w29n51.sys BSODs on XP

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Twice now in as many months I have been the proud recipient of a BSOD on XP. The crashes were identical to each other with only various addresses being different (modules loaded into a different location and the like). They appear to have been caused by a bug in w29n51.sys; the crashes are of the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (a) variety. w29n51.sys is the "Intel® Wireless LAN Driver". Admittedly, I'm running a version that is likely not the latest. But it is interesting that googling the relevant stack entries (w29n51+0x1291, w29n51+0xa6af) turns up no hits. Also of interest is that the driver file is larger than 3 MB - more than 3 times the size of the next largest driver file in %systemroot%\system32\drivers... Strings does show a large number of verbose log-type messages that one can presumably cause to be logged via some configuration setting, as well as "tabular" data.

Of course, it is also disturbing that at the time of these crashes, the wireless hardware was disabled on this laptop...

Plagiarism, Revisited

Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

Raymond Chen posted about a topic yesterday that seems to hit the nail on the head with regard to some of the recent posts I've made here. In What's with all those spam ping-bots?, he describes the methodology used by blog and comment spammers / content thieves, and the motivation ($$) for doing what they do.

Of interest:

(You may notice that many of these sites mis-attribute the authorship; some of them even claim to have written the article themselves!)

Raymond also offers some advice about what one can try to do to "hit them in the pocketbook".

Sadly (ironically?), as I write this, 50% of the comments to that very blog entry are of the type that Raymond was writing about.

So it appears that there is not much that one is going to do to curb this. Also, considering that much of the content here (not just the newer stuff) has already been picked up and assimilated into other sites that slap a label on it as their own, and have even translated it (?????) into foreign languages, and then stamped ads all over it, I'm not inclined to waste much effort on the matter. I'll simply preface each entry with what you have seen the last few articles start with, and hope that that part of it makes its way along with the article to wherever it winds up. I may intersperse one or two similar statements in the longer articles as well. I hope it's not too distracting...

Use C# to Find What Services are Running in a Process

Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

Recently, an individual going by the moniker 'hi' posted a comment to Setting the Priority of a Service Process via Script:

How would I, if I want to, find which services are part of a particular svchost.exe? Can in be done in C#?

Thanks!

I replied via comment, but one has even less control over formatting in comments than one does in the actual blog posting, so I figured I would post the response here as well.

=================

Tasklist.exe with the /svc param can tell you, as can Process Explorer. You can also inspect the registry to determine what services would load with what SVCHOST group (see "Troubleshooting Performance Issues with Automatic Updates" for more details).

As far as C# code, the following requires a reference to System.Management. Invoke the program, passing it the process id of the process you're curious about, and it will output the services running in that process.

using System;
using System.Management;

namespace MyGreenPaste
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main( string[] args )
    {
      if( args.GetLength( 0 ) <= 0 )
      {
        Console.WriteLine( "Usage: {0} pid",
          System.IO.Path.GetFileName(
            System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().
              MainModule.FileName ) );
        Console.WriteLine( "  where pid is the process id " +
          "of a process hosting at least one service" );
        return;
      }

      try
      {
        ManagementObjectSearcher mos =
          new ManagementObjectSearcher( "root\\CIMV2",
            string.Format( "SELECT * FROM Win32_Service " +
              "where ProcessId={0}", args[0] ) );
        foreach( ManagementObject result in mos.Get() )
        {
          Console.WriteLine( "{0} -> {1}", result["Name"],
            result["DisplayName"] );
        }
      }
      catch( ManagementException mex )
      {
          Console.WriteLine( "** Error querying WMI:{0}{1}",
            System.Environment.NewLine, mex.Message );
      }
    }
  }
}

Small Update Regarding Previous Post Pertaining to Plagiarism

Ahhhh, alliteration. Anyway, just noticed that one of the other sites has posted the cheesy comment I referenced in my previous entry, Set the Priority of a Process By Name Automatically, in Vista - Part 2. So, both saw fit to post the comments (took a while for the one site, though) - the first stamped 2008-01-31 2:37 GMT, and the second stamped 2008-01-30 13:40 GMT. No sign of Part 2 on either of these sites, though... Hmmm...