This Day, That Year – Detoxifying “Break”

I would like to start by saying this is supposed to be a personal Journal Log for myself and thus whatever health/medication/supplements/lifestyle related information and/or recommendation you may find here are meant for my personal use only, These practices are solely based on my personal research, beliefs and experiences and I don’t vouch for the accuracy of any of the info shared below. I do NOT recommend anyone to adopt these practices as I’m not a qualified medical doctor or health professional. Please visit the ‘Disclaimer’ page to read our Terms and Conditions in Detail.

I met with an accident on 6 November 2016, yes, this day that (last) year . While crossing a road on foot, I was hit by a speeding motor bike, direct impact on my left leg at an approximate speed of 100 KM/H. I broke my Tibia and Fibula bones on the left leg, for the uninitiated, Tibia is the medical term for the shin bone (the bone that sits between the knee and the ankle) and fibula is the medical term for a much thinner bone that exists right behind the Tibia but is not visible from the outside, nor can one feel it by touch. Both bones were broken into two right from the middle and it wasn’t just a crack. But, it wasn’t a compound fracture, as the bones had not pierced all the flesh and skin to protrude out of the body. I was taken to a Government Run Trauma Center nearby and got an Xray done, they also, straightened the bones back into alignment and put on a temporary plaster with a wooden plank for support, since I had to be transferred to a private hospital of my choice, several miles away. I was advised to get an ORIF (open reduction and internal fixation) surgery done. This involved placing a titanium rod inside the Tibia and fastening it with two screws each at either ends. The Fibula is not treated for fractures in this way as it’s a tiny bone in comparison to the Tibia and as per my Physio, it only bears 5% or 10% of the total body weight. The good thing was that my fracture was right in the middle of the long bone and not near either of the joints at either ends. Normally, Tibia fractures Occur very near to the ankle. The legal case for the accident was decided in my favor.

So, on 8th of November 2016, the same day as the demonetization announcement was made, my health insurer approved the surgery and the associated costs and I finally underwent the ORIF surgery. I was given spinal anesthesia wherein only my left leg would be under anesthesia and I would be awake otherwise. The anesthetist asked me if I would like to be sleeping or awake during the surgery and I asked to be put to sleep as I didn’t want to be a daredevil and be awake and then get scared during the surgery as that would then negatively impact the surgery and my health. This was also the very first surgery of my life. Although I didn’t want it But I woke up in the middle of the surgery and saw that the surgeons were grappling with a problem, the primary surgeon appeared to be on the verge of panicking, so I understood that there is something seriously wrong. I didn’t open my eyes so that I don’t let them know that I’m conscious now as that may deter them from talking about the problem openly as they were doing at that time. One of the junior surgeons, who I had seen to be very enthusiastic and energetic, decided to take things into his hands and seemed confident that he can solve the problem. Although I couldn’t understand what the problem was but I think it was solved without any damage, as towards the end, the primary surgeon was heard saying that ‘we got out of this difficult situation very easily’. So, the surgery was done with and I came back to my room. Later that evening, the Prime Minister was making the unprecedented announcement relating to demonetization and I could not even open my eyes to watch it on TV due to the excruciating pain that I was experiencing at that time. I was being administered a narcotic pain killer, which, I believe was Morphine or something of the same kind, through the catheter that was inserted to my spine during the anesthesia administration just before the surgery. But the dosage was kept low and thus the immense pain. I would spend the next several hours asking the nursing staff to increase the dosage, it would really help when they would administer me a secondary pain killer via the IV line along with the constant morphine administration. Those would be the hours when I would be able to sleep peacefully. But, sometimes, the nurse would administer Paracetamol as the secondary pain killer and that would have zero effect. Anyhow, after a few days in the hospital bed, I was finally discharged and came back home. Then, began the never ending recovery process.

Eight weeks is the normal duration in which tibia fractures are expected to somewhat heal and the patient is expected to ditch the walker and start walking with a stick. When I went for the Xray at 8 weeks, very hopeful to see good progress, I was disappointed to see no difference between the post operative xray and the xray at 8 weeks. I met a junior doctor that day, who was more attentive towards his smart phone than to his patients and he advised to start walking with a stick. Such an advise was shocking for me but since they say, doctor knows best, I went to the phsyio department, bought a stick from the hospital store and asked them to teach me how to walk using it, five different Physios tried all their skills but could not make me walk even a single step. It was clear that the junior doctor didn’t care what the xray showed and had given his advise purely based on the fact that 8 weeks had passed since my surgery. Then began the process of visit after visit to see no or very little progress. Dynamization was also done after 16 weeks where they remove one of the four screws to make both pieces of the tibia more mobile which should lead to them getting in contact with each other more often, which in turn is expected to aid in callus formation, which was not happening until then. Around the same time, I also started taking some additional supplements apart from the calcium supplement that I was prescribed. This decision was based on my personal research on bone healing. As time progressed, I made some further enhancements to my supplements intake and that really paid off when I saw complete union in my xray that was taken after 9 months. I have ditched the stick now, although stairs and uneven surfaces are still somewhat a challenge but I’m happy to see my tibia in one piece instead of two. Being able to walk properly is something we all take for granted, but this accident taught me not to take anything for granted in life, everything is precious. So, after the very long background story, we have finally came to the crux of the matter and the reason why I thought about blogging about my accident – Why did it take soooo long to heal ? About a decade back, I had broken my collar bone and that too had taken a very long time to heal. So, what’s going on with me??

As I said before, tibia fractures are expected to heal in 8 weeks, mine took 9 months, the same amount of time as it takes for a baby to form completely and be delivered. While there are some minor reasons as well like there being a lot of soft tissue damage around the fracture site etc. The major reason (as I found out) was my diet for the last 15 years or so, before the accident. I was following the ‘Western Diet’, which consists of very large quantities of meat – Chicken/Lamb and very little quantities or often, none at all, of vegetables and fruits. I used to drink milk every day too. Apart from this, I was addicted to soft drinks and used to drink, at least, half a liter of it every single day. The enormous amount of sugar intake, that went on for decades, resulting from my soft drink addiction, created a lot many issues for me. While, the negative effects of soft drink addiction are still being researched in the world, the early results show brittle bones and teeth to be the most obvious problems. One lady in Australia, who used to drink about 10 liters of soft drinks every day, had multiple babies without any enamel on their teeth. I have already broken two of my teeth while chewing food, this doesn’t happen to normal people, nobody’s teeth are so fragile, but mine are. The science behind how and why exactly such excessive intake of soft drinks causes such serious problems is still being researched but one thing that can be said very confidently is that soft drinks are not good for health AT ALL. In my personal opinion, liquor causes less damage than soft drinks do. So, as you would have guessed, I stopped having soft drinks altogether. Now coming back to the food part of my faulty diet. Eating a lot of meat gave me a lot of protein, which I thought was great for me and this belief stemmed from the serious scientific backing that protein has got these days. But what it also did was to make me deficient in almost all other vitamins and minerals. Because those don’t come from meat, they only come from veggies and fruits and I was not having them, at least, not in enough quantities and often enough. I also found out that even protein is not needed by humans in as much quantities as we seem to assume. Even if you just stick to a completely vegetarian diet, you will get more than enough protein that your body needs. So, while I was getting very good amount of protein by following the western diet, my body didn’t need that much of it. And what it needed in very good quantities – Vitamins and Minerals, I wasn’t getting enough. So, let’s now get to the specifics of it.

We all know that, Bone healing requires good amounts of calcium, as bones are made up of it. But when I understood how that calcium reaches the bones or in my case, how is it expected to join my broken bones, is when I understood that I need good supplementation of some other minerals and vitamins apart from calcium. When humans take calcium via food or supplements, it needs Vitamin D to be absorbed in the stomach. If you lack sufficient amounts of vitamin D, no matter how much calcium you take, none of it is ever going to be absorbed by your body and resultantly, all of it is going to go to waste. Sunlight is the best and free source of Vitamin D, but in the modern lifestyle, where we get out of the house and sit in the car, reach office, get out of the car and immediately walk into the office building, we are not getting exposed to the sun for our bodies to be able to get any vitamin D. So, I was obviously deficient in Vitamin D, like most other urban dwellers. But, so far nothing was new for me. I knew that by the virtue of drinking milk every day, I should already have enough calcium in my body and after every fracture, the doctors prescribe a calcium supplement, which nowadays contain vitamin D as well, And I was taking all of it from day one. So, where was the problem? After all, the two things required for bone healing were there in the supplements, right?. That’s when I found out that there are many other minerals and vitamins needed for fracture healing. Most important of them is Vitamin K, this is a relatively recent discovery that Vitamain K’s sole purpose is not to make blood clot but it also helps in taking the calcium in your blood stream to get deposited in to the bones. So, let’s paint the full picture, when you take calcium,your body needs a substance called calcitriol to absorb it and take that calcium to the blood stream. Calcitriol is made when the Liver and Kidney work in tandem by using another substance called Cholecalciferol, this is the name given to the form of vitamin D that you absorb from the Sun or other sources. If you are taking a vitamin D supplement, the chances are that it contains cholecalciferol (some supplements also have it in the calcitriol form, calspen is one such supplement), so cholecalciferol is converted to its usable form of calcitriol by the liver and the kidney and then its ready to absorb calcium in your stomach and take it to the blood stream. Now, Vitamin K enters the picture and takes that calcium from your blood stream, and deposits it to your bones. When this happens, your fracture starts healing. On a side note here, if someone has liver and/or kidney problems then instead of taking cholecalciferol based supplements for vitamin D, they should take calcitriol based supplements as their body might not be able to efficiently convert cholecalciferol into calcitriol. This is only the high level overview, bones need various other minerals as well and fracture healing process is not just limited to bone healing, we will talk about all that in just a bit. So, as you might have again guessed, I was deficient in Vitamin K as well, now this is well established because, before every surgery, a blood clotting test is conducted, although the results of my test were not shared with me but I was administered Vitamin K via IV line the night before my surgery, so it was proof enough on what the report would have said about my Vitamin K levels. Vitamin K is found in green leafy veggies and I was not having them at all. Also, my doctor didn’t prescribe any Vitamin K supplements to me either. On the contrary, he was laughing when I spoke to him about what I found about Vitamin K and this time, it wasn’t that smartphone addict junior doctor, it was the director of the orthopedics department. There could be two reasons to his ignorance, its possible that when he studied medicine, Vitamin K’s role in bone healing was not discovered and he didn’t keep himself upto date about such research. The other reason was more worrysome, I found out that doctors are not taught about nutrition when they are studying to be doctors, and this is the case around the world, in no country are doctors taught about the role of nutrition in healing. So, I was taking a lot of calcium and Vitamin D, so my calcium was being absorbed and reaching the blood stream but it was staying there due to vitamin k deficiency. This was not only limiting my fracture healing process but could have caused other issues like calcification of the arteries, this happens when a lot of calcium reaches the blood stream but doesn’t get deposited to the bones, the body starts depositing the extra calcium in the blood to the arteries and it starts to narrow down the arteries just like plaque caused by cholesterol does. If this goes on for very long durations, it can even cause a heart attack just like cholesterol based plaques. This is when I decided to take a Vitamin K supplement. Vitamin B6, B9 and B12 are also known to help in bone healing, so a good Vitamin B complex supplement should have the adequate amount of this vitamin family and I also started taking that.

Now, lets talk about the other minerals needed for fracture healing and the right dosage and efficient ways to consume them. Starting with calcium yet again, it is not recommended to have more than 2000 mg/day via food and supplements combined. The recommendation is to keep it at 1000 mg/day for supplements only. If you take it in very large quantities for a substantial period of time, like an year or so, it can cause kidney stones. It is also recommended to take calcium in smaller amounts per meal, that leads to better absorption of calcium. But some calcium supplement tablets contain very high amounts in a single tablet, I was taking one such tablet which had 1000 mg of calcium in a single tablet, so what I did was to break each tablet into two and take it right after two different meals. Its also important to take your supplements right after your meal for better absorption. It should be a proper meal and not just a light breakfast. Its also recommended to take different forms of calcium supplements, like calcium carbonate, calcium citrate malate etc. So, you can choose a 500 mg tablet of calcium carbonate to have after lunch and have a calcium citrate malate tablet of the same strength after dinner. If you think you need lesser amounts of calcium as per the stage of your fracture healing then you can go for lesser strength tablets as well. Next would be Vitamin D, which is available as cholecalciferol and calcitriol, the former being more common by a very big margin. You can take Cholecalciferol from 1000 IU (International Units) to 2000 IU per day right after meals. Its also available in the form of sachets of strengths as high as 60000 IU which is recommended to be taken once a week with milk. I prefer the 1000 IU tablets that you can take after each meal, instead of stuffing your body with vitamin D once a week. Vitamin K supplements normally contain Vitamin K2, the daily recommended dosage is 120 mcg (Micrograms). Do not take Vitamin K3 based supplements as that is known to cause some major side effects, but you may not be able to find supplements containing Vitamin K3 due to the same reason. Certain trace minerals, while only needed in the body in tiny amounts, play a major role in bone healing. Zinc, Copper, Phosphorous, magnesium, chromium, manganese, Potassium, Strontium, silicon and boron are such minerals. So, you can choose a multivitamin and multimineral supplement that has all these vitamins and minerals in adequate quantities to help your bones heal faster. The role of silicon and boron in bone healing was discovered not too long ago, so most bone healing supplements don’t have them yet. It’s not necessary that your supplements should have all these minerals but it would be beneficial to have supplements that cover most of these minerals. As I stated initially, that making some enhancements to my supplement intake helped me immensely, that was because I appeared to be extremely deficient in most of these vitamins and minerals, so I doubled my intake for about three months, while it was double than the recommended dosage it seemed to accelerate my bone healing by a great deal. So, while it may not be safe for everyone to do it but if you are not getting good results with regular amounts of these supplements, you can try doubling them for a couple of months and see if it makes any difference. Be very careful with calcium supplements and raise it to only till 1700 mg/day due to the risk of kidney stones.

Previously, I also talked about fracture healing not being the same as just bone healing. Bone healing is the biggest part of fracture healing but still not all of it. When any kind of fracture occurs, there is some associated tissue or muscle damage as well, this results in inflammation and pain. As we learned earlier, calcium travels to the bones via the blood stream, so the blood has to reach the fracture site inorder to deliver calcium, but if all the muscles and tissues around the fracture are damaged, it becomes more difficult for blood to deposit adequate amounts of calcium to the broken bones. The more the damage, the more difficult it becomes for blood to reach on site. So, the tissue healing has to happen to make calcium delivery faster, this requires some other vitamins like Vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids etc.

Now, lets get back to protein, from what we have discussed so far it would appear that protein has no role in bone healing, but on the contrary, it has a very important role, protein is also needed for bone healing but as I said before, we get good amount of protein even without bingeing on poultry or protein supplements, it’s the other vitamins and minerals that we generally lack in our diet and need to make up for. If you have 10 blue shirts already, you would not be looking to buy more blue shirts on your next shopping trip. Same is the case with Protein.

As you might have noticed, there are many vitamins and minerals, whose role in fracture healing was not known till not too long ago. So, I believe it would be a safe assumption that there could be more such vitamins and minerals that assist in bone healing but we don’t know about them yet. So, in my opinion, having a very well balanced diet is the key to optimal bone healing. Also, no supplement is recommended to be taken life long, while they are good to deal with a specific problem that you might have, like a fracture for instance, but it’s never a long term solution for your nutrition needs. Also, nutrients derived from supplements are no match for the nutrients derived from your diet. I Personally recommend having a lot of plant based food and ditching processed food altogether, especially, processed meat, which has been classified as a Class 1 Carcinogen by WHO. Carcinogens are cancer causing substances and they are divided into classes based on how likely are they to cause that disease. Some other class 1 carcinogens are asbestos and plutonium, so you can imagine what you are consuming when you order that next bucket of chicken. Non vegetarian food does not add much value other than protein, so it can be consumed as a special occasion food, instead of being consumed as the daily staple. Having non veg food daily, pushes out the plant based food out of our plates and makes us deficient in vitamins and minerals. As we can have only so much food, if we just gorge on non veg food, there’s no place left for the nutritious plant based food. One should try to consume as many varied vegetables as one can so that you get all the different nutrients that each of them contain. Various Pulses and seeds not only add variety to our food, they are also great sources of much needed nutrients. Having fixed schedules for your meals is another good habit. A fruit bowl without any added salt or other spices is the best snack one can have. So, snacking is still good if its done with salads and fruits. Dry Fruits in general are very rich in minerals, especially, walnuts and almonds are very good substitutes for chips and biscuits, which are commonly used for snacking. Dates can be termed as a superfood for bone healing as it contains a lot of the nutrients required for the same. Apart from eating the good food, we should avoid some bad foods as well, We should regulate the consumption of sugar and salt even if we are not suffering from High/Low blood pressure and/or diabetes. Its not only the soft drinks that are the sugar kings, Tomato Sauces and Packed Yogurt also have a high amount of sugar, so those foods are to be avoided as well. White flour or cake flour is another one of the villains that we should try to avoid, so pizzas and burgers go out of the window. In the beginning, it would seem like one can’t live without having such bad food in today’s day and age, but if you commit yourself to the same, then it’s not all that difficult like I’m finding out myself. Having preached all that, it’s also ok to cut loose every once in a while, you don’t need to be a social outcast to stay healthy. If there is a pizza party at office, have pizza by all means, don’t say no. If you are traveling somewhere and you think having a burger is the only option for lunch today, go and get it. You don’t need to be too particular about your food choices, every second of your life. As the great Oscar Wilde said – “Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation”.

I also thought about how can I reverse the ill effects of the years or decades of taking a highly faulty diet ? The best answer I could think of was that just having a good diet, avoiding bad food and maintaining a good lifestyle should heal my body and turn it back to normal. The human body has the amazing ability to heal itself, most of the physical problems we have are treated by our bodies themselves, medicines mostly act as a defense mechanism against external factors only. For instance, if you get a cut, the doctor will bandage it and give you antibiotics, all that the bandage does is to keep the wound from getting infected, it does not do anything to heal that wound. The antibiotics also do the same thing, they also, don’t heal the wound, that part is handled by our body itself, it does not need external help for that. So, all the good food habits that we discussed above, coupled with some kind of daily exercises and stress free lifestyle is the way to lead a healthy and happy life. Exercises are important not only to build a good physique or to be fighting fit, they are important since our lifestyle does not involve any physical activity, we all do sedentary jobs but if we take out the last 100 or 200 years, humans never did only sedentary jobs and thus our physiology is not built for that, human body needs a lot of physical activity to stay healthy and our current lifestyle is depriving it of the same. Even if you are eating healthy and have a good and evolving exercise regimen, stress is one single factor which can make them null and void and make you as unhealthy as one can ever get. So, avoiding stress is the real key, a happy person is more likely to enjoy better health than a fitness freak. Everyone goes through bad patches, but hard times, just like good times, don’t stay forever, although it might look like a never ending nightmare but it’s never, never ending. You can look back at your own life and see for yourself that hard times might have continued for a very long time but it was eventually replaced by good times and good times also get replaced with hard times, this cycle goes on forever, so there is no point stressing about it. Everybody knows all this but hardly anyone acts on it to make their life better, I hope you do, just like I’m trying to!!

So, while I talked about how I detoxified my body by ditching my faulty diet and adopting a more nutritious plant based diet, I should also mention how I detoxified my personal life by ditching some toxic people from my life. I went through some very hard times in the last one year and I could see people turn from good to super bad in no time. These are the people on whom I have showered innumerable favors in the past, in a very consistent fashion, to the extent that if they have any houses or cars it’s all because of me. But they still didn’t take more than a day (in one case at least) to turn on me. I was amazed to see how bad people can be, the very people I cherished turned out be opportunistic parasites. The biggest amazement was that they didn’t even have one single good enough reason to turn on me but they still did that, may be that’s why opportunistic people are called so. Its no wonder that god has punished these people with innumerable family problems, that’s what they deserve. While I was watching these parasites turn their ugly heads (one of them even looks like a snake), I also saw my true friends stand up and fight with me. That, coupled with tremendous family support helped me wade through that rough patch. That was truly heartening to say the least. So, I could see another thing, that I already knew, being proven to be very right – hard times, show true friends. So, in a way, this entire episode of the accident, seriously delayed healing and the rough patch in my personal life taught me a lot of stuff, a whole lot of stuff. That has helped me adopt better lifestyle, food habits and friends, all of which helped and will continue to help me detoxify my body and life as a whole.

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BlueBorne is the latest and the deadliest vulnerability related to Bluetooth. It’s details were published on 12 September 2017. Since it can spread like an airborne disease to any device that has bluetooth enabled on it, the exploit is aptly named. BlueBorne can spread even if bluetooth is not in discoverable mode, it just needs to be enabled, that’s it. Furthermore, the victim doesn’t need to click/touch anything, you may very well be sleeping at the airport waiting lounge, with the bluetooth on your phone enabled, when your phone gets hacked. You won’t even need to have an internet connection on your phone, no wifi connection required, even more simply put, you don’t even need a Sim card to be present in your phone to get hacked via blueborne. This is what makes it so scary. Usually, such targeted attacks need at least some kind of action to be taken by the potential victim, let it be clicking a link in an email or opening an attachment it contains, but blueborne needs zero action. Unlike the common misconception, Bluetooth enabled devices are constantly searching for incoming connections from any devices, and not only those they have been paired with. This means a Bluetooth connection can be established without pairing the devices at all. This makes BlueBorne one of the most broad potential attacks found in recent years, and allows an attacker to strike completely undetected. So, no matter how security conscious you are, you are vulnerable right now. The good news is that patches are out from all affected vendors, Microsoft being the first to release them back in July. But, how much behind, most individuals and organizations are, on patching was very well demonstrated during the recent spurt of ransomware attacks for which the patches were already out too.

As you know, Bluetooth is the leading and most widespread protocol for short-range communications, and is used by devices like, from regular computers and mobile devices to IoT devices such as TVs, watches, cars, and even medical appliances. The latest published reports show more than 2 billion Android, 2 billion Windows, and 1 billion Apple devices in use. Gartner reports that there are 8 billion connected or IoT devices in the world today, many of which have Bluetooth. Exploiting it provides virtually full control over the device. BlueBorne can serve any malicious objective, such as cyber espionage, data theft, ransomware, and even creating large botnets out of IoT devices like the Mirai Botnet or mobile devices as with the recent WireX Botnet. The BlueBorne attack vector surpasses the capabilities of most attack vectors by penetrating secure “air-gapped” networks which are disconnected from any other network, including the internet. This can endanger industrial systems, government agencies, and critical infrastructure. Needing close enough physical access is the only defense right now.

In the past, most Bluetooth vulnerabilities and security flaws originated in issues with the protocol itself, which were resolved in version 2.1 in 2007. Nearly all vulnerabilities found since were of low severity, and did not allow remote code execution. This transition occurred as the research community turned its eyes elsewhere, and did not scrutinize the implementations of the Bluetooth protocol in the different platforms, as it did with other major protocols.

The BlueBorne attack vector has several stages. First, the attacker locates active Bluetooth connections around him or her. Next, the attacker obtains the device’s MAC address, which is a unique identifier of that specific device. By probing the device, the attacker can determine which operating system his victim is using, and adjust his exploit accordingly. The attacker will then exploit a vulnerability in the implementation of the Bluetooth protocol in the relevant platform and gain the access he needs to act on his malicious objective. At this stage the attacker can choose to create a Man-in-The-Middle attack and control the device’s communication, or take full control over the device and use it for a wide array of cybercriminal purposes.

Hearing all this, one is forced to think why couldn’t the great technocrats of the world create software that is ultra secure, so that we don’t see such vulnerabilities being discovered every few weeks. The answer lies, not in technology, but in the human nature itself. When creating something new, we tend to create something that just works, security aspect of it is the last thing on our minds. World’s first car didn’t even have any doors on it. Today’s cars have numerous security features and they still don’t prove to be enough at times. Obviously, the only focus, at the time of building the first car, was to create an automated vehicle, and not to create an automated vehicle that is super secure. Another, much closer example could be, when young people learn to write software code, they are happy to see their code working as intended, they are not even bothered about the efficiency aspect of it, forget about losing sleep over the security aspect. But having said that, Vulnerabilities that can spread over the air and between devices pose a tremendous threat to any organization or individual. Current security measures, including endpoint protection, mobile data management, firewalls, and network security solution are not designed to identify these type of attacks, and related vulnerabilities and exploits, as their main focus is to block attacks that can spread via IP connections. New solutions are needed to address the new airborne attack vector, especially those that make air gapping irrelevant. Additionally, there will need to be more attention and research as new protocols are using for consumers and businesses alike. With the large number of desktop, mobile, and IoT devices only increasing, it is critical we can ensure these types of vulnerabilities are not exploited.

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The ‘Open’ Heartbleed

Before I start, let me; let everyone know that I’m not a fan of opensource, to the extent that you can call me anti opensource.

So, on 7th April 2014, the world woke up to heartbleed, a vulnerability in the VERY popular openssl software which is used by almost the entire world to secure their websites and systems. When I say the entire world, it includes giants like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Netflix, Adobe and Paypal to name a few. Openssl is an opensource cryptographic library used to implement Transport Layer Security (TLS), known previously as Secure Socket Layer (SSL). In simpler terms, it’s the very engine that makes your secure websites and servers “Secure”, so a critical vulnerability being found in openssl means nothing less than Armageddon, and Armageddon it is since the last two weeks in the digital world.

The bug was discovered by Neel Mehta of Google Security on 1st April 2014 (All Fool’s Day) but was made public seven days later. Some engineers (Riku, Antti and Matti) at a Finnish Security Firm called Codenomicon discovered the same bug on 3rd April, unaware that Google had already found it three days earlier. The term “Heartbleed” was coined by Ossi Herrala, a systems administrator at Codenomicon. The name heartbleed refers to an extension of openssl called hearbeat, it is used to keep connections open, even when there is no activity between the client and the server, Herrala thought it was fitting to call it Heartbleed because it was bleeding out the important information from the memory, let me try to explain how. By the way, Mehta donated the $15,000 bounty he was awarded for helping find the bug to the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s campaign for the development of encryption tools for journalists to use when communicating with sources.

The RFC 6520 Heartbeat Extension tests TLS/DTLS secure communication links by allowing a computer at one end of a connection to send a “Heartbeat Request” message, consisting of a payload, typically a text string, along with the payload’s length as a 16-bit integer. The receiving computer then must send the exact same payload back to the sender.

The affected versions of OpenSSL allocate a memory buffer for the message to be returned based on the length field in the requesting message, without regard to the size of actual payload in that message. Because of this failure to do proper bounds checking, the message returned consists of the requested payload followed by whatever else happened to be in the allocated memory buffer. The problem was compounded by OpenSSL’s decision to write its own version of the C dynamic memory allocation routines. As a result, the oversized memory buffer returned to the requestor was likely to contain data from memory blocks that had been previously requested and freed by OpenSSL. Such memory blocks may contain sensitive data sent by users or even the private keys used by OpenSSL. In addition, by using its own memory management routines OpenSSL bypassed mitigation measures in some operating systems that might have detected or neutralized the bug.

The heartbleed bug is exploited by sending a malformed heartbeat request with a small payload and large length field to the server in order to elicit the server’s response permitting attackers to read up to 64K bytes of server memory that was likely to have been used previously by SSL. Attackers in this way could receive sensitive data, compromising the security of the server and its users. Vulnerable data include the server’s private master key which would enable attackers to decrypt current or stored traffic via passive man-in-the-middle attack (if perfect forward secrecy is not used by the server and client), or active man-in-the-middle if perfect forward secrecy is used. The attacker cannot control which data are returned, as the server responds with a random chunk of its own memory.

The bug might also reveal unencrypted parts of users’ requests and responses, including any form post data in users’ requests, session cookies and passwords, which might allow attackers to hijack the identity of another user of the service. CVE-2014-0160 has been assigned to this vulnerability. At its disclosure, some 17 percent or half a million of the Internet’s secure web servers certified by trusted authorities were believed to have been vulnerable to an attack. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Ars Technica, and Bruce Schneier all deemed the Heartbleed bug “catastrophic.” Forbes cybersecurity columnist, Joseph Steinberg, described the bug as potentially “the worst vulnerability found (at least in terms of its potential impact) since commercial traffic began to flow on the Internet.”

The vulnerability was introduced into OpenSSL’s source code repository on December 31, 2011 by Dr. Stephen N. Henson, one of OpenSSL’s four core developers, following a request from Dr. Robin Seggelmann, the change’s author. The vulnerable code has been adopted to widespread use with the release of OpenSSL version 1.0.1 on March 14, 2012. Dr. Seggelmann, the German Programmer who wrote the code (are the Germans going to cause another world war? This time in the digital world?? 😉 ) worked for the OpenSSL project while getting his Ph.D. studies from 2008 to 2012 at University of Munster. Adding to the drama of the situation, he submitted the code at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 2011, though he claims the timing has nothing to do with the bug. “I am responsible for the error, Because I wrote the code and missed the necessary validation by an oversight. I failed to check that one particular variable, a unit of length, contained a realistic value. This is what caused the bug, called Heartbleed,” said Seggelmann, now an employee with German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom AG.

He said the developer who reviewed the code failed to notice the bug, which enables attackers to steal data without leaving a trace. “It is impossible to say whether the vulnerability, which has since been identified and removed, has been exploited by intelligence services or other parties,” he said.

Now, providing you with all the info given above is not the reason why I’ve written this blog, it is to highlight one simple fact, that you can’t trust anything that is open source. This entire open source phenomenon started right in front of me but unlike everyone else, I was never excited about it, the whole world going mad about this open source thing looked very weird to me at that time and the feeling is still the same. I used to share my thoughts with my peers but nobody used to agree with me, I used to sign off with a statement that one day this whole open source thing will cause trouble for all of us, BIG time, I could see that they thought that I’m a weirdo but then I was ok with that because I’m not a person who would change his thought process just because everybody else thought differently, it’s difficult to swim against the tide and you have no company, you are alone but if your will is strong enough, you will make it to the shore.

Now, the heart of the open source community is bleeding and it’s bleeding heavily in the open. Something like this was bound to happen, it was nothing but imminent, just a matter of time as they say. Free stuff excites everybody but all of us should always remember that there are no free lunches in this world. If you are getting something for free, you’ve got to doubt it. These open source fanatics call Microsoft all kinds of names for their heavy licensing costs and it looks very weird to me, If I create something of great value then I would like to get paid handsomely for that, I believe in philanthropy but giving away my valuable work for free doesn’t qualify as philanthropy for me. Even as a user, if I could compare buying software with buying a car, I would like to buy a car from a very reputed brand like Ford, General Motors, Chevrolet or Honda and not a car built by my neighbourhood mechanic in his garage. Those big brands will charge me big bucks compared to the mechanic but I’m sure that the branded car is still going to be a better deal. I always thought that the open source only looks good to novice users and to the people who think that they are great technocrats but don’t really know anything about it, reading four blogs a day doesn’t make you a techie. I’m still ok with someone liking the concept of opensource but when people started to dish out all the open software, that again proved my point that all that was nothing but crap. To give you one very simple example, when firefox came out, it was tagged as being way faster than Mircrosoft’s IE, but the firefox programmers were doing nothing but just trying to make a fool out of their users. When you close firefox, it disappears much faster than IE does, and it indeed happens but it does just that, it just disappears from the user’s view, it doesn’t get closed any faster than IE, if you try to open firefox again right after closing it, you would get an error saying that another instance is already running, if you go to the task manager, you will be able to see the process still running. This is nothing but gimmickry and the novice users and the world’s great technocrats still think that firefox or chrome are better browsers than IE because they are fooled by the eyewash that these opensource guys indulge in. I always thought that even on the security front, these browsers are no good but I never tried to do any kind of research into that, mainly because I was just so sure of it. I always tell my wife to never use firefox for any online shopping, bill payments or net banking. Now, this heartbleed bug has once again confirmed my theory that open source software is less secure, here’s how. Any website would need to do the following to get around this heartbleed.

  • Upgrade their server software to a non-vulnerable version. I can’t give you general advice on how to do this because it depends on which software you are running.
  • After upgrading your software, generate a new SSL/TLS key and get a certificate for the new key. Start using the new key and certificate. (This is necessary because an attacker could have gotten your old key.)
  • Revoke the certificate you were previously using. (This is necessary because an attacker who got your old key could be using your old key and certificate to impersonate your site.)
  • Have your users change the passwords that they use to log in to your site. (This is necessary because users’ existing passwords could have been leaked.)

However, even if all of the affected certificates were to be revoked, contemporary web browser software handles certificate revocation poorly. The most frequent users of a site — often its administrators — can continue using a revoked certificate for weeks or months without the browser notifying them that anything is amiss. In this situation, an attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack by presenting the certificate to unsuspecting users whose browsers will behave as if they were connecting to the legitimate site. For example, some browsers only perform OCSP revocation checks for Extended Validation certificates, while others ignore certificate revocation lists completely. SSL Certificates are used to secure communication between browsers and websites by providing a key with which to encrypt the traffic and by providing third-party verification of the identity of the certificate owner. There are varying levels of verification a third-party Certificate Authority (CA) may carry out, ranging from just confirming control of the domain name (Domain Validation [DV]) to more extensive identity checks (Extended Validation [EV]). However, an SSL certificate — or any of the certificates which form a chain from the server’s certificate to a trusted root installed in the browser or operating system — may need to be revoked. A certificate should be revoked when it has had its private key compromised; the owner of the certificate no longer controls the domain for which it was issued; or the certificate was mistakenly signed. An attacker with access to an un-revoked certificate who also has access to the certificate’s private key can perform a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack by presenting the certificate to unsuspecting users whose browsers will behave as if they were connecting to a legitimate site. There are two main technologies for browsers to check the revocation status of a particular certificate: using the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) or looking up the certificate in a Certificate Revocation List (CRL). OCSP provides revocation information about an individual certificate from an issuing CA, whereas CRLs provide a list of revoked certificates and may be received by clients less frequently. Browser support for the two forms of revocation varies from no checking at all to the use of both methods where necessary.

Firefox does not download CRLs for websites which use the most popular types of SSL certificate (all types of certificate except EV which is usually displayed with a green bar). Without downloading the CRL, Firefox is happy to carry on as usual; letting people visit the website and transfer sensitive personal information relying on a certificate that is no longer valid. In any case even if OCSP were available, by default Firefox will only check the validity of the server’s certificate and not attempt to check the entire chain of certificates (again, except for EV certificates). Google Chrome, by default, does not make standard revocation checks for non-EV certificates. Google does aggregate a limited number of CRLs and distributes this via its update mechanism but it’s not very efficient in that area. For the majority of Chrome users with the default settings, as with Firefox, nothing will appear to be amiss. For the security conscious, Google Chrome does have the option to enable proper revocation checks, but in this case the end result depends on the platform. On Windows, Google Chrome can make use of Microsoft’s CryptoAPI to fetch the CRL and it correctly prevents access to the site. However, RSA’s CRL is not delivered in the conventional way: instead of providing the CRL in a binary format, it is encoded into a text-based format which is not the accepted standard. Mozilla’s NSS — which is used by Firefox on all platforms and by Google Chrome on Linux — does not support the format. On Linux, Google Chrome does make a request for the CRL but cannot process the response and instead carries on as normal. Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer is one of the most secure browsers in this context. It fetches revocation information (with a preference for OCSP, but will fallback to CRLs) for the server’s certificate and the rest of the certificate chain. Now, I think that should make my wife proud of my advice to her 😉

All this gimmickry and all these security flaws in the open source software stem from the fact that the motto of all these guys is NOT to make great software, rather it is to just make something that at least ‘looks’ better than MS products. It’s always easy to build your product that betters on the competition’s flaws or at least perceived flaws, for example, what makes IE a tad bit slower than some of these so called faster browsers is things like I just explained above and these things are not only in the security area, they are in all perceivable areas. If I have an accident in my branded car, I will have better chances of being alive than in the car that a mechanic built, overlooking and compromising on the safety features to make his car cheaper and faster. Microsoft’s Implementation of SSL/TLS remains completely unaffected by this bug and while people might tell me that OpenSSL is a respected opensource software (or at least it was, till the time it’s heart bled), I would argue that the reputation is based largely on wishful thinking and open source mythology. What good can a software be that is made by a small group of developers, most volunteers and all but one part-time. Huge parts of the Internet, multi-zillion dollar businesses, implicitly trust the work these people do. Basically because of only two factors a) It’s free, b) It’s open source, the code being available freely makes people think that a lot of people would be able to review it and find bugs, but since the discovery of this heartbleed bug took years to be discovered (which was not a highly complex miss to find, instead it can even be called a silly programming mistake) we now know that it’s more of a myth than a reality. So, just to save a few millions, enterprises have chosen to put their prestige at stake. It just never ceases to amaze me.

You might think that at least now these big guys might just stop trusting opensource with their life and start paying up for better software but I don’t think that it’s still going to happen because a)heartbleed, even after all of it’s popularity, still remains a bug known only to geeks, b) People think that lightening doesn’t strike the same place twice. So, in my opinion, these people are not going to learn unless something more devastating happens yet again which makes people lose money from their bank accounts and make them lose their emails and other confidential data. So, my advice to all of you is don’t take that car from the neighbourhood mechanic even if he gives it to you for free.

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How to set the Default Excel Version when you have multiple versions on your server/PC

As per Microsoft, you need to install the oldest version first and the newest version last, if you intend to use multiple versions of MS Office on the same machine. There are KB articles for each version of Office that explain this, is for Office 2010 and it has the KB #s for other supported versions of Office as well. But there is a big assumption in these articles, that all of us would like to make the latest version as the default version, this is not always true and hence the problem. Like in my scenario, there was a need to install office 2010 on a server that already had office 2003 and the 2003 version needed to be made the default office application. So, if I install Office 2010 on top of 2003, then the newer one would become the default version which is NOT what is needed, so the workaround was to repair the office 2003 version AFTER the installation of the 2010 version so that it becomes the default one.

This is not a one time affair though, Microsoft recommends following the same order (oldest one first and newest one last) while installing patches to the office versions as well. Now, what happens if the only patches released in a given month apply to office 2010, after you apply those patches, the 2010 version will become the default version. So, we again need to follow the same workaround i.e repair the office 2003 version to make it the default app.

I have only tested this for Excel but I assume this should work on the others, such as word and PowerPoint as well. Also, let me clarify that here, I’m talking about “Installing” the office versions and not using the ‘Click-to-Run’ technology as discussed at

This is one of the reasons why it’s not such a good idea to install multiple versions of the same app on the same machine, Microsoft does not recommend installing two or more versions of MS Office on the same machine and they don’t even support the same if it has been done on a terminal server. So, the best way out is to have just one good version but if you can’t do with that then the above workaround is there for you.

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Server has the RAID configuration intact but still can’t find the OS to boot up

I think all of us would have been in this situation sometime or the other where we have a server whose RAID config has not been lost but the server is still not able to find the OS. It is indeed a strange situation because if the RAID config is not lost then the server should be able to see the Windows Partition, and if it’s able to see that then it should be able to boot off the files present there. This normally happens after a system board or HDD0 replacement. I found an explanation for this problem while working on such a situation with an IBM HW CE, he helped me fix the problem and I asked him for the link where this info is present. The link is here –

It seems that Loading the defaults in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) deletes the Boot Order entries for any UEFI aware operating system. These entries are required to boot the operating system correctly. The workaround for this problem is given below.

The workaround is dependent upon the particular UEFI operating system. Refer to the UEFI operating system information for the actual file name and path used to boot that particular operating system.

For example, for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, the steps are as follows:

1) Power on the system, and, when prompted, press F1 to enter setup.
2) Select Boot Manager.
3) Select Boot from File.
4) Select the GUID Partition Tables (GPT) System Partition where you installed Microsoft Windows Server 2008. (This is mostly the first entry in the available list of options)
5) Select EFI.
6) Select Microsoft.
7) Select Boot.
8) Select bootmgfw.EFI.

The next question in my mind was that will the server boot up normally (without the need to follow the above steps) when it’s restarted or especially if it is powered off and then powered on, although I haven’t tested it myself but the answer should be yes, because the operating system is supposed to recreate the UEFI Boot Order Entry after we point it towards it once.


I’m Back!!

OK, So here I’m with my next blog after about two and a half years, That’s a loooong time which flew really fast. I got married in the interim and life has turned on it’s head since then, I’m finding that being married is quite “different” from being single, your priorities change completely and you start leading …. ummmm a very ‘different’ life for the lack of a better word. But my absence from the blogging sphere was not entirely due to that, one of the other more important reasons was my original motto behind writing blogs – that I would write only on topics on which not many people have written on the internet. I knew it would be difficult to find such topics but then writing a blog a day was never my intent. Now, I have decided to write about things that I encounter in my everyday tech life, it could be a difficult to solve problem or just something that attracts my attention. If nothing, it would serve as my online diary of tech solutions which would at least ensure that I don’t end up slogging for the same kind of problem again, if I end up helping some folks by way of doing that, then I would consider myself lucky 🙂

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It’s that folder which resides in C:\Windows and takes up a lot of space on your Windows Server 2008 machine and which didn’t used to do that in Windows Server 2003. What does it contain?, can we delete it?, can we move it to a different drive?, can we delete something that’s under it? Are the questions that, almost, all of my team members have asked me over the recent past and my short answer to them has been ‘NO’. Explaining all about this folder (I know, geeks are supposed to call a folder as “Directory” as the word ‘folder’ sounds a bit too laymanish but I like to call it a folder) during work hours and that too separately to every individual, demands a lot of time, and time is at a premium at work as I try to finish all of my day’s tasks before the day ends (this line is for my manager, might just be useful during my next appraisal). This was not a problem for my team at my previous organization, as I used to have whiteboard sessions (which later on turned into “Glassboard” sessions as I started using a glass wall partition for my illustrations instead of the usual whiteboard. Now, that’s what I call being innovative ;)) for them after work hours or sometimes, even during weekends. I must also admit for a fact that they are the only ones in the entire world who read my blog ;). For my current team, I thought about sending an email to the team DL. So, that they get their answers pertaining to the WINSXS folder and then I thought, why can’t it be my next blog? So, here’s my blog entry for the WINSXS folder.

WINSXS refers to’ Windows Side by Side’ which refers to the concept of hosting different versions of the same file. Side-by-side technology is a standard for executable files in Microsoft Windows that attempts to reduce DLL hell. DLL hell designates a group of problems that arise from the use of dynamic-link libraries in Microsoft Windows. Problems include version conflicts, missing DLLs, duplicate DLLs, and incorrect or missing registration. In SxS, Windows stores multiple versions of a DLL in the WinSXS subdirectory of the Windows directory, and loads them on demand. This reduces dependency problems for applications that include an SxS manifest.

To start with, this folder takes up a LOT of space on the C: drive and keeps growing over time. The normal size is around 6-7 GB but I’ve even seen them as big as 15 GB. One of the major differences between W2K8 and the previous versions is the move from INF described OS to ‘componentization’. A component in Windows is one or more binaries, a catalog file, and an XML file that describes everything about how the files should be installed. From associated registry keys and services to the kind of security permissions the files should have. Components are grouped into logical units, and these units are used to build the different Windows editions.

Now, let us look at the folders that reside within the WINSXS folder
1. \Winsxs\Catalogs: Contains security catalogs for each manifest on the system
2. \Winsxs\InstallTemp: Temporary location for install events
3. \Winsxs\Manifests: Component manifest for a specific component, used during operations to make sure files end up where they should
4. \Winsxs\Temp: Temp directory used for various operations, you’ll find pending renames here
5. \Winsxs\Backup: Backups of the manifest files in case the copy in \Winsxs\Manifests becomes corrupted
6. \Winsxs\Filemaps: File system mapping to a file location
7. \Winsxs\: The payload of the specific component, typically you will see the binaries here.

WINSXS folder contains all of the OS components; it is called the component store. Each component has a unique name that includes the version, language, and processor architecture that it was built for. So, calling the WINSXS folder the entirety of the whole OS won’t be all that wrong. This folder is also the reason why Windows 2008 doesn’t ask for the Installation DVD while installing additional features and roles or while running SFC, like it used to happen with the previous versions of Windows. Windows 2008 copies the entire media content to the installed server with all components placed in the Single Instance Storage folder (SIS), C:\Windows\winsxs. When a feature or role is installed on the server, the required files are either copied or linked from the SIS folder so no media is needed.

But why does this folder get bigger and bigger? – Answer is ‘servicing’ (patches and service packs). In previous versions of Windows the atomic unit of servicing was the file, in Windows Server 2008 it’s the component. When we update a particular binary we release a new version of the whole component, and that new version is stored alongside the original one in the component store. The higher version of the component is used in the system, but the older version in the store isn’t deleted. The reason for that is the third part of why the component store gets so large.

Not every component in the component store is applicable, For example, on systems where IIS is available but has not been installed, the IIS components are present in the store, but not installed into any location on the system where they might be used. If you’re familiar with how multi-branch servicing works in previous versions of Windows then it’ll make sense to you that we have a different version of the component for each distribution branch and service pack level, and that all these different versions are also stored in the WINSXS folder, even if they’re not immediately applicable. So a single package that contains an update to one component will end up installing four versions of that component in the WINSXS folder – double that on a 64 bit operating system for some components.

Now that you know why the store can grow to be so large, your next question is probably to ask why we don’t remove the older versions of the components. The reason is reliability. The component store, along with other information on the system, allows us to determine at any given time what the best version of a component to be used is. That means that if you uninstall a security update, we can install the next highest version on the system – we no longer have an “out of order uninstall” problem. It also means that if you decide to install an optional feature, we don’t just choose the RTM version of the component, we’ll look to see what the highest available version on the system is. As each component on the system changes state that may in turn trigger changes in other components, and because the relationships between all the components are described on the system we can respond to those requirements in ways that we couldn’t in previous OS versions.

The only way to safely reduce the size of the WINSXS folder is to reduce the set of possible actions that the system can take – the easiest way to do that is to remove the packages that installed the components in the first place. This can be done by uninstalling superseded versions of packages that are on your system. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 contains a binary called VSP1CLN.EXE, a tool that will make the Service Pack package permanent (not removable) on your system, and remove the RTM versions of all superseded components. This can only be done because by making the Service Pack permanent we can guarantee that we won’t ever need the RTM versions. As far as I know, it only works on Vista and not Windows Server 2008 but haven’t tested it yet.

Here is how to use this tool.
NOTE 1: After you use this cleanup tool, you will no longer be able to remove Service Pack 1, should any problems occur. Make sure that the system is stable before using.
NOTE 2: This tool is a one-time use tool. Once it’s used it will no longer work on the same installation.
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Windows\System32. Look for the file “vsp1cln.exe.”
Right click this file and select the ‘Run as Administrator’ option.
The Vista Service Pack 1 Cleanup Tool will remove all of the redundant files that it has replaced.
The amount of disk space you gain will depend on the system, what files are installed, etc.

For Windows Vista SP2, Windows Component Cleanup Tool (compcln.exe) located in the system32 folder seems to be the tool that can be used to clear the superseded versions and this can be run even on Windows Server 2008 SP2 machines, The steps to run it on a Vista machine are given below.

Running this compcln.exe tool is pretty simple:
1. Execute the command “Compcln.exe” at the elevated command prompt. The path is “c:\Windows\System32 \compcln.exe”.
3. You will be prompted with a question whether to keep SP2 permanently in the system.
This operation will make all service packs and other packages permanent on this computer.
Upon completion you will not be able to remove any cleaned packages from this system.
Would you like to continue? (Y/N):
4. Once you type “Y” and press enter, the system will start performing the windows components cleanup.

On my test run, it freed up 1 GB of space from the WINSXS folder from a Windows Server 2008 SP2 test box and I know it’s not much.

In short, if you have a dwindling C: drive and the WINSXS folder is the main culprit, sadly enough, you can’t do much about it. I have seen people blaming Microsoft after running into disk space issues with servers where they have installed Windows Server 2008 on 20 GB drives. Their argument is that it was enough for W2K3, yes it was enough for the previous version but skipping due diligence while upgrading to W2K8 or while going for a new server build is the sole reason for their problems. Microsoft came out with this as the solution for the ubiquitous DLL Hell Problem with the previous versions of Windows. Who was not fed up with the missing DLLs ? How many times had you seen something like “A Required DLL File, Z.DLL, was not found” or “The procedure entry point Y couldn’t be located in X.DLL” when you would try to run an application, or during startup. Expecting that your Ferrari would only need the same amount of fuel as your dad’s car is nothing but stupidity. Microsoft recommends a minimum of 32 GB or greater for the OS alone (some application files also go into the C: drive, So, consider that as well) but going by that minimum requirement would be something like housing a family of four in a studio flat, it’s not impossible but obviously full of problems. I have always liked to have at least 50 GB allocated to the C: drive on the servers and the humongous size of the WINSXS folder is something that justifies my liking.

But then, I was wondering, what would happen if we delete WINSXS ? And Yes, I tried deleting the folder from a Windows Server 2008 SP2 test box. First, it won’t let me delete/move/rename it. So, had to mount it’s hard drive on another system and then delete it. But, when I tried to boot up the system again, it didn’t come up. So, DO NOT DELETE/RENAME/MOVE WINSXS.

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