From ... is at comcast.net Fri Jun 6 07:37:25 2003 Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 13:49:33 -0400 From: innovative.education is at ... To: feenberg is at nber.org Subject: HDD Sheriff Dear Mr. Feenberg, I accidentally saw your webpage on the HDD Sheriff and I thought I may be able to make a few constructive suggestions. First, I must tell you that my company is the sole US distributor for Rogev Computers of Israel www.rogev.com , which is in direct competition with Jungsoft worldwide. Because of this, I will refrain from making specific or negative comments on the Sheriff. I strongly recommend against software such as Deep Freeze and similar. Software is a wonderful thing, but not for recovery. Hardware tools such as Sheriff and our MagicCard work at the hardware level, before the Operating System (Windows) is up. Because of that, they are able to recover a corrupted BIOS or Operating System. Software is intrinsically incapable of doing that. Any piece of application software can only run on a reasonably functional Operating System. Windows crashes are a large reason people buy our products. If Windows is corrupted badly enough, it won't come up at all and neither will the recovery software. Furthermore, software cannot recover from viruses, hacking or accidental mishaps that write directly to the hard drive outside the Operating System, for the same reason. Software also takes a lot more hard drive space, is typically slower to execute a recovery and is NOT cheaper in small quantities. And last but not least, I don't know any piece of software that a determined 12-year old cannot hack in one afternoon. My manufacturer (Rogev), as well as Jungsoft, make software versions of their hardware product. I do not recommend them and I try to avoid selling them. You also must understand that hardware tools, because of their operation at the hardware level, occasionally have certain issues related to the non-uniformity of the computer hardware they work with. For example, all recovery products have had issues with computers using certain Asus motherboards, Intel 815 chipsets and a small number of other "anomalous" hardware. Each manufacturer has addressed the problems in their own way. I will not comment on your specific issues with the Sheriff, however I believe that you can obtain the relevant information by doing some research on the web. For example, the Australian reseller Bit Distribution has a very well put together FAQ section on the Sheriff. There are others as well if you have the time to do a little investigation. Another key point is the intended use of these devices. Hardware recovery tools were invented for computer-harsh environments such as schools, libraries, testing centers, institutional offices, etc. They are not particularly user-friendly because they were intended to be deployed and managed by IT professionals. As a matter of fact they are supposed to be user-invisible. Jungsoft has chosen to sell them to the public. This has generated comments from end-users similar to yours. Rogev, on the other hand, traditionally has not sold their cards outside the institutional market. Only recently have we started selling to the commercial channel, and only the newest card. This card has much simplified features and operation, and as such is more user-friendly. I hope this was of help. Sincerely Dorian Gluckman VP - Technology Innovative Education International Troy, MI From schepers is at ist.uwaterloo.ca Fri Oct 3 16:21:37 2003 Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 09:34:01 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter Schepers <schepers is at ist.uwaterloo.ca> To: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg is at nber.org> Subject: Re: Sheriff > Thanks for your comments. I don't understand what you recommend about > the unprotected partition. You first suggest creating the second partition > before installing HDD Sheriff, then say it is prohibitive. Should I try it > or not? It was getting NAV to work, having _only_ the virus definitions on a drive and location other than it's default install location that was difficult. Creating/modifying the existing partition structure is not hard at all. I would highly recommend using a tool like Power Quest Partition Magic to create or modify the partition structure the way you like since it was engineered to do this job. Simply shrink the existing C partition and create a D partition in the free space. I don't trust, and never use, the tools that Sheriff provides to do the file system alignment or file system scans, having seen them fail in our lab environment under what I consider to be a normal environment. > As to moving Documents and settings, I expect you remember a way to move > it after the user directories are already created. New users will always > be created on C: as far as I can tell. This is where the REGISTRY edits come in. There are two locations that specify where the "Documents and Settings" profiles folder resides, and you can modify them to point to a new location, provided the new location exists first. The trouble was that you can't move or copy the existing ALL USERS profile from C as some files are in an active state. I will try to experiment some more wrt this problem. I gather you want to keep certain profiles around, hence the unprotected partition? In our lab environment, we want the Windows install to be kept in pristine condition all the time, including the profiles folder. Peter S. From schepers is at ist.uwaterloo.ca Fri Oct 3 16:23:44 2003 Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 14:59:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter Schepers <schepers is at ist.uwaterloo.ca> To: feenberg is at nber.org Subject: Sheriff Daniel: I've had your page book-marked for some time, intending to mail you regarding the HDD Sheriff product. We've had it here at the University Of Waterloo for some time (likely 3 years now), and are reasonably happy with it. We use it in a tightly-controlled teaching lab environment where the PC's get rebooted every morning. We have network drives attached to the login script, so we have no need for a local writable drive, not protected by Sheriff. I agree with you regarding the pathetic state of the documentation, non-existent EMAIL support, and the non-existence of tools/updates on the main JUNGSOFT web site. I found it incomprehensible that I could find tools and updates on an _Australian_ web site (a reseller no less), but not on our local support site here in Toronto, nor on the main Jungsoft site. I have mailed Jungsoft and our local support company, but all to futility. We ran into a problem running the cards on Intel 845 motherboards, and tried for almost 2 months to get _any_ support. Nothing. I finally located the Australian BIT-Distribution site, and down loaded the necessary firmware update which fixed our problem. This incident almost pushed me to remove the cards and go with a software-based solution (Clean Slate). As for the person who mailed you, talking about how these cards work at the hardware level... I think otherwise. Sheriff works at the hardware level when in 16-bit DOS only. Once Windows loads up, the Sheriff software drivers take over at a 32-bit level. This implies that if there is a software bug or crash, you could be unprotected. I've been able to setup Sheriff so it _appears_ to be protected, and you have the blue star icon indicating it is in Protection mode, but you are _not_ protected. This is one of many serious limitations and stupidities of the Sheriff setup procedures. Now, onto other things... If you need to have a local non-protected partition, I would set up the partition structure first, before installing Sheriff. Then install Sheriff without letting it create the D drive, and only set it to protect C only. We did do this for a short time, having the Norton AV definitions on a non-protected partition so that live updates could still be done while still being Sheriff protected, but the setup was prohibitive. We no longer do this. Regarding moving the "Documents and Settings" folder... I've looked into this a bit, and it appears possible with a few registry edits, and copying the entire folder structure from C to the drive you want. That's all I can remember. ---------------------- Peter Schepers IST/Hardware University Of Waterloo From billg lanwerx.com Fri Oct 17 11:57:08 2003 Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 08:28:08 -0700 From: Bill Garnett <billg lanwerx.com> To: 'Daniel Feenberg' <feenberg nber.org> Subject: RE: HDD Sheriff [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Hi, I talked with David Tucera at Interware Systems in Toronto this morning. He is very helpful. The can and do sell to the US market. His contact information is dtucera@interwaresystems.com, or phone 866.618.6161 The web site is http://www.interwaresystems.com Bill Bill Garnett LanWerX Game Centers 707 112th Ave NE Bellevue, WA 98004 (425) 462-0010 Fax: (425) 637-8848 From rcmdpoiri@mail.sys.ilstu.edu Tue Jul 27 10:11:23 2004 Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 08:11:06 -0500 From: Poirier Marc D. <rcmdpoiri isat mail sys ilstu edu> To: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> Subject: RE: About HDD Sheriff Dan, Thanks a lot for the idea! Apparently, the HDD Sheriff does require FAT partitions instead of NTFS. After some more time working on it, I now have a working Sheriff on a totally up to date Windows XP system. One tip about setup though... make sure the memory card is IN THE MACHINE at the time you install the HDD Sheriff software! Thanks again! Marc Poirier