227 Volts

So, what does your application errors tell about you?  As many of us are on our way to Berlin for TechEd Europe (unless you’re lucky enough to live near the metropolis), travel is involved.  Well, today I was travelling through Gatwick airport and noticed an application error on one travel update monitor and another nice screen saver on another monitor.  What’s this mean?  Well, lets have a look at what we’ve found. 

The first thing is a bit obvious, Windows XP default screen saver. This means that the PC’s behind the scenes are running Windows XP, I’ll come back to that in a bit.  Now, on to the more informative monitor, the one who decided to give up the ghost and throw an application error on FidsMon.exe. 

When this little beauty of an application crashed, it brought up the start bar as the administrators hadn’t hidden it.  With the start bar up, we can easily see the system tray.  The system tray doesn’t have any icons hidden (see the XP comment above) so we can see just about everything that’s going on. 

Icon 1 – Safely remove hardware…hmm, maybe the software is being driven by a USB controlled key check mechanism? Icon 2 – a little green dot, not sure what this is but I’m guessing it has to do with the FidsMon program itself.  Icon 3 (and the last one in the set), Altiris (now owned by Symantec).  What’s this mean? Well, port 402 TCP is open on this little beauty of a machine, and probably every other machine in Gatwick airport.  What else do these three icons mean?  Well, for one I don’t see any anti-virus software running on this machine…hmm, maybe important?  There’s probably other things that could come to mind as well, but that’s just a few things that yet another application crash without proper debugging – or first thought about a kiosk machine (hide that start bar!) can reveal to us.

Happy travelling and let me know your thoughts or if you have any idea on what the little green dot is

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