[pchelpers] Re: Networking - Calling on all computer gurus for help

Hi Ekhart,

Monday, December 29, 2003, 5:53:05 PM, you wrote:

EGlnl> When i bought my new XP (i still regret not buying a Mac! --
EGlnl> but i'll be getting Linux soon), i thought i'd just try and see
EGlnl> if the MS hype about XP and easy networking is true. Haha, a
EGlnl> good example of M$ lies. They

It IS easy. Try it in DOS, Win 3.1, or original Win 95 and you'll
understand in a hurry!  :)

Networking with Win 3.1 was a pain in the butt; I always used NetBEUI
there.  Of course, TCP/IP was still an alien concept to me then.  :)
However, since the Internet wasn't public then, that wasn't much of a
problem.

Even with Win95/98, still ran across an occasional problem where
everything appeared exactly correct but it wouldn't work, and which
required reinstalling Windows to fix.  I've yet to see that in Win2K
or WinXP.


EGlnl> discontinued support of the excellent, tried, problem-free, and
EGlnl> (if i remember the experts correctly) automatically
EGlnl> self-configuring NetBEUI protocol so far used in Windows and
EGlnl> expect you to undo all settings and protocols in older MS(!)
EGlnl> machines if you want to connect an XP to them.

It's still available in XP Pro (I see later that you know this
already). It'll probably also work if you have XP home and can get the
two needed files from the XP Pro CD.

Nowadays, it's only really good for home networks (see below), and I
doubt that most people would bother to set up two protocols, when can
use just one to share files AND get internet connectivity, even though
it's safer that way.

You can also use IPX/SPX instead, although I don't like it as well as
NetBEUI.


EGlnl> You probably know this, and probably also that the experts are
EGlnl> furious that MS chose the same protocol (TCP/IP) for file
EGlnl> sharing that is used in the Internet. This makes it quite easy
EGlnl> for hackers to break into many computers, depending on the

Unfortunately true, although in single-computer environments, it's not
really an issue. It's also not really an issue in a business
environment with more than a trivial number of computers, since
NetBEUI is not routable (won't go upstream to a higher-level switch in
the same organization). I'm not sure if there are any viable and
realistic alternatives to that.


EGlnl> probably know, the XP firewall is a bad joke since it only
EGlnl> controls traffic in; you'll never know if you've got a trojan
EGlnl> sending out thousands of spam emails a day.)

Not that bad a joke; if I recall correctly, ZoneAlarm was the first to
do it, which I think wasn't too long before XP came out. Might have
been shortly before Win2K, but much of what Microsoft does has a long
lead time, out of necessity.


EGlnl> Before you do anything else, make sure you always restart *all*
EGlnl> computers *individually* even if you changed a setting on only

If getting ghost computers (names that no longer exist because you
renamed then, or names that have the wrong IP address associated with
them, due to network caches remembering the names), you should make
sure that they're all off at the same time. Either that or be prepared
to wait for an uncertain length of time for the problem to go away
when the caches expire. I ran into a cacheing problem just Friday
night.

Most definitely shut down everything and then restart everything,
before you assume that you're done.... it's not so bad with Win2K/XP,
but with Win95/98, you could sometimes change something, and it would
NOT ask you to reboot, but the change could kill something later on
when you DID reboot.  Note that a change to a system may require that
OTHER systems be rebooted; that's probably the problem that you had
that you mention in the PracticallyNetworked thread.


EGlnl> even though, for example, my case of a combined ADSL modem +
EGlnl> router is missing.

Should be basically the same as separate DSL/cable modem and router.


EGlnl> 
http://forums.practicallynetworked.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=9981#post9981.
EGlnl> If i'd known this was going to be such a hell and require so
EGlnl> much time, i'd have paid someone to do it for me. Instead, i
EGlnl> wasted most of my vacation on this!

I looked at your messages there...

You DO need to log in for the networking to work properly. In
Win95/98, it usually logs in automatically for you if you leave the
password box blank the very first time. Once you have it "expecting" a
password, though, it's hard to get it to go back to automatically
logging in, even by using TweakUI. I've seen a couple of computers
where I gave up trying to get them to log on automatically; best I
could do was to simply remove the password so that the user simply
presses ENTER to log on.

Networking is complex because there are so many different possible
configurations. There are entire large books devoted just to PARTS of
networking.

There are quite a few security-related things that are inadequately
documented; you're supposed to change this or that to improve
security, but the documentation is frequently less than clear what the
side-effects of the changes are, so you're pretty much in the position
of making the change just to see if it's workable or not, and if
something fails, you don't really know if it's because of that change
or because of something else.


Your comment in that thread:
> maybe i can hunt down the guy who installed it; he'd know more than
> the help desk.

That's a virtual guarantee. It's hard to do ANYTHING over the phone
(not made easier by having to support multiple OSes, configurations,
applications, etc.), and I'm less than unimpressed by many help desk
people anyway. I once, when I was a tech for Wang, told a help desk
idiot what part I needed a replacement for on the computer that I'd
been sent to look at, and the help desk idiot started off by asking me
to check that the computer was firmly plugged in and that the power
was on.

--Scott.


Regards, John Durham (list moderator) <http://modecideas.com/contact.html?sig>
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