Computer goings-on...

[alexpgp]

This morning, when I started Alice and Borg (the two machines at the shop), they immediately "saw" each other and I could access the files on one machine from the other.

About an hour later, they spontaneously stopped "seeing" each other, as evidenced by error messages to the effect that no such other machine existed on the network. Then Borg proceeded to stop seeing itself in its own Network Neighborhood.

I am beginning to suspect network hardware. The cheap hub I bought is tops on the list.

After many frustrations with McAfee antivirus, I sprang for the pro version of AVP, published by Kaspersky labs. It immediately found an infected file on my system, which arrived with some suspicious mail and had never been run. (Whew!) It turns out the file is infected with I-Worm.Magister, which appears to be a bad one, from its description.

I applied for an Internet merchant credit card account today and it should be "live" tomorrow, if the sales flack can be believed. I also upgraded the store's hosting to "Merchant Hosting," which costs a small fortune, but the deal is that the bank will waive the application fee ($299) if that's my level of hosting. The back of the envelope tells me it will take a year for me to break even, so I elected the higher level of hosting.

Now, to create a web page for the store.

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what problems were you having with McAfee? I'm curious because I've been using it for several years.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, you may recall a few months back I was ranting on about my laptop's performance. I
eventually discovered that if I uninstalled the McAfee, the problems were largely eliminated.

I event reinstalled McAfee twice to confirm that the problems would reappear.

The McAfee that came with my machine also had only a 9-month license, which wouldn't have been too bad, except that every time I'd get a dialog box that said, in effect, "Hey! You've only got months left, c'mon and get the updated virus definition file!", clicking on "OK" resulted in the display of a dialog box that said, "Sorry, your license has expired."

Calls and an e-mail or two to tech support were not productive.

So I stopped using it, and started using the evaluation version of Kaspersky AVP. Finally broke down and bought the pro version just a day or so ago.

Cheers...

Re:

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

My license has been up for over a year, but I keep downloading the new virus updates. I'll check into the Kaspersky thing, though.

Not to be a constant Microsoft basher, but....

[volkris.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling your computer problems, network neighborhood and all, are a problem with Windows and not necessarily hardware related.

Whenever I have any trouble with network neighborhood (Windows file/print sharing) it's ALWAYS windows without fail. And I have quite a lot of these problems.

On the network I have set up here right now I have one Linux box running Samba and three windows computers. Samba can see all of the computers constantly without fail, but the three computers can only see each other and the linux box intermittiantly (meaning both that they appear in the network neighborhood and that you can go to run and type \\hostname). I take the Samba out of the network to make sure that's not causing a problem and it's no change. There's really nothing I can see to do about it all, and I've given up troubleshooting the whole setup. Now I run an ftp server on each machine and ftp everything back and forth. It's a drag, but....

To further confuse things, even when one particular computer, the best one, can see another computer, it can only seem to download from it for about 4 minutes before it resets the connection. This had me looking all over the place at my hardware until I looked at the debugging messages on the Linux box and saw that the computer had randomly decided that it didn't want to keep reading data and reset the socket (and then complained that it wasn't getting data).

Argh, the buggyness that is windows! This should be the simplest thing in the world seeing as all of the computers running windows are running the same version of it, but no. The worst thing about Windows is, I think, that it doesn't break consistantly so it's impossible to trace the problem back to its source.

Anyway, enough ranting, you should be able to run diagnostics on the network cards to get a count of retransmitted packets on both Ethernet and TCP levels. This would tell you if there is any problem with your hardware because a glitch would probably show up as a burst of retransmitting, right? Just a thought.

Re: Not to be a constant Microsoft basher, but....

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I installed LapLink Gold on the machines and things seem to work... no time to really excerise (or analyze) the network, but the files got moved.

Thanks for the idea.

Cheers...

[annathyst]

I replaced the hubs in my home network with switches a while back.
100Base-TX full-duplex file transfers are fun. :)