h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Lil
Some of tyhe things I found were not fleas, they were fully fledged vampire bloodsuckers.

I should point out my neices and nephews had been playing on the machines concerned, so bob knows what sites they had visited.
The beasties had got in despite the machines having a software firewall (Macaffe) and up to date antivirus.

As we know only too well, once one bit of cruft gets a foothold it invites all it's mates in.

After cleaning and a thourgh antivirus scan the systems were still playing up. read that as like running through treacle.

IE still behaved strangely, there were tasks running which definatly should not have been there and the firewall (zone alarm) was reporting a lot of blocked outgoing attempts.

There were (at least) two groups of them that seemed to survive.

The first group were seen by the spyware removers but the cleaning was ineffective.
Re running adaware and spybot after cleaning and without reconnecting the machines to the internet. still showed them present and even though they claimed to have removed them, so the little b******s must have had a hidden installer still on the system.

The second group I found by checking the task list, after start up without any applications running (having disabled as much stuff at start up as I could) and then googling for anything which I didn't recognise as legitimate.

The final straw was that removing some of the nasties damaged legitimate aplications as well.
So I gave up and did a reinstall.

LTP, just so you know, I am not any of the people on my wiki at the moment. This is it's default configuration. I have done nothing with it yet.

I invite any techy geeky friends of mine to play with my wiki, to populate it with whatever information tickles your fancy. This is to be a repository of information. If you have a good trick you want to post, if you have something cool that you want to share, please put it on my wiki. I would love to see it become a resource for all my geek friends.

thanks Marv!

Marv, a few quick points about the wiki. When I try to edit the sandbox page, it says another user [127.0.0.1] edited the page while I was working on it. This happened several times, and there were never any observed changes. The end result was that I couldn't save any changes to the sandbox.

Also, clicking on "author login" took me to the start page - so I don't understand how I login, if that is required at all, or how I begin a new entry

dave, drop me an email at marv.white gmail com with your preferred username and password (note that the password is in plaintext to me, so choose it wisely don't use your real password if you have one) and I will add you to the db.

I am fighting that same issue as well on some other pages. It seems that once someone edits a page the cookies are not allowign anyone else to edit the page. Obviously 127.0.0.1 is me...

Dave, try it again. I think that I found a bug, and then I found that there was a later release of the software. I was running 1.5.8 and 1.5.10 was out.

I am still playing with the software and I will try to get some content on it. I open it up to all my geek friend to add whatever content they woudl like.

ahh, much improved. I edited the sandbox, and added my name to the list of recent vistors. I still can't find an author login though...I'm sending you an email.

Updating to the latest version helped.

Requiem for a router.

My Linksys BEFSR41 has bitten the dust

I came home today to find it dead and attempts at resuscitation were a failure, it looks like it has fried something internally.
So after 4 years of continuous faithful service it has been reluctantly committed to the parts for future projects bin.

Fortunately a quick trip into town has procured a WRTG54 which looks identical, except for the wireless ariels sticking up at the back, which means I'm back up and running without any mucking about, and my work laptop is now connected from the coffee table without the trailing piece of cat 5 to trip over

BB my housemate has a WTRG54 as well. It works great with my airport on the apple.

I have a wireless BEFW11S4 and a wired RT31p2. Not that I really know what that means.

I have a crossover cable

I have a wireless gateway, a Cisco PIX firewall, a Cisco 3002 VPN concentrator, a linksys switch, two Cisco 7960 IP phones, two IBM hubs, numerous cables, and a Cisco 776 ISDN router that I will never use.

we have to routinely power cycle our router. It's a linksys, similar to the models y'all have listed above. Any ideas why this is happening? Also, I using comcast "high" speed internet, but sometimes it drops down to 30 kb/s. What's the deal with that?

As for the router, I would look to see if there are any firmware updates available for it.

For the High Speed internet going 30k/sec I would consider that most cable nodes are vastly oversubscribed. You don't always get the speed they tell you that you will get.

Dave

Q1 How often do you have to cycle the router?

Q2 Are you allocated a static IP by Comcast or is it automatically allocated (dhcp) ?


As for slow speeds
It may be overload on your cable segment but It could also be the sites your connecting to being overloaded at peak periods.

router cycling averages about 1 per week. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but about on average 1 per week.

We are DHCP. The IP address has been changed on us 1 time in the last 4 months.

I witnessed the slow 30 kb/s speed doing an FTP transfer between home and MIT late at night, a couple nights in a row. Sometimes the transfer is OK. Sometimes I'm back down at 30.

What exactly is a "firmware" update? Is that like a bios update, which I would apply to the router? I will definitely look.

Thanks for the help!

firmware is the software that the router uses as it's os. There are often updates online for various products.

Dave

It could be a dhcp renewal failure.
checking on my setup the dhcp lease from the cable modem is about 7 days (it's quoted in seconds)
Might be worth checking your logs.