Some entertaining Windows logs
Recently I posted a blog entry on a digital signage rollout that has had its issues. Mainly, I point my finger at the Windows operating system for the most part. There have been issues but they all seem to go back to Windows problems as being the root cause for problems with the overall digital signage system that is being run. Today, while combing through Windows logs on the digital signage player PCs, I found typical Windows logs, that are entertaining to say the least. They don't provide any information about the root problems, but they have entries in the logs as if they are of some use for troubleshooting. And yes, these are real errors that have been copied and pasted as-is from the real player PCs. The real error messages are in italics, my comments are posted below each one.
Source: serial No Parameters subkey was found for user defined data. This is odd, and it also means no user configuration can be found. And this would mean what?
Source: SNMP The SNMP Service is ignoring extension agent key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IPXMibAgent\CurrentVersion because it is missing or misconfigured. Sounds like we'll need to use our friend Google to see if others have posted this issue and discovered a fix.
Source: Service Control Manager The description for Event ID ( 7000 ) in Source ( Service Control Manager ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: Upload Manager, %%1079. I've seen this similar error so many times, that administrators often times ignore it as being "a normal error".
Source: Service Control Manager The Offline Files service terminated with the following error: The system cannot find the path specified. Offline files is not even enabled on any of these PCs, yet we get this error however it provides no information that could even remotely point us in the right direction. It might as well just say "Your PC has encountered an error of some sort. Good luck trying to find a fix.".
Source: Windows Update Agent Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80070643: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update for .NET versions 2.0 through 3.5 (KB951847) x86. So, we need to do what to fix this? Ah, I guess download and re-install it perhaps? After all, things can corrupt themselves in Windows just out of the blue.
Source: MrxSmb The master browser has received a server announcement from the computer DIGITALSIGNPC1 that believes that it is the master browser for the domain on transport NetBT_Tcpip_{F488A34F-7D1. The master browser is stopping or an election is being forced. OK, I could deal with this if we were running Windows NT 4. But this is Windows 7. Seriously, we still need Windows SMB services to listen and try to figure out which is the master browser for the domain?
Source: System Restore Failed to create restore point (Process = C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe /d srrstr.dll,ExecuteScheduledSPPCreation; Description = Scheduled Checkpoint; Error = 0x80070422). Looks like the Windows recovery features are working great. Glad to know they are dependable in case there is a system problem and we need to roll back. Again, Google will have to be checked for this one.
The other interesting point is that every piece of hardware is exactly identical, and they were all taken from the exact same system image. You would think that the errors should be the same among all of the player PCs, but they are vastly different among them. Many of the errors appear on a single player PC, and do not show up on any other PC within the group. Also, these entries were taken from 6 PCs total. Imagine if there were 50 PCs, 100, or more. I would be scared to look and see what other errors are occurring on other Windows 7 PCs in the company. Administrators have better things to do, than comb through useless log files. Way to go Microsoft, a quality operating system here with Windows 7. It's no wonder Windows isn't used for mission critical appliances, and GNU/Linux is instead. I'm not saying that GNU/Linux logs are the best, but they are pretty good and usually have information that I can use, to help pinpoint the error a little bit. GNU/Linux does not, and I repeat, does not have this amount of useless garbage in its logs like Windows does.