RPC sucks, how can I fix it?

[rabbit]

It gets like that after about 2 or 3 hours of my computer being on, and it never stops.  I've tried all the fixes I could find:
Turning off automatic updates
Setting failure to "restart service"
Uninstalling IPv6
and some other stuff I doubted would do anything (cleaned the registry, defrag, etc...)

Does anyone know how to fix this assmonkey service?

[iago]

Install Linux?

[rabbit]

I need Windows because I need to use certain programs for some of my classes...

Also, my external drive is formatted to NTFS, and it has all of my movies and stuff on it, plus I need a converter and program to stream media to my 360.  Linux won't work just now

[Warrior]

Install Linux?

That'd only triple his problems

[Killer360]

Install Linux?

That'd only triple his problems

Yeah... sure. 

[Camel]

I need Windows because I need to use certain programs for some of my classes...

Also, my external drive is formatted to NTFS, and it has all of my movies and stuff on it, plus I need a converter and program to stream media to my 360.  Linux won't work just now

Check if your programs will run in Wine; most do.

Ever heard of NTFS-3G? NTFS isn't just for Windows any more. In fact, NTFS-3G is generally reviewed as being better than Microsoft's own NTFS driver.

Streaming media to a 360 is seriously a concern? Do a google search (hint: you're looking for a UPnP-standard streaming server); if reading any random five of the first ten distinct results doesn't give you a working solution, I'll eat my hat.

[Chavo]

You might have the Blaster worm, try

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2003-081119-5051-99

[Newby]

Ever heard of NTFS-3G? NTFS isn't just for Windows any more. In fact, NTFS-3G is generally reviewed as being better than Microsoft's own NTFS driver.

Last time I heard, it had troubles with compression and encryption and some other random problems (running out of hdd space, something with folders, etc.). How could it fare better than M$'s NTFS driver?

[rabbit]

Blaster not found 

[Camel]

Ever heard of NTFS-3G? NTFS isn't just for Windows any more. In fact, NTFS-3G is generally reviewed as being better than Microsoft's own NTFS driver.

Last time I heard, it had troubles with compression and encryption and some other random problems (running out of hdd space, something with folders, etc.). How could it fare better than M$'s NTFS driver?

In NTFS, file and folder elements have properties structured similar to those that exist in the system registry. These properties cover things like permissions, and they use complex key names that vary under certain conditions. Because the key names vary, the number of properties attached to each element grows over time. Additionally, there's nothing specifically preventing a user-level program from writing to the properties of a file owned by the user account.

Once these keys are created, they very rarely ever get deleted; they just linger. This can lead to excessive disk fragmentation, which increases exponentially the likelihood that a disk fault will result in corrupt data. NTFS-3G doesn't possess the problem that manifests as the "corrupt data after a long time" bug.

When NTFS-3G first came out, it was distributed in read-only mode, and it remained that way for, IIRC, about two years. The reason why? The keys for the properties are all GUIDs generated by an algorithm that varies from file to file! For those of you who don't understand what that means, it's security by obscurity, which isn't actually security at all; it's obfuscation. In order for something to be called secure, the data has to be unrecoverable even if the algorithm by which it was encoded is published. That's right, you heard it here first, NTFS is an unsecured filesystem, despite what Microsoft wants you to believe. Anyone with physical access to your NTFS formatted harddrive can read any of the data on it, as long as they have the knowledge of how to install the NTFS-3G driver.

Eventually, someone figured out the method to the madness - I remember compiling the unstable branch on my Gentoo box the day it was available. Wasn't entirely bug-free, but you were only in danger if you tried to do a write operation. Failures back then were generally catastrophic; one bad write could result in the ultimate destruction of the entire filesystem, since NTFS is structured in a way that's conducive to cascade failures!

By the time NTFS-3G went stable, all of the above issues had been resolved. An NTFS partition maintained buy the NTFS-3G driver will last longer than an NTFS partition maintained by Microsoft's. The bottom line is that NTFS is a very poorly designed filesystem, and it should never be used by non-windows machines if at all possible.

[iago]

In order for something to be called secure, the data has to be unrecoverable even if the algorithm by which it was encoded is published. That's right, you heard it here first, NTFS is an unsecured filesystem, despite what Microsoft wants you to believe. Anyone with physical access to your NTFS formatted harddrive can read any of the data on it, as long as they have the knowledge of how to install the NTFS-3G driver.

Unless you're talking about when file encryption is enabled, do they actually advertise NTFS as secure?

[Warrior]

In order for something to be called secure, the data has to be unrecoverable even if the algorithm by which it was encoded is published. That's right, you heard it here first, NTFS is an unsecured filesystem, despite what Microsoft wants you to believe. Anyone with physical access to your NTFS formatted harddrive can read any of the data on it, as long as they have the knowledge of how to install the NTFS-3G driver.

Unless you're talking about when file encryption is enabled, do they actually advertise NTFS as secure?

I don't think so, I mean not unless you use BitLocker.

[MyndFyre]

In order for something to be called secure, the data has to be unrecoverable even if the algorithm by which it was encoded is published. That's right, you heard it here first, NTFS is an unsecured filesystem, despite what Microsoft wants you to believe. Anyone with physical access to your NTFS formatted harddrive can read any of the data on it, as long as they have the knowledge of how to install the NTFS-3G driver.

Unless you're talking about when file encryption is enabled, do they actually advertise NTFS as secure?

Yes.  The definition of a secure file system is not whether it protected file data; in fact, my smart card's OS has a secure file system.  The SDK describes a secure file system as having the following two characteristics:
* Internal data structures are updated safely even in cases of power interruption.  (True: NTFS is a transactional journaling file system).
* Access to individual files and directories can be protected using authentication keys.  (True: NTFS uses security identifiers and a sophisticated permission system).

Whether the data on my smart card is *physically* secure, I can only speculate.  I don't have the technical knowledge to bypass the smart card's OS.  Similarly, NTFS is secure only when Windows is running.  Physically, the data's there.

Anyone with physical access to your NTFS formatted harddrive can read any of the data on it, as long as they have the knowledge of how to install the NTFS-3G driver.

That means that NTFS-3G is insecure, because it doesn't obey the rules of NTFS.

Once these keys are created, they very rarely ever get deleted; they just linger. This can lead to excessive disk fragmentation, which increases exponentially the likelihood that a disk fault will result in corrupt data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Internals

Seriously, do you know anything about the internals of the Windows OS?  Read this, and stop spewing off the FUD and hate from the 40-year-old-never-gotten-laid-3-foot-long-bearded Linux users.

[Skywing]

Unless you're talking about when file encryption is enabled, do they actually advertise NTFS as secure?

It is secure as long as you are operating within the constraints of the operating system and don't have physical or administrative access to it.

(Amazingly enough, having physical or administrative access to a run-of-the-mill system not explicitly designed for hardware tamper-resistance allows one to bypass local security measures, which seems to be news to certain persons whom are not named iago.)

Protecting data against attacks of that sort requires encryption with a key that isn't stored on the volume itself, or (say for a smartcard or TPM), is stored in a tamper-resistant fashion such that the effort needed to extract the private data from the tamper-resistant hardware is greater than the worth of the data protected by it.  The same can certainly be said for ext3 or other filesystem choices as well.