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#31
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24/7 and keyboard funny
"Paul" wrote
| I don't know of anyplace to actually check for running hooks | | Would Sysinternals "handle.exe" work ? | I've never seen that before. But a handle is basically just an object ID, for a window, bitmap, etc. I don't imagine that would provide guidance about functionality. Maybe checking out unknown DLLs in PE would work. I don't know. I may be there's an easy way to return system hooks, but I've never had occasion to notice. |
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#32
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24/7 and keyboard funny
In message , Mayayana
writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | No, that's not it. When I get the fault, it's as if a Ctrl or sometimes | shift key is stuck down - at least that's the best description I can | give of it. Arrow key presses are registered - but, say, if the cursor | is in text, it moves by (and sometimes highlights) a word at a time | rather than a letter. Sometimes the letter keys do nothing, except that | (say) S brings up the Save dialogue. | | Does sound like a faulty keyboard - but the thing that mitigates most | against that being the cause, is that different things seem to have | different sensitivities: usually (though not always), if I switch to | Notepad+, I can type as normal. (Sometimes I even resort to switching to | Notepad+, typing the text I want, copying it, switching back to [e. g.] | my news client, and pasting. [The "mouse" - trackpad - works fine.]) | Sometimes switching to Notepad+ and typing a character or two suffices - | I can switch back to the other application and typing is back. It's a | weird one! It might be worth checking for hooks. If a program needs to be able to get system keyboard messages it will install a hook -- normally from a DLL. I use one for an accessibility library I wrote, to provide notification of keystrokes in an event, so that each key name can be spoken aloud for blind people. Imagine an old-style bucket brigade. The water bucket gets passed along to the end. It doesn't really matter how many people are in the line as long as each does their job of passing the bucket along. A hook allows constant monitoring. It could be used by malware, anti-virus, or anything that provides a service needing to monitor mouse and/or keyboard. I can only think of two such that I have: AllChars (which allows me to enter ½, ö, ñ, ±, and so on, via a laptop keyboard with no numeric pad), and Noisy Keyboard (which gives me feedback). AllChars seemed the most likely, as that was the most recent thing I'd installed before the symptoms started. Although that was back on my XP machine. But I tried turning it off, or even uninstalling it, and still got the behaviour. Having said that: I just got one of the manifestations of the weirdness while I was typing the above paragraph, I turned AllChars off (didn't uninstall it), and I got my typing back! So, more investigation needed. I've just turned AllChars back on, and I can still type - including éûμ„ the odd characters AllChars makes it easy to type. Hmm, I'll have to play more (-:! I don't know of anyplace to actually check for running hooks, but you could try stopping various things, including services that might need a hook, and see what happens. I did try that before - closing down everything that was running to see if it "got better" - but the nature of the fault (comes and goes) makes it _very_ difficult to study. If the hook library is faulty -- not always passing the message along -- that could possibly create symptoms like what you're seeing. The main suspect to my mind would be malware or anti-malware. (Like cops and robbers, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. (-: I assume you've tried a different keyboard. I know you said it's software related, but you never know. Coincidence can sometimes mislead. Yes: both an external one and the on-screen one (simulated keyboard you click on with the mouse [osk.exe]); it was the latter that convinced me it wasn't hardware! -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "I've got this shocking pain right behind the eyes." "Have you considered amputation?" - Vila & Avon |
#33
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24/7 and keyboard funny
In message , Paul
writes: Mayayana wrote: I don't know of anyplace to actually check for running hooks Would Sysinternals "handle.exe" work ? It will tell you what files are open, and it's possible other device types might be detected that way. I think It might - I have it as part of the SysInternals suite I launch from the Nirsoft launcher. However, I've just tried it - and it's far too complicated for me to understand )-:. [] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "I've got this shocking pain right behind the eyes." "Have you considered amputation?" - Vila & Avon |
#34
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24/7 and keyboard funny
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | No, that's not it. When I get the fault, it's as if a Ctrl or sometimes | shift key is stuck down - at least that's the best description I can | give of it. Arrow key presses are registered - but, say, if the cursor | is in text, it moves by (and sometimes highlights) a word at a time | rather than a letter. Sometimes the letter keys do nothing, except that | (say) S brings up the Save dialogue. | | Does sound like a faulty keyboard - but the thing that mitigates most | against that being the cause, is that different things seem to have | different sensitivities: usually (though not always), if I switch to | Notepad+, I can type as normal. (Sometimes I even resort to switching to | Notepad+, typing the text I want, copying it, switching back to [e. g.] | my news client, and pasting. [The "mouse" - trackpad - works fine.]) | Sometimes switching to Notepad+ and typing a character or two suffices - | I can switch back to the other application and typing is back. It's a | weird one! It might be worth checking for hooks. If a program needs to be able to get system keyboard messages it will install a hook -- normally from a DLL. I use one for an accessibility library I wrote, to provide notification of keystrokes in an event, so that each key name can be spoken aloud for blind people. Imagine an old-style bucket brigade. The water bucket gets passed along to the end. It doesn't really matter how many people are in the line as long as each does their job of passing the bucket along. A hook allows constant monitoring. It could be used by malware, anti-virus, or anything that provides a service needing to monitor mouse and/or keyboard. I can only think of two such that I have: AllChars (which allows me to enter ½, ö, ñ, ±, and so on, via a laptop keyboard with no numeric pad), and Noisy Keyboard (which gives me feedback). AllChars seemed the most likely, as that was the most recent thing I'd installed before the symptoms started. Although that was back on my XP machine. But I tried turning it off, or even uninstalling it, and still got the behaviour. Having said that: I just got one of the manifestations of the weirdness while I was typing the above paragraph, I turned AllChars off (didn't uninstall it), and I got my typing back! So, more investigation needed. I've just turned AllChars back on, and I can still type - including éûμ„ the odd characters AllChars makes it easy to type. Hmm, I'll have to play more (-:! I don't know of anyplace to actually check for running hooks, but you could try stopping various things, including services that might need a hook, and see what happens. I did try that before - closing down everything that was running to see if it "got better" - but the nature of the fault (comes and goes) makes it _very_ difficult to study. If the hook library is faulty -- not always passing the message along -- that could possibly create symptoms like what you're seeing. The main suspect to my mind would be malware or anti-malware. (Like cops and robbers, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. (-: I assume you've tried a different keyboard. I know you said it's software related, but you never know. Coincidence can sometimes mislead. Yes: both an external one and the on-screen one (simulated keyboard you click on with the mouse [osk.exe]); it was the latter that convinced me it wasn't hardware! Something that occurred to me later, was filter driver That's a way of hooking HID devices. A filter driver is used for touchpads, as a means to derive "gestured" from the coordinate flow. There are UpperFilters and LowerFilters. And filters of one type or another, also have an "altitude" parameter, that allows the filters to work in "stacks", where there is pre-agreement when the filter driver is registered with Microsoft, that it won't cause a problem if it is above or below somebody elses filter driver. https://i.postimg.cc/nzcYNRhb/check-...rivers-HID.gif Paul |
#35
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No Such Interface Supported
On 3/5/19 6:04 AM, Sam Hill wrote:
Yeah, I suppose it was a bit of a tangent. But your statement that "24/7" equates to "reboot each night" grabbed my immediate attention. As Char stated, that was just wrong! Hi Sam, I kill filed Char years ago. I do not see anything she writes. You trust what she says at you own risk. Also keep in mind in these kinds of forums that there are always those that make it their life's work to defend the honor of their favorite software, working or not. A polite name for them is "tech evangelists". They are pains in the ass. Eventually they wind up in my kill file, as did Char. Home users that run (not use) 24/7 typically are doing so because they want immediate access and they don't care about the energy cost. And sometimes because they have viruses and have a bad time getting their computers to restart and are too cheap to get them fixed. Providing everything else is okay, rebooting in the middle of the night have solved these issues. I have also had to do the reboot thing on some Windows Servers. They are not very reliable. I typically make them reboot after their backup completes in the night. One one machine, it would prince 4" letter across their order form if the server was left running more than two days. It was hysterical. I had a good laugh when they showed me their sales forms. For enterprise 24/7, Paul is your best guy to ask. It is a whole different ball game. Also, enterprise level typically will use more reliable systems, such as Linux. By the way, that last remark will typically blow the head off a tech evangelist. Unfortunately their heads do grow back. Now you are completely free to disregard my advice as well. This is what I have done and this is my experience. And I am making a concerted effort to help folks, not to stalk them and disparage them, as does Char. -T |
#36
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No Such Interface Supported
On 3/5/19 7:18 AM, Paul wrote:
T wrote: On 3/4/19 7:47 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: Baloney Todd, Last place I worked before I retired I had 2 windows machines running for about two and a half years 24/7/365 with no shut downs or reboots, They ran my security and door card reader systems and where not allowed to shut down, they were critical systems. You are spreading FUD, and its not appreciated. Rene Seriously Rene. Your computers ran a single app. and from that you surmised that I am spreading FUD? I am curious about your system. In 2-1/2 years you never had a power hit?Â* What kind of power protection were you running. What version of Windows did you run? Was it embedded Windows? Did you have Internet access? Did you run any other apps on it? Did you have updates turned off? Did you have sleep / hibernate enabled? We had a machine at work with an uptime of 2 years. And knowing how often the power used to drop to that site, it got some of the staff thinking "this cannot possibly be right". The power at the time, would drop maybe once a week due to lightning storms (summer months). How could a machine stay up for two years, when all the computers around it, dropped once a week ? It seemed like a miracle, like finding an image of Jesus in your morning toast. (It was a Unix box, and presumably had an uptime command.) Then, someone decided to check where the power plug was situated. And it turned out, that computer was plugged into the emergency lighting system rail :-) The power source that runs all those red Exit signs. The building design, had that power bussed throughout the building. So if you want a recipe for fun at work, give that a try. I'm pretty sure that outlet is specifically marked as not for general consumption, but some rocket scientist probably thought this would be funny. And, it was... Â*Â* Paul Hysterical !!! |
#37
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No Such Interface Supported
On 3/5/19 8:40 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 03/05/2019 3:06 AM, T wrote: On 3/4/19 7:47 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: Baloney Todd, Last place I worked before I retired I had 2 windows machines running for about two and a half years 24/7/365 with no shut downs or reboots, They ran my security and door card reader systems and where not allowed to shut down, they were critical systems. You are spreadingÂ*FUD,Â*andÂ*itsÂ*notÂ*appreciated. Rene Seriously Rene. Your computers ran a single app. and from that you surmised that I am spreading FUD? I am curious about your system. In 2-1/2 years you never had a power hit?Â* What kind of power protection were you running. An 1800 watt UPSÂ* Worth about $1400.00 What version of Windows did you run? I do believe it was XP if I remember correctly Was it embedded Windows? No Did you have Internet access? No Did you run any other apps on it? Only backup Applications. Did you have updates turned off? No internet, Thus no updates Did you have sleep / hibernate enabled? No, these systems had to run 24/7 Rene Hi Rene, Thank you for sharing. It is a very sound design. Makes perfect sense that it would have run for so long. XP and 7 are now pretty stable now. It usually takes about two years for M$ to clean up their latest offering, unless they completely drop them and go on to something else. Windows 10 is an exception as it hasn't gotten any better in what five And M$ is not about to drop 10 as they did Vista. Have you been to Walmart lately? Their self service line are running embedded Windows 10. I scoff watching them reboot. They should have used embedded Linux. -T |
#38
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No Such Interface Supported
On 3/5/19 7:57 AM, Ken Blake wrote:
I'll add my experience to yours. Both my machine and my wife's run continuously without ever rebooting unless it's required by an update (or we're leaving home for a couple of weeks on vacation). I've never timed exactly how long it runs before an update (to Windows or something else) that requires rebooting, but my guess is that it's usually around a month or so. That experience is currently with machines running Windows 10, but it goes back to Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1. Home machines? |
#39
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24/7 and keyboard funny
On 3/5/19 3:42 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , T writes: On 3/5/19 2:04 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: 4. You describe "keyboard acting weird." Would you care to give more detail? When I first asked about this a few months ago, I don't think anyoneÂ*elseÂ*hadÂ*quiteÂ*theÂ*sameÂ*behaviour. |
#40
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24/7 and keyboard funny
On 3/5/19 1:31 PM, T wrote:
On 3/5/19 3:42 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , T writes: On 3/5/19 2:04 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: 4. You describe "keyboard acting weird." Would you care to give more detail? When I first asked about this a few months ago, I don't think anyoneÂ*elseÂ*hadÂ*quiteÂ*theÂ*sameÂ*behaviour. Hi John, Arrow keys now working, ctrlC & V not working, that sort of thing. No, that's not it. When I get the fault, it's as if a Ctrl or sometimes shift key is stuck down - at least that's the best description I can give of it. Arrow key presses are registered - but, say, if the cursor is in text, it moves by (and sometimes highlights) a word at a time rather than a letter. Sometimes the letter keys do nothing, except that (say) S brings up the Save dialogue. Does sound like a faulty keyboard - but the thing that mitigates most against that being the cause, is that different things seem to have different sensitivities: usually (though not always), if I switch to Notepad+, I can type as normal. (Sometimes I even resort to switching to Notepad+, typing the text I want, copying it, switching back to [e. g.] my news client, and pasting. [The "mouse" - trackpad - works fine.]) Sometimes switching to Notepad+ and typing a character or two suffices - I can switch back to the other application and typing is back. It's a weird one! Does rebooting fix it? Yes, always. Usually messing about fixes it, so I tend to do that rather than rebooting, as it's quicker. Can you duplicate the problem in safe mode? Don't know. Since I don't know what sets it off, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell. When you finally figure this out, would you post back for us nosey people? If I remember, sure! (Even if it's something embarrassing!) -T This is a long shot, but are you having power problems?Â* Your lights flicker every so often? Another long shot. Is your laptop getting rather warm when this happens? |
#41
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24/7 and keyboard funny
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| Having said that: I just got one of the manifestations of the weirdness | while I was typing the above paragraph, I turned AllChars off (didn't | uninstall it), and I got my typing back! So, more investigation needed. | I've just turned AllChars back on, and I can still type - including | éû?" the odd characters AllChars makes it easy to type. That could fit with a bad hook. It depends on how they designed it. Problems might not necessarily seem consistent. For instance, if the hook didn't pass on the message after certain keys only, due to an oversight, then you could see erratic behavior. |
#42
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No Such Interface Supported
On Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:29:34 -0500, Paul wrote:
Sam Hill wrote: On Mon, 04 Mar 2019 19:11:45 -0800, T wrote: On 3/4/19 6:38 PM, Sam Hill wrote: On Mon, 04 Mar 2019 17:55:57 -0800, T wrote: For those that need to run 24/7, doing a reboot in the night clears them up. Think about what you just wrote: "For those that need to run *24/7*,". How does a reboot fit into that? Who is processing something 100% of the time? The remote server that sits waiting for world-wide salespersons to log business transactions... Geez, think beyond the mom-n-pop people you serve for once. You pick a stop when nothing is expected to be happening, like when all the remote loggers have finally gone to sleep, etc.. And just let everyone know when the reboot will occure. What if the loggers are in Denver, Dubai, and Dingzhou? My computer has been running since the last neighborhood power failure, 67 days, 12 hours, 10 minutes ago. A Windows machine? No. (Now you're going to complain that 'this is a Windows group' - just know I was picking on your silly comment about what "24/7" is.) That is the longest I have seen! 12 days and one customer could not type, or send eMail, and Chrome's windows shimmered. "A Windows machine?" g Maybe it's okay in your little world that not being able to run more than a few days is sufficient. By change do your have hibernate/sleep set? You'd be running a redundant system with some sort of fail-over, such that with a pair of machines, one could be rebooted while the other takes over. The only problem with schemes like that, is when they get into a loop. One evening at work, a "pair" like that, swapped roles every 90 seconds, affecting service, so I had to page the on-call IT guy to put a stop to it. Char could probably tell you how to set something like that up. It's a misconfiguration, obviously, but that issue and others similar to it come up often enough that I and my colleagues have added the topic to the 'ad hoc knowledge transfer' portion of our dog and pony show. As a consultant, we've all been brought in to resolve issues like that many times. It starts with good intentions, as is so often the case. The customer wants to eliminate a single point of failure, so they implement a redundant pair of routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc., in an Active/Standby configuration. Then, for whatever reason, they configure the pair so that Unit 1 is preferred to be Active. Sooner or later, along comes an issue that causes Unit 1 to demote itself to Standby, and Unit 2 dutifully picks up the Active role. Unit 2 sees that it should be Standby, so it demotes itself back to Standby, allowing Unit 1 to promote itself to Active. However, the issue with Unit 1 is still present, so Unit 1 demotes itself to Standby, Unit 2 sees that and promotes itself to Active, and the cycle repeats until someone comes along and resolves it. Most of the network gear that I work with can be configured so that a specific unit is preferred Active without the issue above coming along for the ride, but you have to do a bit of additional config work to get there. It's not complicated, but it helps if you've been there and done that. And there have been implementations like that, which are run by idiots. My old ISP insisted on some sort of brain-dead DNS scheme, where about 30 pairs of machines provided DNS. And they would *reboot both machines in a pair* on the same minute at night, knocking out DNS service to the customers on that particular pair, for around 15 minutes. Talk about strange designs... Why have redundancy, then reboot both machines in the pair at the same time ? Boggles the mind. Yes, that's just stupid on someone's part. Accidents happen, but if it happened more than once then someone probably isn't doing their job. Why not have... ten machines in parallel, and boot all ten at the same time :-/ You know ya wanna. My current ISP has "a single pair", for which the provisioning is all hidden. (You cannot discover there are 30 pairs of machines over time, by studying the DNS addresses it hands out over DHCP.) You cannot see what goes on, inside the ISP building. I suspect a kind of "virtualized" DNS scheme, which presents two addresses, but has some unknown level of "proper" redundancy that we cannot see. That setup has *never* gone down, that I could detect. Yup, load-balanced DNS. I've set that up countless times. To the user, the load balancer appears to be the DNS server, but the actual DNS servers sit behind the load balancer, shielded from prying eyes and probing attempts. You add capacity by simply adding servers to the load balanced pool, and/or you can add geo diversity by adding DNS pools in different parts of the country or different countries in the world. DNS requests are typically steered to the local DNS pool, but there are 'follow the sun' scenarios where the country is selected based on local business hours. Plus a thousand other variations, of course. The Space Shuttle had five computers, and majority voter logic. It ran two sets of software. It had a pair of machines on each software set. And the fifth machine was some sort of tie breaker. So there are people who have made reliable solutions before, that actually work... They obviously didn't hire any staff from my old ISP. If my old ISP was running the Shuttle, they'd pick the landing cycle as the time to reboot all five of them. Our network equipment is very sensitive to being in time sync, (3 seconds nominal, 10 seconds max), so we sort of do the 'majority voter logic' thing with NTP. The minimum recommended number of NTP servers is 3, because with 1 you'd never know if you can trust it, while with 2 you wouldn't know which to trust if they were to diverge, so 3 is the minimum. More are better, but you get into diminishing returns. Based on stratum, response time, and jitter, a primary and secondary are automatically and dynamically designated. The primary is used to set the local time, but the primary is always checked against the secondary. If they start to diverge, another server from the list is brought in for a vote. If the third server agrees with the primary, it gets promoted to secondary, but if the third server agrees with the secondary, the secondary gets promoted to primary and the third server gets promoted to secondary. -- Char Jackson |
#43
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24/7 and keyboard funny
On 3/5/19 1:45 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | Having said that: I just got one of the manifestations of the weirdness | while I was typing the above paragraph, I turned AllChars off (didn't | uninstall it), and I got my typing back! So, more investigation needed. | I've just turned AllChars back on, and I can still type - including | éû?" the odd characters AllChars makes it easy to type. That could fit with a bad hook. It depends on how they designed it. Problems might not necessarily seem consistent. For instance, if the hook didn't pass on the message after certain keys only, due to an oversight, then you could see erratic behavior. Does Windows have a master keyboard reset function? |
#44
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24/7 and keyboard funny
On 3/5/19 1:43 PM, T wrote:
On 3/5/19 1:31 PM, T wrote: This is a long shot, but are you having power problems?Â* Your lights flicker every so often? Another long shot.Â* Is your laptop getting rather warm when this happens? And another long shot, if you do a "user" log off (not a reboot) and log back on, does it clear the problem? |
#45
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No Such Interface Supported
On 03/05/2019 3:18 PM, T wrote:
On 3/5/19 8:40 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 03/05/2019 3:06 AM, T wrote: On 3/4/19 7:47 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: Baloney Todd, Last place I worked before I retired I had 2 windows machines running for about two and a half years 24/7/365 with no shut downs or reboots, They ran my security and door card reader systems and where not allowed to shut down, they were critical systems. You are spreadingÂ*FUD,Â*andÂ*itsÂ*notÂ*appreciated. Rene Seriously Rene. Your computers ran a single app. and from that you surmised that I am spreading FUD? I am curious about your system. In 2-1/2 years you never had a power hit?Â* What kind of power protection were you running. An 1800 watt UPSÂ* Worth about $1400.00 What version of Windows did you run? I do believe it was XP if I remember correctly Was it embedded Windows? No Did you have Internet access? No Did you run any other apps on it? Only backup Applications. Did you have updates turned off? No internet, Thus no updates Did you have sleep / hibernate enabled? No, these systems had to run 24/7 Rene Hi Rene, Thank you for sharing.Â* It is a very sound design.Â* Makes perfect sense that it would have run for so long. It was a very secure system Designed by the RCMP, The chosen system supplier, My boss and myself. I was the only person who had access to the system, I ran it, maintained it and allocated door reader access cards and even our IT department were not allowed to access it. No, The internet would never be allowed near a security system. in that building. XP and 7 are now pretty stable now.Â* It usually takes about two years for M$ to clean up their latest offering, unless they completely drop them and go on to something else. Windows 10 is an exception as it hasn't gotten any better in what five And M$ is not about to drop 10 as they did Vista. Have you been to Walmart lately?Â* Their self service line are running embedded Windows 10.Â* I scoff watching them reboot.Â* They should have used embedded Linux. -T Rene |
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