The New Computer Problems Thread

[Reese Tora]

It's possible your ISP is blocking bittorrent.  There's some programs that include stealthing options so ISPs can't detect it to block it, but that stealthing is kinda hit or miss depending on how you ISP is detecting and blocking (assuming they are)

[Aridas]

They wouldn't be blocking bit torrent, they've got EVERY SINGLE ONE of my ports returning a result as stealthed by online tests.

[Reese Tora]

well, your modem/router... what make and model is it, and what ports are you having it forward to your computer? Is it set to put your computer in a virtual DMZ?

From your reported IP address, It's already obvious it's acting as a NAT enabled router, which means it may also be acting as a hardware firewall and just dropping the incomming packets that are not return traffic to requests from inside your home network.

since the original problem is limited or no function using bittorrent (when you said unconnectable, you mean as in it's not performing at all, right?) I would guess that the packets are not reaching your computer.  Some ISPs specifically block bittorent traffic, and a lack of forwarding by a modem/router (which is the default state fo affairs) would more than explain the apaprent stealth rating.

I'll admit that I don't have much any experience in probing computers for vulnerabuility, but I would suppose that only some processes will respond to traffic, and only if the ports that serve those processes are open.

If you have windows firewall turned off, then there are only two other things between your computer and the site you are testing with: your modem/router, and your ISP.  As ISPs don't, as a rule, block most traffic on most ports, that leaves two possibilities: either your computer is screwed up some how (always possible, but you said you made a clean install, so unlikely) or your modem/router is dropping the packets.

can you give me the link to the site you're using to test with? I'd like to test it out and see what kind of tests and results it gives.

[Aridas]

1. It's a SpeedStream 6520. I'm trying to forward ANY ports. I've had entire ranges opened to test them and coming out unsuccessful. There's a DMZ option, but on or not made absolutely no difference.

2. unconnectable as in I can still connect to some people, but I'm losing potential connections. I pretty much get a red icon rather than green or yellow.

3. Yeah. It used to work on all my computers, now it DOESN'T work on all my computers. I bet if I checked on my wii for the hell of it, I'd get the same result

4. http://www.grc.com/default.htm Scroll down and find Shields UP!!

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

... what IP address did you put into GRC? Putting your desktop IP address in won't work, because that's not a public range, and, as such, it'll get dropped by the first internet router between GRC and you...

[Aridas]

er, doesn't it use the IP that it detects? because i'm pretty sure it didn't give me a choice of IP... and it wasn't 192.168.x.x

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Ah, right. Yes. Interesting. Not totally useful, but interesting nonetheless.

.. at least, for my link here.

I see what you mean, though. I'd still confirm that the IP address they supplied -was- the IP address on your router, though. It might well be the IP address of the web proxy that your ISP provides without telling you about it...

[Aridas]

It was. The modem reports the number when you check the home networking information.

[superluser]

Quick!  I deleted my /usr directory (or possibly mv'd it to .usr)!  What do I do?

Oh, wait, that was another superluser.

Sorry.  Just thought that this thread could use a bit of levity.

[GabrielsThoughts]

Quick problem,  with windows Vista I recently uninstalled WinRAR and now my computer allows me to compress files, but I am unable to extract the zipped files. I tried to use system restore but it didn't help. what should I do?

[Vidar]

Quick problem,  with windows Vista I recently uninstalled WinRAR and now my computer allows me to compress files, but I am unable to extract the zipped files. I tried to use system restore but it didn't help. what should I do?

I'm no vista user, but from what I've read, you're better off waiting until service pack 25 has been released, before 'upgrading' to vista.

Vista has a lot of problems with apps that aren't specifically adapted for vista.

I would suggest going back to XP, if that's an option.

[GabrielsThoughts]

the computer was purchased as a Vista

Edit: I hate to ask but does winzip still exist?

[Vidar]

the computer was purchased as a Vista

Edit: I hate to ask but does winzip still exist?

http://www.winzip.com/

Yes, it does.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

If you're still interested, winzip also supports rar... I don't know if that's still an issue...

[Roureem Egas]

Ok, I've come across a bit of a problem. Last night, I asked my dad to download Microsoft Access onto my laptop for me since I'll be needing it for my homework this weekend. The thing is, I might have had it before and uninstalled the thing. Normally, I wouldn't think too much about it, but when I put in the CD my dad kept for Microsoft Office 2002 and tried to install Access by itself, my laptop kept saying that the access key code was wrong. We kept trying it for a while until my dad gave up and decided to try Microsoft Office 2000 Premium, or something like that. So now I have Access but all my other Office programs have been downgraded from 2002 to 2000.

My question is: is it advisable to uninstall all of Microsoft Office and then reinstall with MO 2002? I was thinking that the reason it failed earlier is because there already was MO 2002 programs installed, which is a stupid thought I admit. I'm also a bit afraid that doing so might delete all my documents and papers and/or fail to install again. Help please? 

[Reese Tora]

Your documents should be fine, they're saved seperate from word, excel, etc.

Your custom settings will be lost, but that's usually not much.

You should be able to reinstall without trouble if you do uninstall.

[Roureem Egas]

Alright, thanks Reese. I'll have to do that over the weekend since I still have stupid essay writing to do now and due in two days. I'll be forever slow on these.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

It won't delete your documents, but it's possible you won't get it reinstalled without reinstalling your machine (yay microsoft) and -that- will. So just take it a little slow, is all.

What you may find, however, is that your licence key for O2k2 is a "standard" key, not a "premium" key, and the standard drops Access from the list of apps. This I'm not sure about, because I haven't installed windows apps for a while, and prefer to avoid the whole mess when possible, but certainly in the past, there were two different versions with two different prices attached.

If the 2k2 cd you're installing from doesn't match the stuff you already have installed, chances are it'll fail in New and Interesting ways. So yeah, remove and reinstall is a good plan.



Personally I'd rather install OpenOffice or the Gnu versions (not an office suite, but Abiword and Gnumeric) but they each have their peculiarities, and it sounds like you need the microsoft versions to keep your professors happy, so...

OO is closer to what you'd expect MSOffice to show you, even so, but, to my knowledge, there's not really a "msaccess" type app available for unix and/or free - on unix, it tends to be "install a real DB and write your own frontend in perl or php or java" (where "real DB" is one of postgresql, mysql, oracle, etc, as the local tastes vary. Whichever floats your boat, really.)

[Tapewolf]

I need to run a scheduled task on Ubuntu.  It seems to use some confusing mixture of cron and anacron.  Since it's a daily backup operation I've bunged it into cron.daily and tried to reconfigure it to run the whole lot at 10pm.

The line from crontab reads:

00 22 * * * root  test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

Shell scripts aren't my forte but it's just occurred to me that that probably means "run anacron if it exists, otherwise run the cron.daily job".
That still leaves the question of why the hell anacron is running its stuff at 8am or something instead of 10pm.

Any ideas? How do you control the hour at which anacron does it's stuff?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

You don't. Anacron, by design, is a non-specific time sequence.

I -think- it runs based on when you last restarted your machine, +x*24hrs (where x is the number of days the machine has been online), with added algorithm to re-schedule if your machine has been offline.

What you want, however, is simply:
0 22 * * * exec /root/bin/your_script

.. in "crontab -l root", and avoid the cron.daily thing entirely - mostly because there's usually -other- stuff in cron.daily that probably shouldn't be fiddled with, and the time sequences are set to avoid the monthly, weeks, and hourly stuff.

In my case, the hourly one runs at 17 minutes past the hour, the daily at 6:25, the weekly at 6:47 on monday, and the monthly at 6:52 on the 1st. This is so you don't get mass server loading all at one time.


((also, if you're really interested, pass me the script and I'll look it over, and offer suggestions. I do a -little- bit of scripting for work, so... :-] ))

[Tapewolf]

You don't. Anacron, by design, is a non-specific time sequence.

That's pretty crap for a server.

What you want, however, is simply:
0 22 * * * exec /root/bin/your_script

Yes, that's probably the best approach.  I've appended it to the master crontab for now - I guess we'll see if it worked in the morning.

**EDIT**
As an aside, do you happen to know how to get SVN to authenticate against an Active Directory system running on windows 2003?  The guy who set up our SVN server left and I've been keeping it ticking over.  Then the HDD failed 

Currently it's all there except that it's not authenticated so everyone on the LAN has full access, which is not ideal.

**EDIT EDIT**
Yes, the cron job has worked nicely.  Thanks.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

No, because our svn is on a totally different network to the AD, and I wouldn't want it under AD anyway.

I'll see if I can find something somewhat later - I presume there's no immediate rush on it, right?


Edit:
I presume http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2006-01/0067.shtml and following doesn't help much?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

... also:
http://www.subversionary.org/sspidomainauth
and
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Apache2_with_subversion_SVN_and_DAV (although you didn't say you were using apache with svn)

might be of use...

[Tapewolf]

No, because our svn is on a totally different network to the AD, and I wouldn't want it under AD anyway.

I know, but unfortunately we're mostly a Microsoft shop at the moment.  And no, there's not much of a rush.  Now that we have SVN working again at all (yes, it is through Apache2) there are more important things for me to do and I'll get back to it at some later stage.

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out although I believe the first one is pretty much what I've already done 

[Kitsune Ascendant]

I think my desktop just bit the big one, but in case there's any hope for its survival, I'm going to post my problem here. Here are the basics:

emachines t2825. Basically, it started acting really weird, and when I tried to turn it off with the power button, it wouldn't respond even after holding it in for several seconds. then, when I try to turn it back on, it wont even do that at first, then it alternates between not being able to be turned on and turning on without being able to be turned off. in the latter case, nothing appears on the screen, and I get no beep codes, but the hard drive light is continuously on. I have tried this with and without the hard drives plugged in, no change. if there is anything at all I can do to get the computer working again, please tell me.

[superluser]

emachines t2825. Basically, it started acting really weird, and when I tried to turn it off with the power button, it wouldn't respond even after holding it in for several seconds. then, when I try to turn it back on, it wont even do that at first, then it alternates between not being able to be turned on and turning on without being able to be turned off. in the latter case, nothing appears on the screen, and I get no beep codes, but the hard drive light is continuously on. I have tried this with and without the hard drives plugged in, no change. if there is anything at all I can do to get the computer working again, please tell me.

The first thing I'd try is a different power supply.  It could be that there is a short in the motherboard or the power supply.

It's a remote chance, but if you have access to a power supply, it's worth a shot.

[Destina Faroda]

Not a computer question, per se, but an Internet connection/site problems.

For close to a year and a half, I have had difficulty connecting to March On, Black Queen.  Most people I have talked to have no problem reaching the site, and I have e-mailed the site's owner about this and have received a response (so the mail servers associated with this domain name obviously still work).  At first I thought it was just a problem with my computer/firewall/router, since there was intermittent access.  However, I decided to look up the domain name using DNS STUFF tools, and this is what I found:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?&domain=houseofwacks.org

For the NS records tests, it fails, reading:

A timeout occurred getting the NS records from your nameservers! None of your nameservers responded fast enough. They are probably down or unreachable. I can't continue since your nameservers aren't responding. If you have a Watchguard Firebox, it's due to a bug in their DNS Proxy, which must be disabled (31 Jul 2006 UPDATE: several years after being informed of this, there is a rumor that there is a fix that allows the Watchguard DNS proxy to work).

However another DNS lookup site reports everything is fine:

http://www.dnswatch.info/dns/dnslookup?la=en&host=houseofwacks.org&type=A&submit=Resolve

So what's going on here?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

* llearch n'n'daCorna looks

Ew!

The two DNS servers for the domain are right next to each other, netwise. According to the RFC's (basic instruction documents for how the 'Net works) there should be at least two domain servers, and on two different networks.

As it stands, if the network is down to one, it'll be down to both. Which may explain some of the intermittent access issues.

Tracing the network traffic, from here I get through Level3 (major backbone) and then get DimeNoc-edge1.HostDime.com and 72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com

I'd say they've gone cheap on the DNS, and you're paying the dime. :-/

If you know they aren't changing, you add an entry for this into your hosts file, but it's unlikely to do you much good, as the webserver is right next to the two DNS servers (web on .9, dns on .10 and .11...) so if you can't see the DNS, you probably can't see the webserver either...

Sadly.. I don't think there's much you can do about it. :-/ If you could run "traceroute houseofwacks.org" next time it's giving you grief, and paste the result, that might help. Of course, you might have to do "traceroute 72.29.83.9" (that is, open a command prompt, and paste either command into it..)

Does that make sense, or would you like more details?

[Destina Faroda]

I'm going to continue this over PM for privacy reasons. (Even if someone can trace my location easily, I don't need the whole world to know which neighborhood I live in.)

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

That's fair enough.