To clean, or not to clean?

That is the question. (My posthumous apologies to William Shakespeare)

I've seen PCs that were so filled with dust, animal hair, grease, and loose screws that I was surprised they were still running. There are pro's and con's to do this cleaning, and I've certainly made my mistakes in cleaning computers, mostly due to carelessness and not inspecting the components before diving in. So, here are a few of the things I do in the cleaning process.

1. Check the system event logs, to see if there are any entries in the logs that indicate a component failure. If there is, I point that out and make sure you're aware of the condition, and what the remediation is for that problem. (If the system is still under warranty, either I open a case with the manufacturer, or my customer does that, depending on my service relationship with that customer)
2. Check the BIOS and revew the system environment readings. If the CPU temperature looks a little high, or the system fan RPMs look a little low, the system probably needs cleaning. Heavy dust will put a drag on the fan motors, causing them to spin significanly slower than when they're clean.
3. After determining that the system may need cleaning, I open the case, and visually inspect it for cabling that may be frayed or compromised. If any of the cables look like they were nicked by the CPU fan or some other moving part, I will recommend replacing the cable or the power supply, depending on where the bad cable is.
4. I also check the exhaust fan to see if it is blowing in the right direction (it should be blowing outwards, to draw hot air out of the case - I've seen a few "custom built" PCs with exhaust fans blowing air inward). If that fan needs to be reversed, I make that correction with the 4 mounting screws for the fan. I also check to see if the fan is plugged into the correct place on the motherboard (as opposed to being connected to a power jumper from the power supply)
5. There are air intake slots usually at the base of the front of the PC, under the bezel. I've seen those intakes completely filled with hair and dust. That reduces the intake airflow, and makes it increasingly difficult to have cooling air travel through the case.
6. Carefully observe the level of dust, dirt and grime on the surfaces of the fan blades, heat sinks, hard drive cases, and on the bottom of the case.
7. I have a vacuum cleaner that I use to pull the dust as I blow it out with a duster. Sometimes, it's important for me to vacuum the air intakes on the machine itself, or extract the hair and dust clogs before doing the dusting. I use Q-tips to brush dist off the fan blades when the dust looks really solid, and wooden chopsticks to pull out those clogs, and then I lodge those chopsticks and Q-tips into the fans to immobilize the fans while I'm blowing dust out the case.
8. On a service call, with customers who still have rollerball mice, I open the ring, clean the ball by brushing it off the best I can, and scrape out all the gunk from the wheels and rollers. For the optical mice, I scrape gunk off the pads on the base of the mouse. I also turn the keyboard upside down and shake it out (it's amazing how many staples fall out of those keyboards).

If I'm replacing a component (RAM, HDD, CPU, CPU fan, optical drive), I will generally do this level of cleaning as a courtesy to the customer, and explain why I did it. I don't usually open cases just to clean them, under the "leave well enough alone" rule.

I did a quick search for the different techniques of cleaning computers, and why it should be done, and maybe why it should not be done. Here are some of the different views on the subject:

Cleaning the Interior of your PC
Clean up your grungy PC
In my search for "don't clean the inside of your PC", I did not get a single hit on why it should not be done.

Malware removal

Posted on the NYSBS Yahoo Group earlier today, but of general interest to the community

Malware’s a bitch, ain’t it? Short of backing up the data and rebuilding the server, try this process.

1, Get a list of all the services that are running, and note them. Lots of tools out there that will list those for you. I don’t have any suggestions for that on a server, but have lots for workstations. (I'll edit this post later with links to services listing utilities)

2. Run msconfig and see if there are any suspicious startups and services starting there. If there are, uncheck the startups, and go to services and stop those, and then kill them in the Task Manager. Check the Start > Programs > Startup menu for suspicious items. Don’t just delete them – from Properties, find out where they live and trace back to their source directories. Then if it’s malware, delete the directory, and then delete Startup shortcut.

3. Download HijackThis http://www.download.com/Trend-Micro-HijackThis/3000-8022_4-10227353.html
and CleanUp 4.52 http://www.download.com/CleanUp/3000-2144_4-10727454.html?tag=lst-1&cdlPid=10727453

4. Restart the server in Safe Mode

5. Go to C:\Documents and Settings and delete the contents of the Temp and Temporary Internet Files folders in the Local Settings folder for Administrator and other folders (you’ll need to go to Folder Options and check “View Hidden files and folders” and “View protected system files” on the server). Also, delete everything in the C:\WINDOWS\Temp folder and c:\temp if it exists. Those folders are where a lot of the web hijackers live. After I do that, I run CleanUp to finish the job.

6. Then, run HijackThis
There are many HijackThis forums on the Internet that will help you decipher those results. I’ve used the tool so often that I pretty intuitively know which entries need to be removed, and if you’re pretty sharp, you’ll either search for the suspect entries and figure it out, or use the forums to get help from the experts. Before you uncheck any of those items, look at the path that is indicated and see if it leads you to some other folder that needs to be deleted.

Elapsed time, probably an hour or so, excluding potentially extensive research from the HijackThis results.

ISA reverse caching

Last night, I encountered a strange problem. I updated a website on my virtual SBS 2003 Premium server and then viewed the website. The content updates did not come through. I deleted the website from IIS. When I viewed the website, the old content was still there. Searched the local drives on the SBS server and could not find any of the old content.

Then I realized, ISA must be caching the information. Did a google search on "ISA caching website" and the first hit was ISA Server 2004 FAQ: Caching which mentioned "reverse caching", and some vague instructions on how to create a rule to disable it. Apparantly, ISA does the same thing caching forward and reverse. I turned off caching in ISA, recreated the website in IIS and everything is fine now.

Caching configuration in ISA, especially reverse caching, is an important quality of its security and performance qualities. Since I'm not using the forward caching, I could disable it completely, but that will not always be the case. Thus, I have another "learn to" on my task list - "learn to configure reverse caching on ISA"

Thanks, Michael, for helping me troubleshoot the problem.

ISA - Internet Security and Acceleration
IIS - Internet Information Service
SBS - Small Business Server

The Power of User Groups and other resources

I've created some great relationships as a result of being a member of various Users Groups. Some of them are local, some of them are international. Some meet regularly (monthly, annually). Some never meet at all.

Here is a list of some of the groups I've joined
WiNSUG
San Diego SBS Users Group
Small Business IT (sbs2k)
SMB Managed Services
NYSBS
SDW2003
SMBTN
smallbizIT

All of them have been a good source of education for me. I've made contributions where I could. Some of the folks I've created professional relationships with, as they've assisted me with my transition to a Continuous IT Care modeled business. I'm going to blog in the future about how I selected some of the managed services tools that I'm using.

Welcome to SMBIT

Hello! I'm Eric Louie, and an independent IT consultant in San Diego, California. My customer base is local small businesses in San Diego County. I provide them their IT support, mostly on a Time and Materials or Break/Fix basis, and I'm slowly transforming my business into a Continuous Care model of support. I'm a sole proprietor, though I started in this independent business 6 years ago with a terrific and gifted business partner who left for Oregon 2 years ago to raise his family in a better environment.

I'm active in the small business technical community here, and I get a lot of my technical information from different newsgroups, mailing lists, blogs, online discussion groups, and local user groups. In the work that we do, it has become apparent to me that we need to share our solutions when we've found them, and the more places to search and possibly find the solution, the better.

I participate and really try to give 100% in my participation to everything. My disclaimer - I am not an expert at anything. I'm not even a specialist in anything (yet). I am not a Microsoft evangelist. I do my best to keep an open mind to all possible solutions to my customers' business problems.

What I will do is share my views on how to get things done in the small and medium business IT environment, where we have budgetary issues, training deficiencies, knowledge limitations, resource problems, and customers' lack of understanding the importance of maintenance of Information Technology.

The posts here will initially be divided into the following categories:

• Marketing (efforts to make our businesses known to possible customers)
• SBS2003 (discussions specific to the nuances of Small Business Server 2003)
• Win2003 (Windows Server 2003 - general Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, File and Print Sharing, IIS)
• WinXP (Windows XP Home, Professional, and Media Center Editions)
• WinVista (Windows Vista operating system)
• Cisco (networking with Cisco routers and switches)
• Consulting (for the business people in the crowd)
• Linux (Warning - My Linux knowledge is limited - this will be me sharing my learning experiences with Linux)
• Desktop (workstation hardware and software solutions and issues)
• Server (server hardware and software solutions and issues)
• Philosophy (ramblings on what I found works and doesnt work)
• MSPtech (Managed Services Provider technology - includes products, services, monitoring and management)
• MSPbiz (Managed Services Provider business - includes customer and vendor negotiations)
• Alliances (how to create alliances and associations with other technology partners)
• Microsoft (General Microsoft news, product announcements, public betas)
• Layer123 (Layer 1 cabling issues, Layer 2 Basic and advanced Ethernet switching and bridging, & Layer 3 routing, port forwarding, TCP/IP, Network Address Translation)
• NetSec (Network security, firewalling, anti-virus, intrusion detection, malware)
• SMB (issues that are specific to the small and medium business environment)
• MSPartner (my experiences in the Microsoft Partner community)
• UserGroup (anything that I get that can be pointed back to the communities that I'm aligned with)
  
  A few self-imposed ground rules for my blog:
• I have a real distaste for abbreviations (I call it acronymophobia). I'll spell out alot in English - it may take me longer, but I type pretty well.
• Jargon - I try to stay away from it, except when it is commonly accepted slang in the technical community. I'd ask the same from any commenters.
• Complete information - I'll do my best to provide a complete solution here, with this caveat - if there is something that I believe is basic knowledge to operations, I might not spell out all of those steps.
• I won't post anything here that I wouldn't want my customers to see. I have somewhere else that I vent. I am a professional, and will conduct myself to that standard.
• I won't post rumors or partial factual information. I'm not a fan of hysteria or FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Therefore, I'll carefully research anything I post. As a result, you might not see "the latest and greatest" here, but you will find solid solutions that I've proven to work for my customers or myself.
• I'll try to be as impartial as possible because that's also part of my job with my customers - vendor neutrality and technology neutrality are important to me. However, when a specific technology works in a specific business need, I'll advocate it.
  
  My goal is to have a good resource that you can refer to for specific problems and solutions. If you know of another source of information, I'll be very happy to link to it.