Not a good morning when Windows 10 (20H2) decided not to boot up !
There were updates earlier which needed a restart of the OS but thereafter it misbehaved. It loops loading Windows and restarting.
First off, I try to boot up on the recovery and tried to restore from previous saved point. That didn't work and gave same issue. Then tried repairing boot record with series on commands on console ie. bootrec and still the same. Thereafter I created a Windows USB using the Windows Media Creation Tool and tried a repair of Windows. It didn't go far as it restarted at a point and did the same. Out of options, I head to my arsenal of Live USB drives and find the HBCD drive. Intention was to look into the local drive from the Live OS and save my files.
Upon opening the Windows Explorer and click on the local drive, it asks for my bitlocker key. After keying that in on the root folder, saw some folders starting with "$", which seems odd. Nothing to lose, chose all of them (was about 7) and deleted. Then I tried to restart the machine. This time Windows loaded !
Thanks you so much MICROSOFT !
Sidenote: HBCD or Hiren Boot CD is a Windows 10 Live USB and may be downloaded HERE
There are many other Live CD flavor you can use and create. One of the more common ones is YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator.
my support staff tells me to restart my computer !
Is this familiar to you ?
Many laptop users make it a habit to keep their laptop on sleep or hibernate mode even though these modes WERE NOT DESIGNED OR MEANT TO BE KEPT PERPETUALLY POWERED ON and thus they experience many issues like battery issues.
By restarting your PC at least once a week it helps to "reset" many items on both the hardware as well as Operating System levels like:
Flushes the Memory - Each program kept open used the Random Access Memory (RAM) and as its being clogged up, performance degenerates and you will experience sluggishness in performance.
Halts Memory Leaks - Programs that do not close correctly creates memory leaks that drag performance as well as creates issues.
Corrects Software Glitches - Software may display erratic and quirky behaviors such as missing buttons, network issue and such. These happens usually when user was in office network before their computer went into sleep/hibernate, and when it "wakes" up, it gets "confused" as to the network it is on. Often, this gets resolved on a fresh reboot.
Speeds Up Performance - Cobweb of running processes on your machine stacks up over usage and thus performance tend to be impacted.
Saves You Time - Penny-wise and pound-foolish comes to mind when one thinks that keeping their machines powered on all the time is the right thing to do to save time. Instead, the 1-2 mins it takes to reboot/restart your computer may just be the things that saves you the extra 15 minutes in performance that you need over your day.
Fixes Emergent Issues - The following issues usually gets resolved by a reboot:
In Singapore today, all flats already moved on to the fast optical cable (broadband). The optical terminals (by OpenNet) in our houses looks like this:
Fibre cable (yellow) is then connected to a modem or simply called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) [sample picture below].
The ONT simply converts from fibre to UTP cable but the LAN port in which we tap our internet for our home is important to note. Usually if we never switch Internet Service Provider (ISP), the default port to tap internet from is Port 1. Otherwise, its good to check with your ISP which port from our ONT do we tap internet from.
To test internet connectivity, we can simply plug via cable from our PC/laptop to one of the ports and check for internet.
Once we know which port on the ONT our (normal UTP) network cable should be connected to, the other end of that cable should be connected to a router.
A typical router looks like below:
The other end of the cable from ONT should be connected to one of the LAN port of the router.
The router is usually the most important network device in our home. This is because all other devices, like our mobile devices, laptops/PCs and TVs are connected to it.
These routers are sometimes pre-configured by our ISP. However, we can configure them by ourselves. There is usually a reset button on these devices so that we can reset the device to its default setting. Once in its default setting, we may connect to it using it default IP address and set the Wifi settings and security (refer to the model's how-to on vendor's site).
Sometimes the wifi reach is not good and we may need extra "repeater" for wifi at certain locations in our houses. Today, there are many devices that are popular to "mesh" the whole house for reach.
However, if you are renewing a plan and get a new router, and you do not have the budget to get newer products, you may re-use your old router elsewhere in the house. To do this, you will need to cable from a LAN port of the first router to a LAN port old one (maybe in a room). Next, just reset the old router and set it to "Bridge" mode. (refer to model's how-to on vendor's site). :)
What if you do not have to download all your standard applications individually and updating them each when there are updates ?
There are many ways to get all of your standard applications all updated using applications like Ninites, Appget or Yum, but Chocolatey is simply the easiest 😊
Let's get straight to it !
1. Prep-Reqs: Windows 7+ or Windows Server 2003+ / .NET Framework 4
2. Open command prompt as admin and copy-paste this and press Enter to run:
Copy all the application names that you will need on your machine (example: firefox, 7zip.install & jre8). Tip: You can copy all the applications in a notepad with a space in between them for installation).
To install all your standard applications, simply copy the text from your Notepad (like below) and paste them in command prompt (opened as administrator) and press Enter.
You will find that all your selected applications are installed at one go !
TIP: If you do not need confirmation, you can add -y in the command to skip confirmation.
When new version of your installed applications is out, you just need give the below command in your command prompt:
choco upgrade all -y
To uninstall an application, this is the below command:
Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels. All containers are run by a single operating-system kernel and are thus more lightweight than virtual machines.
The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first started in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.
Docker can package an application and its dependencies in a virtual container that can run on any Linux server. This helps provide flexibility and portability enabling the application to be run in various locations, whether on-premises, in a public cloud, or in a private cloud. Docker uses the resource isolation features of the Linux kernel (such as cgroups and kernel namespaces) and a union-capable file system (such as OverlayFS) to allow containers to run within a single Linux instance, avoiding the overhead of starting and maintaining virtual machines. Because Docker containers are lightweight, a single server or virtual machine can run several containers simultaneously. A 2018 analysis found that a typical Docker use case involves running eight containers per host, but that a quarter of analyzed organizations run 18 or more per host.
The Linux kernel's support for namespaces mostly isolates an application's view of the operating environment, including process trees, network, user IDs and mounted file systems, while the kernel's cgroups provide resource limiting for memory and CPU. Since version 0.9, Docker includes its own component (called "libcontainer") to directly use virtualization facilities provided by the Linux kernel, in addition to using abstracted virtualization interfaces via libvirt, LXC and systemd-nspawn.
Docker implements a high-level API to provide lightweight containers that run processes in isolation.
Components
The Docker software as a service offering consists of three components:
Software: The Docker daemon, called dockerd, is a persistent process that manages Docker containers and handles container objects. The daemon listens for requests sent via the Docker Engine API. The Docker client program, called docker, provides a command-line interface that allows users to interact with Docker daemons.
Objects: Docker objects are various entities used to assemble an application in Docker. The main classes of Docker objects are images, containers, and services.
A Docker container is a standardized, encapsulated environment that runs applications. A container is managed using the Docker API or CLI.
A Docker image is a read-only template used to build containers. Images are used to store and ship applications.
A Docker service allows containers to be scaled across multiple Docker daemons. The result is known as a swarm, a set of cooperating daemons that communicate through the Docker API.
Registries: A Docker registry is a repository for Docker images. Docker clients connect to registries to download ("pull") images for use or upload ("push") images that they have built. Registries can be public or private. Two main public registries are Docker Hub and Docker Cloud. Docker Hub is the default registry where Docker looks for images. Docker registries also allow the creation of notifications based on events.
Tools
Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. It uses YAML files to configure the application's services and performs the creation and start-up process of all the containers with a single command. The docker-compose CLI utility allows users to run commands on multiple containers at once, for example, building images, scaling containers, running containers that were stopped, and more. Commands related to image manipulation, or user-interactive options, are not relevant in Docker Compose because they address one container. The docker-compose.yml file is used to define an application's services and includes various configuration options. For example, the build option defines configuration options such as the Dockerfile path, the command option allows one to override default Docker commands, and more. The first public beta version of Docker Compose (version 0.0.1) was released on December 21, 2013. The first production-ready version (1.0) was made available on October 16, 2014.
Docker Swarm provides native clustering functionality for Docker containers, which turns a group of Docker engines into a single virtual Docker engine. In Docker 1.12 and higher, Swarm mode is integrated with Docker Engine. The docker swarm CLI utility allows users to run Swarm containers, create discovery tokens, list nodes in the cluster, and more. The docker node CLI utility allows users to run various commands to manage nodes in a swarm, for example, listing the nodes in a swarm, updating nodes, and removing nodes from the swarm. Docker manages swarms using the Raft Consensus Algorithm. According to Raft, for an update to be performed, the majority of Swarm nodes need to agree on the update.
