President's Report

There is nothing quite so frustrating as a network that won't. Penny was, quite rightly, complaining that her modem kept disconnecting. So, after reloading drivers and trying various modem strings all to no avail I decided to share my modem over the network. ie I decided to use Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). After all it made sense, quite often we both wanted to go on the net simultaneously, my modem was reliable and everybody knows how good XP is at ICS!

There is a wizard in XP which does it all for you so I started it up, created the floppy to configure
Penny's machine, and installed it. That's when my problems started. The network didn't.

I uninstalled ICS; nothing; I reloaded the network protocol drivers; nothing; I updated the network card drivers; nothing; You can guess I was getting pretty frustrated by now. When installing ICS I had moved my machine so I checked the network cable connections; you guessed it – nothing!

The trouble with a non-functioning network when you only have two machines on the network is that it's very difficult to work out what's wrong. Is it this machine? is it that one? is it the network cable? is it a network card and if so which one? The only reliable and systematic way of solving the problem is to introduce a new machine, get it working with one machine then with the other then let the original machines talk together. I did all that - would they talk together - yes - Yay! - but oh so slowly and I couldn't save files across the network.

Do you know about Ping? Ping is a lovely program, it comes with your computer and is designed to test networks. The way it's used is, at the DOS prompt, enter 'Ping ComputerName' (without the quotes). Ie Ping Penny or Ping www.microsoft.com. What it does is search for the computer/web page and tell you how long it took to connect to it - or what's more important in my case - that it couldn't connect to it. Try it - even if you do not have a network - it will try to dial out and connect to a site. It's a program to remember for that time when your system doesn't work.

I Ping'd everywhere, Penny's machine would, my machine wouldn't - but they were talking! I was extremely pinged off!

Having loaded XP Service Pack 2 some time ago, I had decided to use the Microsoft firewall instead of Zone Alarm. So I turned ZA off by removing it from the start-up menu. I now realise that, since then, I had had intermittent problems connecting to and surfing the net. Some pages refused to open (as happens sometimes anyway), Norton Antivirus Live Update didn't - I spent days trying to resolve that one – and my connection speed seemed low. I had checked on Penny's machine and she could access the pages that I couldn't so there was nothing wrong on the net. Bloody Microsoft SP2!

Spent ages searching the net for answers to my problem, - it's not easy to describe this problem in a search engine - 'page will not load' - 'slow modem' etc. At last I found a comment in a technical forum where someone else had a similar problem, blamed it on ZA which they had similarly 'stopped' and their problems went away only when they completely uninstalled ZA. So I did a complete uninstall, and my network did, and the Internet did.

Oh the pleasure of seeing the Norton Live Update icon appear automatically when I went on the net, of opening the pages normally again, of having a reasonable speed connection again! It appears that ZA makes modifications to the registry and in particular resets the TPC stack - whatever that is. So if you no longer want to use Zone Alarm - uninstall it - don't just turn it off. Don't get me wrong I really rate Zone Alarm, I use it on Penny's machine (Win 98) and it has never President’s Report let me down and it's free. It took me about two weeks of searching the net to find this answer - took a lot of trying this and that - rebooted thousands of times. Drank gallons of coffee and nearly got divorced! And I learned a few things!

I learned that we cannot access every Internet site. It appears that some sites on the seven name servers (the sites that convert www.microsoft.com into an address like 23.233.1.33) do not have all the addresses and there are sites like free.tibet that you can’t access. Suggest you go to www.support.open-rsc.org for instructions how to access the additional sites. It will take time to research the implications of this additional access – and I have spent all my time this month sorting out my network so have nothing to report on the advantages of adding additional DNS servers. There is a reference to it on the Microsoft site that implies that the American government has a hand in restricting the names – who knows – and I thought the Internet was free of interference.

I suppose all that time spent searching and fiddling did do me some good. I learned more about networks, firewalls and the Internet – so it wasn’t time completely wasted – only wish I hadn’t drunk as much coffee and lost so much sleep!

We have a new project, to make a club CD or DVD if necessary. The idea is to provide all club members with a CD containing lots of files, of shareware or freeware programs, of drivers for things like modems and video cards and anything else we find is useful. I know spend a great deal of time searching for programs, for tools to do certain things and to have a good chance of getting them from one CD will make my life easier. It still needs some working out but the idea is that members send programs to a common point with a description of the program and we put it on a CD with a front end interface like magazines do. It won’t be as flashy as magazines but it won’t have the garbage and fillers that come with most mags CDs these days. Watch this space.

See you at St Giles

Rog