Shame Ubuntu! (unable to boot Windows after upgrade to 10.04 - Lucid Lynx)

And I say this because I still have higher regards and consequent expectations about products coming from Ubuntu community.

The network based upgrade itself went smooth. Seems like things are messed up with the new GRUB. When I rebooted the PC to boot Windows XP (can we live without one?), GRUB did show Windows as an option to boot. Earlier during the upgrade I had noticed this entry was added as the upgrade process prompted me whether to replace existing copy of

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Thankfully at the point I had saved a copy of the one being replaced! So, when I selected to boot Windows, all I was shown was a blank screen with a text mode cursor blinking at me infinitely.

Thanks to the active community out there, I realized I'm not alone :-)

• Many talk about this: (and it worked for me!):
  
  
  

  http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bootinfoscript/index.php?title=Boot_Problems:Boot_Sector

  Found via a thread at Ubuntu Forum.
  Earlier I was not sure about applicability of this to my issue. People claim this solved theirs).
• Online Update to 10.04: loss of Windows Boot. One suggested solution is in post #8.
• Short but laborious, unpredictable solution.
• And finally, the official bug report... (Shame! I expected a better job after all that Microsoft product bashing we have witnessed for so many years).

People say this issue slipped between release candidate and actual production release as they never faced issue during beta testing. That highlights importance of freezing development/ new check-ins before an important milestone.

During this exploration, I discovered some useful tools:

TestDisk (GPL):

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software, primarily
designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting
disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty
software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as
accidentally deleting a Partition Table).

This tool really did the job for me! And I learned that there exists a backup copy of MBR on the disk. I'm not newbie to OS internals and its programming; but never had chance to deal with gory details of boot record, partition tables, disk geometry, and the likes (yikes! :-) )

CMOSpwd BIOS password recovery from CMOS.

Why is Google Public DNS scanning ports on my host computer?!

Being fade up with poor DNS response during peak hours from the ISP assigned resolver or occasional complete blackouts, recently I opted to use Google Public DNS. While the performance and security benefits of the latter are impressive and I trust Google being able to safeguard against DNS poisoning compared to an average, unaware ISP, recently I found myself on the receiving side of port scan or DoS attempts from Google DNS directed to the private IP of my host computer! Here is a firewall log from my Internet facing router. The router is on a private LAN shared with the host computer. I have intentionally masked the time and the private IP addresses on my host.

Tue, 2010-03-16 03:33:04 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8 Destination:192.168.x.y - [PORT SCAN]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:43 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,52344 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:44 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,59397 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:44 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,36034 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:49 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,58507 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:49 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,47320 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:49 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,43986 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:54 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,57783 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:54 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,46381 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:54 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,37386 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:59 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,42595 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:34:59 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,49444 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:00 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,46906 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,50278 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,42480 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,46706 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:10 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,33430 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:10 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,37712 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:10 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,58394 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:16 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,39228 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:16 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,41935 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:16 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,57780 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:21 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,60592 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:21 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,45238 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:21 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,37143 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:26 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,47709 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:26 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,58876 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:26 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,42900 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:35:32 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,56628 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:50:59 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,35201 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:50:59 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,58851 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:00 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,59257 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,44891 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,36661 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:05 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,56824 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:11 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,43335 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:11 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,44840 - [DOS]
Tue, 2010-03-16 03:51:11 - UDP Packet - Source:8.8.8.8,53 Destination:192.168.x.y,48039 - [DOS]

Notice the time difference between two successive scanning or reported DoS attempts. Why is Google scanning these ports? Isn't DNS resolver supposed to be a passive entity responding only to user requests and not initiate a connection with the client host computer? Is this some sort of opportunistic spying?

Fit more in limited RAM -- compcache

'What's new' for Linux kernel version 2.6.33 had mention for it; so I tried out this compcache--using part of RAM for saving swapped out memory contents after compressing them to fit more. While the argument for using it is to let CPU do more work and save on disk access latencies, after having configured it the difference in responsiveness on my desktop was somewhat noticeable. The mouse movements were jerky. Firefox browser was not responding for tab switch when loading a large Web page... Guess, this argument works better on multi-core, faster processors than my single core 1.6GHz Intel P4 running Ubuntu.

Was going to disable it. However, when I re-ran the same tests without compcache configured, the issue with Firefox persisted. So, in the interest of using less of my aging disk having the swap partition, I have retained compcache and bear with that minor mouse jerkiness :-). To benefit better from the same, I have increased the value for swappiness kernel tunable parameter to 50 from a previous lower value of 40.

Using SSD memory for swap partition may be a better idea. A good friend had originally mentioned this idea to me few months back. What do you say?