Wingate and windows upgrade

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Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby ngrayson » Jul 30 19 10:21 am

Hi,

Dumb question time. I have had wingate 9 (and earlier) running under windows 7 pro for years but with the impending dropping of support for windows 7 next year and finally upgrading my home platforms.

Has anyone upgraded from windows 7 pro to windows 10 with wingate 9 and had any issues or does it upgrade OK?

Any comment from you guys at QBIK?

Cheers
Neil
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby adrien » Jul 30 19 11:20 am

Hi Neil

WinGate should be fine, since the network driver is the same.

However Windows in my experience doesn't really like being upgraded much. You do end up having a bunch of cruft left lying around, and whether it causes any problems or not seems to be up to chance. I've usually resorted to a re-install on any system that had had an OS upgrade.

Cheers

Adrien
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby ngrayson » Jul 30 19 9:00 pm

HI Adrien,

Many thanks.

I have been told that the free upgrade still works and on a test machine yesterday indeed it did or appeared to.

I am aware from having done this for relatives that the upgrade path can leave "issues" which resulted in a reinstall but the good news is if the upgrade has worked and converted your license to digital you can lock this activate to your Microsoft account So they say but I have not had to try that yet as the previous upgrades I did were within the free window.

If I get brave enough will post the outcome.

Cheers
Neil
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby labull » Jul 31 19 8:58 am

Hi Neil!

We have successfully done the W7-W10 free upgrade and then followed up with a fresh install of W10. This has been very useful when we started with a 32bit W7 install and wanted to end up with 64bit W10.

Good luck!

Larry
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby ngrayson » Aug 01 19 9:30 am

When I awoke this morning I thought "Shall I eat that packet of razor blades or upgrade my server". I made the most painful choice.

For those that may want to do this, this is my "experience".

The server is a household server with an AMD 4 core 4100FX 3.6G with 8G RAM (Windows 7 Pro) and provides
Wingate proxy to all devices in house.
Print server
File server for other machine users to store data which gets backed up.
DLNA server (serviio) to share music, vids and photos to mobiles and TV's

So....
Didi the usual backup and made sure I had a restore boot disk etc.
Inserted the windows 10 disk I had to hand which was 1809 release and kicked it off. Some hours later and 5cm of beard growth it said it finished.
No proxy firewall functioning.
The upgrade had decided to turn on defender firewall so I disabled it and wingate worked. Of course it would its QBIK :-)
Previously Internet "Exploder" was set to proxy via wingate but this prevented me adding my MS account to store my digital license so I had to change this to make the license permanent.

It sort of works except.... With W7 boot to usable time was about 2 minutes and it would pass user traffic between the red and green side of the network that quickly. Windows 10 however is taking much longer before that point and indeed from power on to fully logged in takes about 11 minutes. it starts to pass traffic much later. The reason is I suspect that the hard disk is banging about like a headboard in a seedy hotel and is maxed at 100% usage during most of startup. I have tried disabling windows search and most of the other suggestions on the internet with no avail so tomorrow I need to find out why.

In short my situation may be unique but the only thing which was straight forward was the Wingate software. Well done to QBIK.
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby adrien » Aug 01 19 3:17 pm

Hi Neil

thanks for the update and the laugh at your similes

Maybe time for a relatively cheap SSD - can give machines like that a few more years of life.

Cheers

Adrien
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby ngrayson » Aug 02 19 10:36 pm

So 24 hours later and now looking like a ZZ Top band member I have decided there are 3 problems.

Given that the settling time after boot was 10 minutes you cant make many change/test cycles and hour. I was trying to decide if windows defender may be at fault but disabling it is not persistent over a reboot and MS re-enable it on the next boot.

For those interested and who are confident they may not be affected by external forces I googled and found that you can do this but via a group policy setting. Since I have the pro variant I could but not sure if your get gpedit.msc with home and the like I would not recommend this unless you know what you are doing you can do a lot of damage with group policies including locking yourself our of your own machine forever.

Anyway it was not the cause and unlike Haynes workshop manuals simply reversing the process did not re-enable it. It took some fiddling although I did not have to search for the spring that shot over my left shoulder. You have to have used a Haynes manual to understand that!!

So I started to look at disk access times and they were protracted to say the least. On some occasions I could have snail mailed a request for data and got it quicker. Checking the SMART data for disk showed there to be some issues on crc corrected hardware reads and software corrections too so I decided a new disk was in order and its on its way.

I also thought that something else had to be an issue and was using Ashampoo HDD 2 for monitoring SMART. On reading part of their description although it does not state caching it describes something similar and it is the one bit of software whose license has become a problem since upgrade. Its now de-installed and I have seen some improvement.

Now we get to the big question for QBIK guys. The only antivirus on my machine is Defender and I use the Kasperskey plugin for wingate. What I have found using performance monitor during boot/stable time is that the process with biggest throughout is "kavehost" which I think is the Kaspersky engine. So what is this doing during that time? Any ideas? Is it called during boot?

Cheers
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Re: Wingate and windows upgrade

Postby ngrayson » Aug 08 19 3:07 am

So, just to close the loop and finally ask a support question from you QBIK guys.

I was issued with a newer copy of the Ashampoo HDD software which resolved the license issues but since HDD2 is not officially windows 10 I removed it anyway. It made no difference to the booting. I now use free software to monitor the SMART data namely CrystalDiskInfo. I have also tried the Acronis software which is free and works OK.

The replacement HDD arrived so I used EASEUS backup to clone my original disk onto the new HDD and booted. Now, I have what I expected in terms of boot times but my mystery remains. Why did the disk change fix it given that it was a clone from a suspect disk?

I took the old disk and ran it on Gibsons Research Spinrite and did a check on it and it showed now issues. Confussed? Me to. The smarts only show 1 sector reallocation pending. Not withstanding that it was 7 years old and with a potential bad sector I do not feel I wasted my money as it was clearly aiming to let go in the near future.

I can only assume that there was some artifact created by the Windows upgrade which was resolved by the disk change. I will admit the new HDD has a bigger cache but not I suspect enough to make the massive difference it has from 10 minutes to settle booted and logged in down to 1m 15 Seconds.

So THE QUESTION now Adrean Et Al, One thing I noticed during all of this is that the Kaspersky Engine kicks in early on and does take some startup resource. So clearly its instantiated as Wingate starts and so what is it doing? Loading signatures? scanning wingate files? It does sit in memory and has the largest foot print in memory and the largest I/O requirement during boot.

BEST NEWS Underneath all of the woes I had one thing remains the case. Wingate was always working come hell or high water once it finally got there. So again I say well done guys overall well behaved software!!!!

The doctor tells me I will eventually get better once the bruising on my forehead subsides but I will need the tablets for life now.
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