Weird DSL Problem - Network locks when getting a call on the non dsl phone line.

This is really a weird issue. One of my son's friends calls him to discuss runescape. (Yes I am unblocking it periodically).

Here is the setup.
- DSL is on the home office line
- His friend only calls our house phone (The line WITHOUT dsl)
- We are running speakeasy dsl and a linksys router.

When our son's friend is on the line we lose the internet. The problem is repeatable. This only seems to happen with calls from that one individual.

This does not make any sense. The only thing I can thing of is
(1) the wiring going into our house is old and there might be some crosstalk between the two phone numbers
(2) There is something at our son's friends house either with the telco equipment in their area or perhaps the phone that he is using. We don't get anyone else calling regulary from his neighborhood.
(3) There is some kind of interaction between runescape and the dsl lines that kicks in when he calls from his phone. (That would be really weird)

Anyway, I have a call into tech support and am waiting for a callback. I want them to be looking at the connection and get our son's friend to call and see if they can tell what is happening.

Vista, Blue screens of death and ubiquitous Windows

I read a couple of weeks ago that Bill Gates wants to expand where we will find Windows... ie in your car and other places....

That is interesting... I'm sitting here in a Starbucks and was doing a little bit of blogging. Nothing, special.. I had just highlighted some text and got a BSOD Blue Screen of Death and a forced reboot. Fortunately, I try to never have a lot of unsaved data.

Every time something like that happens, I consider the implications of depending on Windows for life critical situations. I get visions of barrelling down the highway flying formation with a bunch of tractor trailers at 75 MPH and suddenly getting a BSOD on the on-board Windows based computer controlling the vehicle.. Not a pretty picture. Waiting for a reboot and reload in heavy fast moving traffic is not appealing. Let's not make things more complicated than they are.

The funny thing here is that the event viewer didn't log anything unusual.

In all fairness to Windows, I am running the laptop without the chill mat. There is a possibility that the problem was heat related and not Windows.. but then again.

PCHelpware - Remote Support

PCHelpware is a subset of UVNC. It is an open source solution for allowing remote access and support.

CAUTION - Whenever you allow remote support, there is always a possibility of things getting hacked. Use at your own risk and be careful.

PC Helpware allows you to build a simple server app that clients can download. You use a viewer to establish the connection.

The server can be configured to allow several different options for connections. In this post, we will just deal with the simplest which is where we are at our home office on a fixed IP and have access to our router for port forwarding.

There is a newer version of PCHELPWARE available at http://www.uvnc.com. Look for the PCHelpware Link or go directly to http://www.uvnc.com/pchelpware/index.html. The viewer is really great, however, we were having trouble getting the server configured to allow a choice of multiple connections. We found a post that indicated a link that would allow you to build a V1.0 server : http://www.uvnc.com/pchelpware/download/PcHelpWare_rel10_SCgui.zip

We also configured the desktop we use for support with a fixed IP address. That allowed us to easily set up the linksys router for port forwarding of port 5500 to the 192.168.1.nn address of the suppport desktop.

For ease of distibution, we set up a password proteced folder on one of our websites. If the app is not installed on a client's machine, it is a simple process to walk them through the download. If we visit a client, we usually put the app on their desktop. The server does not allow us to access the machine unless the client purposely runs the server and makes the correct selections.

We found that the new viewer works great.

We suggest you test this out before trying it with clients. One of the easiest ways is if you have a laptop with a cellular aircard. That can be used as the client's machine running the server.


The procedure is pretty simple once everything is in place

1. We are in contact with the client via telephone.
2. We run the viewer. We need to make sure that the listening port is 5500. Checking the debug box seems to help make sure that the connection is working. You can also choose a High, medium or low experience. For the most part, the 'low' experience works pretty well.
3. Once you start the viewer, you instruct the client to pick the correct connection option and click connect. After a few seconds, you should have control of their screen.

You can do just about anything that you can do while seated at the machine.

We've used it for about a year and it is a great tool for consultants. We have tested PCHelpware with XP Home, XP Pro, Windows 2000 and Vista Home Premium. We did have some trouble getting it to run on a Server 2003 machine.

When you are running the server on a Vista Machine, vista will lock the remote keyboard during the connection which means that someone must be at the target machine.

We'll post later about what you need to do if you are taking your laptop on the road with a cellular aircard or connecting to various wireless networks.

Blocking Runescape on a Linksys WRTG54

I finally got fed up with our son playing runescape when he is supposed to be doing his homework. The final straw was when the network slowed to a crawl while I was trying to get some work out. I went downstairs and sure enough, it was runescape on his laptop and not anything homework related.

Now, something like runescape should most likely not cause network problems. However, I really don't have the time to troubleshoot it right now.

Most of the newer routers give you the tools to either block internet access at certain times, block services, block sites or block by keyword.

CAUTION - when you work with your router, this is always a chance of (1) completely hosing the router configuration and 'bricking' it and (2) blocking yourself from internet access that you need.

How you go about blocking access to a particular site and the amount of control you will have will depend on the router model and the firmware installed. In our case, we are running a Linksys WRTG54 and an early version of the firmware - v 1.x

There is a tab titled "Access Restrictions". You can define up to 10 policies. The basic procedure is

1. Name the policy. In our case it was runescape.
2. IMPORTANT - you need to edit the list of PCs with the "EDIT LIST OF PCS" button. This determines which PCs the policy will apply to. You can specify the PCs by their MAC address which can be a pain. I went with the "Kill them all and let God sort them out" approach and blocked based on an internal IP range of 1-254. In other words, the policy applies to every device on our network.
3. Enter a value for block by url. In this case www.runescape.com This will block all access to the runescape site.

Be careful with any of the other settings. You could cut off all internet access for your network.

Apply the settings and test them out.

Done - Runescape is kaput until further notice.

Make sure that the kids know that any cute moves like a cold reset of the router will result in something that will make the inquisition look like romper room. (You should back up your router settings anyway or at least save a hardcopy of the configuration pages, especially if you are using port forwarding for things like remote access. In the case of the WRTG54, you can go to ADMINISTRATION - CONFIG MANAGEMENT - BACKUP to save a copy of your router configuration to a local machine. (Note - you should also have hard copies of any port forwarding or port triggering you might be using)

I'm not a big fan of taking draconian steps with a network. Currently I just don't have the time to manually police things. Overall, I really think Runescape has a lot of educational value. The problem is that it can be addictive.

Western Digital Hard drive stops sharing on an XP Pro Network

One of our clients is trying to go paperless. They have a nice scanner and were saving files to a Western Digital USB hard drive attached to one of the office computers. The drive was shared at the root level (Don't yell at me, that is the way it was when we started with them)

Everything went fine for a couple of weeks and then we got a call that they could not see the hard drive on the network any more. In order to work with the scanner software, the drive has to be mapped.

I'm still baffled as to exactly what happened. I seriously doubt that the clients changed anything. When you would click on the mapped drive from another machine, you would get an 'access denied' error. However, you could open the drive with a right-click and explore or open. I checked the sharing settings repeatedly. You could share anything you wanted under the root but you could not share the root and have it mappable by other machines.

I tried moving the drive to another machine and had identical results. A freeagent USB drive attached to the original machine was shareable and mappable at the root level

This was an older drive in the 125GB range and was a FAT format. I finally decided that the best option was to take a break, get some think crust pizza and pick up a 250GB Freeagent drive. The data copied over to the new drive in a couple of minutes, it took another minute or two to set up the sharing and everything was working perfectly.... In addition to doubling the storage space.


Anyway, I guess the lesson here is that sometimes an end around is better than trying to solve an oddball problem.

Vista and Remote Differential Compression

We ran into a major problem when we were running our first Vista based laptop. The file copy times over the network were horrendous. Slow just barely describes the copy speed. A guy with a quill pen, parchment and an ink bottle could have copied the files faster.

Some research pointed to people having luck with disabling Remote Differential Compression. You go into the program uninstall and then the windows components. Simply uncheck the box and reboot.

The copy speeds were now where they were supposed to be. I only did a cursory check but it appears that we aren't losing anything important by disabling RDC.

Vista, Norton and Total Appraisal

We are still advising most of our business clients to try to purchase new machines with XP Pro instead of Vista. We were just referred to a new client who had been going through a nightmare trying to network 3 machines running Wintotal's Aurora Appraisal Software. They had been hit by lightning and had to purchase new machines. They went with Vista Home Premium.

The machines would not talk over the network. Every time a client tried to connect, the whole network would lock up. They had spent countless hours with Wintotal's tech support and had two consultants in prior to us. Things would lock up so bad you had to reboot everything including the router

After a lot of troubleshooting I finally concluded that Norton 2007 Internet Security was somehow blocking the traffic even though the network was set as trusted, the firewall was turned off and everything was opened up as far as possible. Fortunately they were running on a 30 day trial so I did a regular uninstall and then ran the Norton removal tool on the server and a client. Everything worked perfectly.

They purchased a copy of AVG antivirus and I turned the Windows firewall on. Our experience with AVG is that it is a great app. The machines are used for very little recreational surfing. I like Norton but it appeared that the mix of Aurora, Vista Home Premium and Norton IS 2007 just didn't want to play well together.

Migration from Frontpage to Expression Web on Linux/Unix servers

It's getting to the point where we really have to move off Microsoft Frontpage for web design. I know a lot of people panned FP, but it did allow us to create sites that got rankings easily and efficiently. The way it handled Navigation was excellent.

The problem in migration is that
(1) Eventually hosts will discontinue Frontpage extensions
(2) Functionality that was in Web components in FP will require .net on the server
(3) Linux/Unix hosting does not include .net.

The solution seems to be an open source project involving Novell called Mono http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page . Mono is supposed to provide .net functionality between 1.0 and 2.0 on Linux boxes.

If you can install it, or get it installed on your hosting, then you should have a lot more functionality without needing to move to a Windoze host. I have a support ticket into one of our hosts now asking if they plan to implement it or if I can install it on my virtual machine.

I don't think that current FP users and hosting companies really understand the impact of this. If you migrate from FP to EW and are designing new sites, you will have extremely limited functionality on linux/unix hosting. The easy solution would be to move to windows hosting which I don't want to do for a number of reasons.

If anyone has tried Mono/ew/*nix, I would appreciate it if you could share your experiences in the comments.

NOTE - if you do go the MONO route, check out their vulnerabilities page. You will be opening up a few possible holes.

Update on our Sierra aircard and Spring

Here's a quick update on our Sierra Wireless Aircard (595U) and Sprint service....

So far, so good. We've been on the road in upstate new york (Lake Placid and Lake George). Right now, I'm in the lobby of the Sagamore hotel with about 2 bars and getting 699 kbps down and 308 kbps up according to the speakeasy speed test. According to one of the hotel staff, there is a cellular tower nearby.

I didn't test the speed up in Lake Placid, but the connectivity was flawless.

I would prefer a built in aircard but the Sierra card works fine, even when plugged into a plain old mini usb hub.

Right now, we are running on a new HP Laptop with Vista Home Premium. We did need to download the latest Sierra software. It gave us a little trouble connecting for the required updates but that was probably because our home office is in a really bad cellular area. Once the update got loaded, it's run like clockwork.

Spam - What a mess

I just wanted to grip about spam. My home system is set up with filters and rules so a lot of the spam gets moved into the spam folder on the client side.

I've been on the road for a couple of days and am processing my main account manually. What I'm seeing is that about 90% of my incoming mail is Spam. This is really getting annoying. The situation seems to be gettng worse all the time.

There are some server side things that can be done. The hosting for my main account doesn't support RBLs (Realtime blacklists). I'm thinking about changing to a host that does support RBLS. That way, a lot of the spam will get killed at the server level.

One of the main reasons for the amount of spam is the number of home users and even businesses who are running machines that are buggier than a $5 a night hotel room. They are too ignorant and/or too cheap to have someone properly lock down their machines. Every machine that is open to spammers contributes to the mess.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Whitelists just won't work when you are getting mail from clients who are not whitelisted yet. Client side rules and filters are just masking the problem. If you run something like Spamassassin and have it blackhole spam you run the risk of trashing emails that you really need (There was a law firm a little while ago that had a whole lot of problems resulting from their tightening up of email spam filters).

Until the majority of the machines out there are cleaned up and trojan free, then the spam problem will continue. There have been some prosecutions relating to spam. Putting a few heads on pikes might be a good thing overall...

PRISONER TO HIS NEW CELLMATE " So waddare you in for"

SPAMMER " Well, I sent Spam to people"

PRISONER TO SPAMMER "I'm in here cause I killed a coupla of my neighbors .. punk. And i hate them spam emails"

We can only wish......