 ms  64.230.197.230
 * 3    7 ms     7 ms     7 ms  dis26-toronto63_Vlan107.net.bell.ca [64.230.229.105]
 * 4   23 ms    21 ms    23 ms  BX4-CHICAGODT_POS12-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.186.238]
 * 5   20 ms    19 ms    19 ms  Qwest-peering [64.230.186.206]
 * 6    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 7   45 ms    43 ms    43 ms  65.121.156.210
 * 8   41 ms    41 ms    41 ms  ws7600-a1a-gw-to-wscrs-gw-sec.ncren.net [128.109.1.106]
 * 9   44 ms    43 ms    45 ms  chlt7600-gw-to-ws7600-a1a-gw.ncren.net [128.109.9.21]
 * 10    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 11    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 12    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 13    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 14    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 15    *        *        *     Request timed out.
 * 16    *     manning-gw-to-chlt7600-gw.ncren.net [128.109.246.62]  reports: Destination net unreachable.


 * Trace complete.


 * What might this indicate? Clearly something's amiss, but I'm not sufficiently experienced in this area to interpret this information.


 * Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 23:58, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Although we're from different parts of the world, your packets and mine both pass through 65.121.156.210, and head through ncren.net (which is North Carolina based MCNC, which supplies UNC and other North Carolina education instutitions with internet connectivity). After 3 hops in ncren and one in UNC mine gets to the destination, but yours doesn't. Your 10th should be to manning-gw-to-chlt7600-gw.ncren.net (128.109.246.62) (which is MCNC's connection to UNC's IT center on Manning Drive).   I don't know why it's dying there, but it looks deliberate - that UNC itself is blocking you.  Your IP, or yor ISP, may have hosted someone trying to hack or DOS them in the past (and they've taken umbrage); or they're trying to do geographic or network load balance and they're failing. Its not your fault, not your ISP's fault. I don't know that there's anything you can do, bar try to get a new IP address. 87.112.245.215 (talk) 00:22, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * So rather than the "destination unreachable" you're getting from manning-gw, you should see the final two hops:

irl-vlan1600-manning-loco.net.unc.edu (152.19.255.253) gutenberg.ibiblio.org (152.19.134.47)
 * They're there, they're working fine, they just don't like you. 87.112.245.215 (talk) 00:35, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the thorough response. I'll reboot my modem/router combo and see if I can get a new IP address assigned to it (it's entirely possible that my current IP address was previously assigned to some malicious individual by my ISP) (Edit: I've since rebooted my modem, confirmed that it was assigned a different IP address, and tried to connect to gutenberg.org with no luck). Failing that, might it be worth contacting MCNC to inquire about this problem? (Their site's contact info page seems primarily catered to the educational institutions they support.) Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 00:55, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Project Gutenberg has the following disclaimer posted prominently in several pages on their site. "The Project Gutenberg website is for human users only. Any real or perceived use of automated tools to access our site will result in a block of your IP address." My guess would be that enough people with dynamic IP addresses in your range violated this rule so that Gutenberg initiated a rangeblock. If I were you, I would contact the Gutenberg team directly, either at help2010 at pglaf dot org, or webmaster at gutenberg dot org.  However, you should probably do this from a webmail account, as mail originating from bell.ca may never reach them for the same reason you cannot establish a web connection. gnfnrf (talk) 04:20, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the suggestion; I'll send them an e-mail from work this week. Hiram J. Hackenbacker (talk) 14:50, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Threat detected while sensitive information was visible - should I be scared?
While I had some sensitive information visible (in a form in Firefox), Avast reported "Threat has been detected". Should I be worried, and what is the recommended action? PurpleSorceress (talk) 20:44, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * If the threat was detected, it was probably also dealt with by your anti-virus software. For example, if a website is detected to be a threat, it likely refused to load that site. StuRat (talk) 22:38, 9 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot. That's what I was thinking, but I wasn't sure whether it might have done something evil before it got caught. PurpleSorceress (talk) 00:12, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Most anti-virus software saves a log of what action it has taken. I don't use Avast, but it might be worth looking ....    D b f i r s   08:02, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Can't compile wxWidgets on Ubuntu 11.10
Upon running the configure script, I get this: configure: error: The development files for GTK+ were not found. For GTK+ 2, please ensure that pkg-config is in the path and that gtk+-2.0.pc is installed. For GTK+ 1.2 please check that gtk-config is in the path, and that the version is 1.2.3 or above. Also check that the libraries returned by 'pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --libs' or 'gtk-config --libs' are in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH or equivalent. Trying sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev does not find the package. --Melab±1 &#9742; 23:13, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Could not run GTK+ test program, checking why...
 * The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
 * exact error that occured. This usually means GTK+ is incorrectly installed.
 * There's not really enough information here to diagnose the problem. How about trying Synaptic rather than apt-get?  It's a bit better at helping you to use the right repositories. Looie496 (talk) 04:15, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You'll want to ask any Ubuntu-related questions on Ubuntu forums. They're much more experienced than we are in such issues.

68.232.119.30 (talk) 19:41, 10 March 2012 (UTC)