For the past week I’ve had agro from two of our users who have recently had new laptops and been unable to vpn into our network. The vpn connection is established but no traffic is passed through to the lan. The weird thing is that the wireless card on one of the machines would pass traffic but the lan connection wouldn’t. I spent about 5 hours troubleshooting this last week and thought I had a working solution until the next morning when it stopped working again.
This morning I spent an hour systematically working through symantecs troubleshooting guide and finally found this document:- Symantec VPN Client connectivity problems on IBM ThinkPad Laptops and guess what these new laptops are?
Turns out that IBM include some special software that automatically work out where you are connected and fiddle with the tcpip stack appropriately. As soon as I removed the IBM access software from running tasks I was able to ping the network – I was SOOO relieved as I really was starting to get worried about how I was going to fix this problem.
I’ve now decided that if someone asks me to fix virus/spyware problems then I’ll remove any kazaa type programs before I even start (which may sound obvious!) and also change their default browser to firefox. I’ll probably also start installing Mozilla Thunderbird (and disabling outlook express) as an email client, although I need to dogfood that myself so I can support it better. If the person doesn’t agree to these three changes then I just walk away from the pc. Not only will this hopefully save me time in disinfecting the machine *now* but it will hopefully reduce the number of problems infections that occur in the future.
The more section contains a list and link of most recent extensions to install which I really need to write up as a static page to link off the main page on this site.
Next post should be some quick “getting started instructions”
For some weird reason my cache feed only picked up one of my finds from yesterday. I’ve also realised that the main page won’t update unless I post a new item to the main page either so I’m going to have to rethink that idea (or post more often)
TR/dldr.delf.CB.1*2
BDS/Haxdoor.BH*3
TR/dldr.small.ait
TR/Drop.Funweb.A
Drop.Small.NK
BDS/Haxdoor.BH.1*2
PMS.WildTangent.B.1
Interestingly Norton had already detected and deleted a couple of these files but didn’t detect any of the others. I had to boot from a Windows UltimateBootCD, download new dats for avpersonal and then run a scan. The Avpersonal only took 30 minutes to run, the Trendmicro one has been going for about an hour and is still going. Its a good job I don’t charge by the hour.
Had a bit of a scare this morning when the home machine refused to boot. Basically the computer froze after displaying the Bios version and CPU speed and refused to go any further. After taking everything out this evening it booted up so I then tried to remember what I had changed, and then remembered the (non powered) USB2 hub I got last week. Unplugged it and the machine booted up ok. Plugged it back in again, with nothing attached to the hub and the same thing happened. Therefore the hub is now sitting on my desk. Not sure whether I can be bothered going through the hassle of getting it replaced…the weird thing is that the hub works when the machine is booted up. Having said all that I’m wondering if the PSU is being maxed out as the machine also refuses to boot if I have a usb thumbdrive plugged into it when I boot up.
Not that I’m up to anything dodgy but artisolve’s anonymous proxy looks quite handy.
With the aid of the Movable type mt-rssfeed plugin, I’ve now got my cache finds automatically posted to my Absocachinlutely site as a site item. This means the webpage is updated automatically and I don’t have to post each find as a unique post.
Tried to install the wpblacklist plugin this afternoon but have run into several problems, probably due to the security setup on the server. It initially wouldn’t install as WPblacklist-install.php didn’t have permissions set to 644. After the installation ran through, I had to change the permissions in wp-admin to wpblacklist, wpblmoderate and wpblsearch.php files to 644 then it all seemed to work.
I’ve been meaning to try out some digital photo printing services, especially after Kristen got the scrapbooking bug and wants to print lots of photos out. Yesterday morning I placed an order for 10 prints from truprint and they arrived in the post this morning. That is what I call fast turnaround. I don’t know if its because the order was flagged as a first order (and therefore fast-tracked) or whether this is normal service.
The interesting thing is that they offer a service where the photo’s aren’t actually 6×4″ due to the prevention of cropping of the photos as apparently digital photos don’t fit in with this aspect ratio.
The quality of the photos that came out is very good and I’d use them again. If you fancy using the service then drop me an email using my contact mail as that way I get some photos free as a referral or you can just sign up without referral here. Wish they’d have a straightforward referral link though!
There’s a patch available for Mambo, where Tar.php is exposed to XSS injection. I’ve upgraded our installation (and also upgraded the mambo installation to the version prior to this update too