Crapware installed from UEFI BIOS - Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT)

This is a interesting and describing forum post about Lenovo putting some Lenovo CrapWare in the UEFI BIOS which Windows will execute upon login (right before actually):

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014

Lenovo has issued a fix: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook
and an article: http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013

Comments

Force Dell BIOS Upgrade

I just experienced a problem upgrading a Huawei N8300 OceanStor NAS Engine node (OEM'ed Dell PowerEdge R710 server). Running the linux binary update file looked good and it asked me to reboot. After reboot the same old v2.1.15 BIOS was there, not the latest v6.4.0 (as of writing this small post). Next up was creating a FreeDOS Bootable ISO with the bios update program included (see this page for how to do that in Windows). Running the BIOS upgrade program from FreeDOS (virtual media and DRAC) I got this error: Cannot use a "Dell System PowerEdge R710" BIOS in a " - " Pres any key to exit. ROM update not performed. After some googleing I found the solution on Dell Community Forum - use the /FORCETYPE option. So to force the update, I just ran the update package with that option (I had renamed the file for 8.3 DOS filename): R710-640.exe /FORCETYPE And thats it. v6.4.0 BIOS up and running :)

How to configure multiple VLANs on QNAP TS-869U

It's unbelievable that QNAP still doesn't support multiple VLANs on a single bond0 interface via GUI when they now just released the QTS v4.1.0 NAS Operation System for QNAP. The underlying Linux OS (QTS) does support it, and there should at least not be any problems with Intel chipsets. Some are reporting problems with Marvell.. but I haven't tried. I wanted to use the QNAP as a iSCSI storage for my LAB using a second interface while having full redundancy and get max bandwith (2x1GbE) for my ESXi hosts, and I didn't want that interface routed. At the same time I of course need the possibility to manage the QNAP system via the main interface, which is routed. This CLI "hack" will at configure the QNAP for a second VLAN interface that will be persistent during reboots. It's not been verified that it works after an upgrade of the firmware, but I presumed it will. To get this to work I presume you already have the following working: Network onfigured...

Intel Rapid Storage Technology (iRST) driver for Windows 10 on older chipsets (7-series and older)

My computer is still more than fast enough even though it's over 4 years old. It's a Intel Core i7-3770K with 32GB DDR4-1600 RAM on an Asus ROG Maximus V Gene mainboard. The chipset is Z77 and so it was more or less the best to get at the time being. I started with two Samsung SSD 830 in RAID-9 and later upgraded to a OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 PCIe SSD for my OS disk. Fast forward from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 (v1607) and Intel seems to not have released any Windows 10 supported SATA controller drivers for Z77. Or have they? It seems that as long as your BIOS has the Intel SATA controller set to AHCI-mode, Windows 10 will install and use the generic ' Standard SATA controller ' and trying to install the latest iRST driver v15.2.0.1020 (latest version as of 2016-12-15) on an AHCI configured Z77-system only gives you an error: Platform not supported The good news is that Intel does have driver support for some of the older chipsets; those that have RAID capabilities, whi...

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