Hacker's ramblings

Hands down KB3200970 is the worst update I've seen for Windows 10!

In general I hate Windows 10 TiWorker-process. It sucks CPU like there is no tomorrow. I cannot comprehend how difficult it is to determine if an update is needed or not. If you compare to any Linux .deb or .rpm packaging, a simple update check in Windows 10 is way too heavy. I find this kind weird. When Microsoft announced simplifying servicing models for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, the reasons were to reduce scan times and finding right patches easier. It certainly doesn't feel like it to me.

So, there is Cumulative update for Windows 10 Version 1607 and Windows Server 2016, released November 8, 2016. This is also known as KB3200970 and boy, do people have trouble installing it!

This is what happened to me:

For about 8 hours it was stuck there in the preparing phase. While doing absolutely nothing, this was my CPU-load:

Well done idiots!

Net is full of stories like mine: How to fix Windows Update in Windows 10 if it becomes stuck, Windows 10 KB3200970 issues: install fails, high CPU usage, battery drain and more and Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 for x64-based Systems(KB3200970).

The Reddit-article had a link to KB971058, How do I reset Windows Update components? which helped some. I gave it a try and it did help.

First some services needed stopping. This is what you would run as an administrator cmd.exe:

net stop bits
net stop wuauserv
net stop appidsvc
net stop cryptsvc

In my case the wuauserv didn't stop, I had to find the process id for it and kill it manually. After all that, I attempted renaming:

Ren %systemroot%\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.bak
Ren %systemroot%\system32\catroot2 catroot2.bak

First one failed, so I don't know what the impact was. Then I ran the entire list:

cd /d %windir%\system32

regsvr32.exe atl.dll
regsvr32.exe urlmon.dll
regsvr32.exe mshtml.dll
regsvr32.exe shdocvw.dll
regsvr32.exe browseui.dll
regsvr32.exe jscript.dll
regsvr32.exe vbscript.dll
regsvr32.exe scrrun.dll
regsvr32.exe msxml.dll
regsvr32.exe msxml3.dll
regsvr32.exe msxml6.dll
regsvr32.exe actxprxy.dll
regsvr32.exe softpub.dll
regsvr32.exe wintrust.dll
regsvr32.exe dssenh.dll
regsvr32.exe rsaenh.dll
regsvr32.exe gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32.exe sccbase.dll
regsvr32.exe slbcsp.dll
regsvr32.exe cryptdlg.dll
regsvr32.exe oleaut32.dll
regsvr32.exe ole32.dll
regsvr32.exe shell32.dll
regsvr32.exe initpki.dll
regsvr32.exe wuapi.dll
regsvr32.exe wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe wups.dll
regsvr32.exe wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe qmgr.dll
regsvr32.exe qmgrprxy.dll
regsvr32.exe wucltux.dll
regsvr32.exe muweb.dll
regsvr32.exe wuwebv.dll

Lot of them failed, but that's what the KB971058 told to do. Then starting the services:

net start bits
net start wuauserv
net start appidsvc
net start cryptsvc

Still this update tested my patience. It ran couple hours preparing after it announced, it's ready to go install. The installation took yet another couple hours. After the installation was completed and the obligatory reboot was done, Windows still reported that a reboot is required. This update really sucks ass!

Ultimately my laptop spent more than 50 hours to install all this. There were number of retrys and times than I didn't care to look to closely what's going on, so the machine had to wait for user interaction. Still the process was paintakingly long.

For the past couple of days, I've been getting weird Baidu links via Skype chat. The sender is somebody I actually know and is my contact. The messages do not stay in the message history for that person, nor they never received the reply I sent back when the link was received. It's really weird to receive such links to a Chinese search engine in the first place, but the elusive chat history is the definite clue: somebody hacked Skype's protocol. Also, I find it strange, that the link contains my Skype-handle in it (obfuscated in below pic).

The message looks like this:

I'm not alone with this phenomenon: Link to "baidu" website sent to all of my contacts.

As the messages I got are from actual contacts, I followed up on them. Both persons deny sending me such links, and their message history doesn't display the link either. So, I don't think that the personal accounts are cracked, it's the Skype servers that are being exploited. Hopefully Microsoft-guys figure this out and plug the hole.

Update:

Couple hours after posting this, somebody posted a link to Why are Skype accounts getting hacked so easily? into Skype's community discussion. The article makes a claim that Skype's 2-factor authentication can be circumvented easily by using the old Skype credentials. Looks like you can still log in with Microsoft-account (pretty secure) or the credentials used before Microsoft acquired Skype. The old credentials cannot have 2-FA set up into it and most likely you already forgot it even exists. That seems to be the way how nasty people make their way in.

Update 10th Nov 2016:

Recent buzz is about a similar incident last year, when users' Skype accounts were used to send spam. So, nobody has come forward with any proof that the protocol would be compromised. It is gearing towards to the fact that users didn't realize there are two separate passwords to their Skype account, and the non Microsoft-account had a weak password which was used to gain access to contact lists.

Update 14th Nov 2016:
Confirmed, that this is not a case of using leaked passwords, my second post about this is here.

Those of you, who celebrate All Hallows' Eve today: have a happy one!

I whipped up my pumpkin knife and carved a very scary(?) looking one for those kids ringing my doorbell for trick or treating.

Update:

This iFixit teardown of a pumpkin isn't how I did it.

I've been an active IPv6-user for many many years. Of course my ISP doesn't offer a native IPv6, so I'm using a tunnel from SixXS. They have been providing such tunnels free-of-charge for years, and for that I thank them and the ISPs volunteering their capacity for us nerds to have decent IPv6-connectivity. SixXS got tired for IPv6 not getting any traction, the ISPs have almost zero commitment for allowing people to use real, native IPv6. SixXS has a campaign called "Call Your ISP for IPv6!", but I don't think that's going to make much of an impact. When any ISP is actually asked about their IPv6 support, they'll stall by "we'll announce it later" or "but we do support IPv6" (by some unusable mechanism).

When looking what's happening on the ISP-side, Telia (or Sonera, as we call it here in Finland) has enabled 6rd for their connections. It combines DHCPv4 by returning enough parameters for an IPv6 setup with a 64-bitmask to be done. It kinda works, but ... still not the real thing I'm after. Also Elisa and DNA, two big mobile telcos in Finland, started offering IPv6 (DNA, Elisa) for their customers, but ... I'm not going to change my home fiber for a mobile connection. So something is happening at the telco-scene. I'm just waiting my ISP (Elisa) to act on the wired side too.

The other side of the chicken-egg -problem are the services. There is no real commitment on their side either. For example Amazon AWS (a really huge infrastructure provider) really doesn't support IPv6, they have nice IPv6 support for Internet-facing load-balancers, their S3 storage and their content delivery net Cloudfront, to mention few. But when it comes to running a server instance with real native IPv6, no dice. So, you can market your service to be IPv6-ready, all the critical Internet-facing services really do support IPv6, but your infra runs on IPv4 private addresses. Not cool.

And when it comes to services, this is a typical scenario:

That's what's been happening for LinkedIn for I-don't-know-how long. At least this week.

Me being the nerd I am, some background investigation:

# telnet www.linkedin.com 80
Trying 2620:109:c007:102::5be1:f881...
telnet: connect to address 2620:109:c007:102::5be1:f881:
Connection timed out Trying 91.225.248.129...
Connected to www.linkedin.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

A classic.
Their IPv6 is down and they don't know about it. This is their level of commitment:

On September 2014, they announce to have done a "Permanent launch of IPv6". But none of them are using it themselves to realize it has been down for a week! The really scary thing is, that they cannot afford $10 a month for a Pingdom check.

That's what I recommend for everybody to use for monitoring on-line services. Any reputable admin needs to know the second a service is out of reach by general public. IMHO that should include also admins at LinkedIn.

When it comes to lack of IPv6, I need to come clean. This blog isn't running on IPv6 either. Since most of you don't have it, it is impossible for you to know. My co-location host cannot offer me the IPv6, so no avail.

But why? Why is there no real commitment for IPv6? What's blocking all sensible people for going all-in IPv6? Everybody knows, that all possible IPv4 addresses were allocated by IANA to telcos and ISPs in January 2011. So, there is no more. Of course there are plenty of available addresses in RIRs to allocate for regional telcos, so we're not completely bankrupt with IPv4-addresses. But that day is eventually coming, it's just a waiting game. Notable efforts like World IPv6 Launch Day yield no mentionable results.

So what's holding us back? I don't know anything else except everybody going on the path-of-least-resistance. Since there are available IPv4-addresses, why risk a change. With change things can go broken or something may shift so that some people will lose some and others will win some. Not that much of a risk, if you ask me. But here we are, inching towards IPv6 very slowly. Speed it up, goddamnit!

Arstechnica wrote last week: NSA could put undetectable “trapdoors” in millions of crypto keys. The article in the link says:

A special prime devised by the researchers, however, contains certain invisible properties that make the secret parameters unusually susceptible to discovery. The researchers were able to break one of these weakened 1,024-bit primes in slightly more than two months using an academic computing cluster of 2,000 to 3,000 CPUs.

So, there is a mathematical weakness in DH-key exchange algorithm when using 1024 bits and suitable prime number.

It so happens, that Diffie Hellman has been taking major hits in the past. In May 2015 team of researches found out an implementation failure in DH-key exchange called Logjam Attack. There is no mathematical weakness, but when negotiating a key exchange, client forces the number of bits used to be ridiculously low instead of server's suggestion. And in their discovery they suggested:

The Logjam researchers include some talk about how some "attackers with nation-state resources" could break through 1024-bit DH.

All this means, that the entire Diffie Hellman algoritm is riddled by different types of flaws and any reliability it previously enjoyed among security community is gone. Even with a Logjam-patched server, using less than 1024 has been insane for a long time. Now 1024 bits are gone, what next?

Impact

In practice this affects HTTPS, SSH and VPN-tunnels. Ok, there are other software using DH-key exchange, but I'll try to keep this simple.

So, there is no backdoor that NSA or anybody can open. It's just that when client and server agree on details of the encryption used in communication, the encryption key used can be calculated by a listening party. If somebody cannot capture your key exchange and encrypted bits, they cannot de-crypt the communication. However, if somebody can grab your bits and either you're using too weak DH-key exchange, or somebody can tamper the connection and do a "Logjam", then your connection's security will be impaired. The best option is to use some other protocol for key exchange.

There is more information about key exchange and Diffie Hellman in my previous article TLS Security recap - HTTPS (in)security up until 2016.

Diffie Hellman in TLS (SSL)

To quote the Wikipedia article about Diffie Hellman: "There are three versions of Diffie Hellman used in SSL/TLS: Anonymous Diffie Hellman, Fixed Diffie Hellman and Ephemeral Diffie Hellman". To make things confusing, there is also Elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDHE), which is not affected. For the purpose of this article, it is considered a completely another key exchange protocol. Yes, it has Diffie Hellman in the name, but ... still not affected.

Of those four protocols, pretty much the only ones being used in today's Internet are DHE (affected) and ECDHE (not affected). When looking at stats according to SSL Pulse, Survey of the SSL Implementation of the Most Popular Web Sites, only 27% of the sites tested supported DH/DHE with 1024 or less bits.

What you can do

The simple version is: nothing.

If you really want to, you can check which cipher suite your browser is using:

The string "TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384", means, that the TLS 1.2 connection is using elliptic-curves DHE (the not affected one) for key exchange. 

If you want to make things really interesting, from a Linux command prompt try to lure the server to use DHE as key exchange method. First get a list of suitable ciphers:

# openssl ciphers | perl -ne 'print join("\n", grep {/DHE-/} split(/:/));'

Let's pick one with weak key exchange, but with powerful crypto DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, and go for it:

# openssl s_client -cipher 'DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384' -connect www.google.com:443

As guys at Google are smart, they won't allow that. What you have is "CONNECTED" and "alert handshake failure". It means, that your client and their server failed to agree on suitable cipher suite to use. Your request for using DHE was the key here.

Final words

If you are a server admin and didn't stop accepting Diffie Hellman as key exchange before this, do it now.

If you are a regular internet user, don't worry number of government-level organizations already have your data!

This is the abridged version as most steps are exactly like in OS X El Capitan. See my article about that.

Step 1: Go download

As any upgrade, go to App Store, it should look like this:

Beware, it is quite a chunk (almost 5 GiB to be exact). If your Internet connection isn't too fast, be prepared to wait a while:

When the download is done, the installer will start automatically. It will look like this:

That's your cue. Do not proceed with the installation, but quit the installer instead:

Now all the necessary files are on your machine.

Step 2: Go USB

The recipe is classic, insert an USB-stick of suitable size, unmount it, prepare it for install, copy installation files to it and you're done!

Unmount (your volume name will differ, unless the stick had an Arch Linux installation in it):

sudo diskutil umount /Volumes/ARCH_201607/

Pay attention to the output, it will give a clue about the device identifier of your USB-stick on your machine it can and will vary. My output was:

Volume ARCH_201607 on disk3s1 unmounted

Now that we know which disk it was, partition and format the stick as JHFS+:

sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk3 1 GPT jhfs+ "MacOS Sierra" 0b

It will take a while and during operation it will say something like this:

Started partitioning on disk3
Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for the disks to reappear
Formatting disk3s2 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name MacOS Sierra
Initialized /dev/rdisk3s2 as a 7 GB case-insensitive HFS Plus volume with a 8192k journal
Mounting disk
Finished partitioning on disk3
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#:                  TYPE NAME        SIZE    IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme             *8.0 GB disk3
1:                   EFI EFI        209.7 MB disk3s1
2:             Apple_HFS MacOS Sierra 7.7 GB disk3s2

Now the stick is good to go, transfer the installation image into it:

cd /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/

sudo ./createinstallmedia \
   --volume /Volumes/MacOS\ Sierra/ \
   --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/ \
   --nointeraction

Again, that will take a while and output something like:

Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%...
Copying installer files to disk...
Copy complete.
Making disk bootable...
Copying boot files...
Copy complete.
Done.

That's it. The stick is ready.

Step 3: Go update

This is the part, that you'll be repeating on each newly upgraded/installed machine.

Follow the installation procedure and boot to the newly installed macOS. If this doesn't make any sense to you, see my previous article about that.

Step 4: Finishing touches

After boot, you'll end up in a classic login-screen. Login and upgrade will continue there.

The only new items are:

My choices for those new questions are:

• no, absolutely not I won't be storing my data into iCloud, I have the freebie 5 GiB of space there and with my files I'd run out pretty soon
• no, absolutely not I won't be enabling Siri (aka. spy-machine)

Step 5: Done!

That's it, enjoy your upgraded operating system.

Couple of glitches here and there, but the most important one was that my SSH didn't do agent forwarding anymore. I'm not alone with that, other people reported same issue:
ssh -A stopped working in macOS Sierra and keychain is not unlocked at login

The second thing is, that MD5 signed root certificates aren't accepted anymore as default. Unless you're doing some weird shit like I, you won't notice this change. This is fully documented and know before. In optimal world we wouldn't have any MD5 signed root certificates anymore.

Other than those two, I continued using my macs as usual.

I business in Sydney, Australia and I'm sharing some pics I managed to snap with an iPhone. There wasn't too much time for doing any extensive touristing around, but I managed some.

So here goes:

There is a pic of The Bridge, view to harbor from top floor of one skyscraper on Victoria Street, Opera House and Manly Beach.

I got a comment from Mr. Martin, that Google changed their SMTPd, so I'll have to revisit the article.

As suggested, new /etc/postfix/smtp_reply_filter would be:

#New 2016/09:
/^5(\d\d )5(.*. \S+ - gsmtp.*)/ 4${1}4$2

Above one is working perfectly on my box.

Again, thanks for Mr. Martin for bringing this topic to my attention.

Every once in a while I have enough time to read books. The ones made out of paper having printed words and images on the paper. And pretty much 98% of the books I've read in the last couple of decades have something to do with my profession. There is one book, that's worth mentioning: Security Engineering by Ross Anderson.

The price point for getting this one is a non-issue, you can download the entire book as a PDF with no cost at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html (that's at University of Cambridge). Having the book available is fully intentional, as four years have passed, author and publisher have agreed to place the material freely available for anybody interested. I most sincerely thank Mr. Anderson of doing that.

Of yourse, I recommend you to support this good work and purchase one. Go to Amazon, or similar and get your own copy. It will include a digital copy, all you have to do is go to above link and download one.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anybody ever designing or implementing anything with a computer. As the phrase goes: “Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” This is your chance of getting ahead and learning how some smart people blundered in their design and/or implementation of security. There is so much information in the book, but I found the case studies being the best part. The general idea is to get an injection of experience and start to think like hackers do.

My recommendation is that, for anybody working in software engineering should memorize this book and have an exam taken, so that it is crystal clear how secure systems are done.

I was about to do some testing with a cheap Elastic Compute Cloud Linux-instance, but ... AWS wouldn't allocate me one.

Here is the reason from Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing:

Somebody really lost his marbles and is paying ludicrous price for a box.

Ok, in reality that has to be work of two (or more) automated systems competing with each other in a situation where capacity of i2.4xlarge instances is scarce. Any human would do what I did, just pick the bigger box and be happy about that. That instance type with normal pricing costs like $3.41 / hour, and with spot pricing it goes ~60 cents / hour, but not when automated bidding goes haywire.

I wrote couple of posts about Windows 10 upgrades, but there are no more free upgrades. See:

From now on, you'll just have to pay for it.

There are couple of issues I bumped into while upgrading about dozen PCs last month alone and I'll be blogging about those later. There is no rush, as the free upgrade window closed (pun intended).

Before release of Windows 10 build 10565 in October 2015, it was pretty much impossible to do a clean install for upgrading Windows 7 or 8 without first running the upgrade on the target machine. The announcement said:

Device activation improvements: Microsoft has received a lot of feedback from Insiders on making it easier to activate Windows 10 on devices that take advantage of the free upgrade offer to genuine Windows by using existing Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 product keys. If you install this build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview on a PC and it doesn’t automatically activate, you can enter the product key from a qualifying Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 used to activate the prior Windows version on the same device to activate Windows 10 by going to Settings > Update & security > Activation and selecting Change Product Key.

In short: You can whip up your install USB and do a clean install on a machine. If its not an OEM-machine, just enter your Windows 7 or Windows 8 key at install, and the thing should activate. Nice an easy.

And to clarify the exact build number situation your box is running, go to Settings, System, About. It should have something like this:

As suggested by Ilpo in a comment he left in my blog, there is an alternative method described by article How to Directly Clean Install Windows 10 without having to Upgrade First. Of course I had to try that! And thanks Ilpo, for the suggestion.

What you need is a Windows 10 install USB-stick. Go create one with your favorite method, and if you don't have a favorite, just go for Media creation tool, it can download an install image and store it to your USB-stick for later booting.

When your install-stick is ready, go find <your USB-stick drive>:\support\gatherosstate.exe into the target machine to be upgraded. Do NOT run in at the USB-stick, COPY it. I just dragged the file into my desktop. When ran, the application will create a XML-file containing a fingerprint from the machine ran. That fingerprint can be used to active the upgraded Windows 10 installation later. Needless to say, this type of activation will work only for valid upgrade paths. You cannot upgrade Windows 8.1 with Bing into Windows 10 Pro (I tried).

Second important thing: Run the gatherosstate.exe as an Administrator. I tried to validate the run-as-Admin -requirement after the upgrade was done, but it was too late. The file generated will differ. My thinking is, that it is not necessary to run as Admin, but that's what the original instructions said.

Take a copy of the generated GenuineTicket.xml-file. You will need that later. At this point you're good to go with a clean install. Replace hard drives or just re-partition the original one, whatever your install plan is. I'm guessing you wouldn't be doing the upgrade this way if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

During Windows 10 installation do NOT enter a license key. It is possible to "skip this" and "do this later" and ultimately when the install ends run a perfectly good non-activated Windows 10.

Now its time to go activate the newly installed Windows 10. You need to locate your saved GenuineTicket.xml-file and copy it to directory %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\ClipSVC\GenuineTicket. Like this:

Now the activation is only a reboot away. Go ahead and boot the thing, and confirm:

Done! Simple as pie.

One of my own boxes runs a Fedora Linux. A while back my upgrade failed miserably due to Fedora installer not getting an IP-address from my ISP, Elisa. I had a minor skirmish for an hour or so with the installer, but no avail, Fedora installer beat me on that one. As I love to have that box up and running, I gave up and decided to investigate that later. Now that day came and I'm victorious!

Basics

DHCP is what pretty much everybody has for getting an IPv4 address in 2016. Mobile connections have something different, but everything else including Wi-Fi hotspots, ADSL-routers, Fiber-to-the-Home -connections, etc. etc. issue an IP-address (mostly IPv4, sometimes IPv6) to any well-behaving customer of theirs. Today, the de-facto is that the IP-address is allocated out of a well known broadband address range, or pool. Lists of those are generally available, so that home customers can be differentiated from data centers and companies.

To put DHCP simply, it is a mechanism for allocating an unique address for your Internet connection. The Wikipedia definition for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol uses more words and isn't as concise as mine, but you'll get the idea.

Details of the problem

In case of mis-use or unpaid internet bill, they'd naturally decline any DHCP-requests for an IP-address. Since everything I tested, including various Windowses, OS Xes and Linuxes worked it wasn't about that. The connection was ok, the DHCP server issued a valid DHCP-lease as it had been doing for couple years, but not for my Fedora installer. Duh?

At this point I went to google for the symptoms and quite soon I landed into RedHat Bugzilla. It contains bug 1154200 which is titled as "not getting a dhcp address assigned". Mr. Krovich reports that his Fedora 21 installer won't get an IP-address from ISP. I pulled up a Fedora 20 installer for the previous version. It worked ok! Yep, they changed something into Fedora 21. The change affects Fedora 22, 23 and the latest 24. It does not affect RedHat nor CentOS (yet).

Fix (aka. trial and error)

In the comments of bug 1154200 they're talking about Option 61 commit which was introduced for Fedora 21 release. A possible fix would be to use DHCP-configuration: send dhcp-client-identifier = hardware;

I downloaded Fedora 24 installer and tested it out. It didn't help any. After a lot of wiresharking the traffic, I isolated this:
In the DHCP Discover -packet, there was an Option 61 present.

More poking for man 5 dhclient-options revealed that it was possible to specify a fixed string for identifier. So, again I edited /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf (btw. the file didn't exist to begin with, I had to create one) to contain:
send dhcp-client-identifier = "";

That did the trick! Now even Fedora 24 installer got a a valid IP-address and it was possible to install.

Specs

In the early days, all IP-addresses were assigned manually. Everybody was given an IP-address and they punched all the details manually. That was frustrating and error-prone, so somebody invented BOOTP to automate the entire setup. Quite soon, that evolved into DHCP, defined by RFC 1531. When DHCP gained traction and more and more vendors joined the dynamically allocated -game, couple of clarifying iterations later, we're at RFC 2131 for current breed of DHCPing. It is basically the original BOOTP, but with most wrinkles ironed out.

The options are defined at RFC 1533 for DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions. Looks like nobody supported Option 61 for a long time. Windowses don't, Apple doesn't, most Linux Distros don't, but RFC 4361 for Node-specific Client Identifiers for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Version Four (DHCPv4) must have done it for Fedora-guys. They chose to implement request 560361 (Dhclient doesn't use client-identifier; may cause issues in certain bridged environments) and make sure everybody uses it, with assumption that all ISPs that won't support Client Identifiers will merrily ignore the option. Nice!

Afterwards

I'll target equal blame to my ISP. The Option 61 is well-defined and it should be possible to ignore it. Looks like they're running Alcatel-Lucent hardware there and for some reason it is configured to spit on Option 61 requests.

Naturally I reported the error to my ISP, but you can assume how well that goes. Any regular customer facing clerk won't know DHCP or what it does, nor any options of it. So all I got back is the classic "we'll investigate" -style response. I'm not keeping my hopes up. I have more hope on my own Bugzilla request 1357469 to have an option to enable or disable usage of Option 61 on Fedora. They might even implement that one day.

Anyway, I'm hoping that this post will help somebody strugging to install their Fedora.

I'd like to be clear on this: I did not figure this one out myself, I just bumped into Philip Yip's page about this. All the credit should go to him, I just tested this and confirmed it to be working.

One of the upgrades I did earlier this month was for a Windows Vista. Computer geeks point out two things immediately: 1) Vista! Really? Who would use that voluntarily? 2) well, it cannot be upgraded into Windows 10. Both very true. It just so happened, that there was an OEM Vista running on a computer. Vista will cease to have security upgrades on 10th April 2017, so I suggested to upgrade the thing into a 10 while I did some other work on the thing. Obviously the person owning the poor computer didn't want to pay for the upgrade, so I chose to go with Mr. Yip's method on it.

Prerequisites

For this to happen you will need:

• An USB-stick, minimum size 4 GiB
  • This will be used to host the Windows 10 installation image
  • I went to a supermarket and got a brand new 16 GiB USB3 stick for the speed improvements
• Ability to boot the target computer from the above USB-stick
  • Most computers I've worked with can do this
• Windows 10 ISO, build 10130
  • Ok, this one is harder one to come by, but it is generally available in the Big Net. I'm talking about software piracy here.
  • You will need this specific build. Older or newer ones won't do the trick.
• A piece of software to write this ISO-file into the above USB-stick and make it bootable.
  • My favorite thing for doing that is Rufus. It is a solid piece of software to write images into USB-sticks.
• Windows 10 media creation tool
  • You can get one from Microsoft's website
• Possibility to disable internet connection from the target machine and enable it when needed
• Finally: Possiblity to change the BIOS/UEFI date on the target computer.
  • This trick solely relies on the fact, that you can pretend the date to be in the history.

Also please note, that there is NO UPGRADE possibility here. This is effectively a fresh install. If you choose to re-install on top of your existing Vista installation, please take care no to lose any precious data. I installed a bigger hard drive to the computer, so I made sure that the old drive was intact during this process.

Steps

This is how the entire process goes:

1. Use Rufus to create Windows 10 build 10130 USB-stick
   
2. Boot into BIOS/UEFI setup, set date to anything around September 2015. I just bumped back the year and did my installation in "July 2015".
3. Make sure, there is no Internet connection during the installation. THIS IS IMPORTANT!
4. Boot from Windows 10 build 10130 USB. Make sure there is no Internet connectivity on the machine, so that it is impossible for it to update date via NTP or talk to Microsoft.
   1. Run Windows 10 install (for the first time)
   2. During installation, don't bother installing any security upgrades, you will re-install entire Windows 10 after this one completes.
      
   3. Wait couple of hours. This depends on your hardware speed.
   4. Remove the USB
5. Create a recent Windows 10 install USB
   • I had my own computer for media creation and didn't have to use the target computer for this. This can be a parallel process.
   • When asked about the edition, choose Win 10 Pro
6. Turn off internet time when install done. I found that one to be little tricky, but the setting is there.
   
7. Set a specific license key. For this you'll need to open CMD.exe as Administrator. If you attempt this as a regular user, ie. not right clicking the cmd.exe and selecting "run as administrator", you'll notice that soon. The command to execute is:
   slmgr /ipk 6P99N-YF42M-TPGBG-9VMJP-YKHCF
   
8. Connect to internet. THIS is the first time the install machine is allowed to get there. If your box did connect to The Net before this, you have failed.
9. Activate Windows (remember: Admin prompt):
   slmgr /ato
   
10. Now you have an activated Windows 10 running. You can go to My Computer and Properties to confirm.
    
    However, it's an old edition and you don't want to keep that. The important thing is, that now your computer's fingerprint has been stored into Microsoft's server and any subsequent Windows 10 installations will proceed without entering any license key.
11. Just insert the USB install stick with the newer Windows 10 installer (the one you created on step 5) and run setup.exe on that. There is no need for reboot or anything, just run the installer.
12. Install it again! This is your second installation.
    • I choose to keep nothing. This just makes sure, that all the old garbage will be gone after you're done.
    • Please note, that when asked for license key, don't enter any. Always select "Do this later" or "Skip". This is not needed and your newly installed Windows 10 will be activated at the end.
    • Wait 15 minutes
13. You're done! Your Windows is ready to be used.
14. Remove the first installation stored into C:\Windows.old, you don't need to keep any of that. However, the files are protected by operating system and deleting the entire directory prooved to be little tricky. I ended up booting from the USB-installation stick into rescue-mode and chose the cmd.exe from that. On prompt I entered two commands:
    del /S /F /Q c:\Windows.old
rd /S /Q c:\Windows.old

Finally

This process worked for me on 5th July 2016. I don't think this has anything to do with July 29 free upgrade -limitation.

Also I'm sure guys at Microsoft keep track of their installations. They'll know exactly how many licenses they gave out using this method. My thinking is, that they simply don't care. Pretty much all of the competition is giving out operating systems for free and they cannot for some strange reason. Anybody choosing this method needs to be aware, that in an unfortunate scenario they would deactivate all licenses distributed this way.

Happy installing! I know I created one ex-Vista user very happy with this.

Recently I've been doing a lot of Windows 10 upgrades. The free upgrade offer is about to end in less than 15 days:

There is a counter in Windows.com.

My own adoption to Win10 is pretty high, only one box left to upgrade. I'll have to resort to virtual machines for things, that I really, really need Windows 7 for.

The real-time Windows 10 adoption gauge @ gosquared.com shows one third:

That's pretty good, but not the number Microsoft guys are aiming for.

I regularily follow Mr. Gordon Kelly, a writer who publishes @ forbes.com. In December 2015 he wrote a piece with a title 'Free' Windows 10 Has An Expensive Secret. There he pretty much speculates, that Microsoft really wants to get to one billion (1.000.000.000) Windows 10 installations as fast as possible. Not giving away free upgrades to pretty much everybody wouldn't help in that. However, his post after Microsoft's May 2016 press release (Three Reasons Microsoft Stopped Free Windows 10 Upgrades) indicates, that even he gave up hope on prolonged free upgrades being available. I guess, they didn't want to get to one billion that bad. That's something Mr. Richard Hay @ winsupersite.com predicted last December.

It seems that it is possible to prolong your free upgrade offer by enabled assistive technologies. See Microsoft's blog post about that. But unless you do that, it's time to act on it or do some trickery after July 29th.

For my Windows 10 weeks, I'll be posting couple of articles what I did earlier this month with my various upgrades.