Network Fun & Games

[BladeRnR]

I'm sure almost all of you have had a Network problem and know how frustrating they can be to fix it. You do the basics - Ping, IPConfig, Check Protocols, Check IP's, try Static IP's, DHCP allocated IP's - you know the drill. When you want something fast off another computer and you're in a (Fairly) closed Network, security doesn't have to be as strict. So you use Simple File Sharing to get the job done and worry about adding Users and making it tighter later on.

So that's just what I did recently. Spring is here so it was time for a format of both mine and my Bro's computers. Formats went perfectly and in 2 days we were Formatted, Installed & Imaged with a new Backup. Now my Bro needed some files so out came the LAN cable and we hooked up. Pinged ourselves and remote via NetBIOS name and IP. No problem - full comms. Allocated shares to a couple of our drives and we were off - but not quite.

We&#39;d navigate to each other&#39;s drives using via Explorer using &#092;&#092;<remote share> and then click on the share. Nothing - the busy mouse would start going crazy then Explorer would fail to respond. We couldn&#39;t even look at our OWN shares let alone each others&#33; No matter what I tried from my bag of knowledge worked. 3 days later I was still trying. New Cat 5 cable, different hubs - everything. Reviewed the Event Log extensively and I saw errors in there that would make a Network Admin shudder. How could a simple peer-to-peer Network give anyone so much trouble? I trawled Microsoft&#39;s Newgroups looking for answers and nothing made sense given my scenario. The only way to resolve this was the old fashioned way - inch by inch. So I formatted again.

So first thing I do when I boot into a fresh install of Windows is share C: Drive. Wham - I could see the share. Right - this was either software that was doing this or a Service we were turning off. Bit my bit and put everything back on. The last thing I do with any build is tweak it with TweakXP Pro and TweakUI. Everytime I put new software on I would test the share. It worked right up until I put on....TweakXP Pro and applied my usual tweaks. huh? I took TweakXP Pro off and my share worked again. uhuh. Put TweakXP Pro back on and had 2 windows up - TweakXP Pro and Explorer looking at my share. I&#39;d apply a tweak and test my share. You know what it ended up being? TweakXP Pro Ad Blocker&#33; Yep&#33; As soon as I disabled it locally and remotely the shares were there. I&#39;ve since E-mailed Totalidea Software and they sheepishly replied 2 days later they have a bug :cry: as they replicated the problem themselves.

The moral of this story? Computer problems are sometimes caused by totally unrelated issues. If you look through a typcial WinXP/Win2K Event Viewer you&#39;ll see all kinds of bizarre EventID&#39;s setting you off on the wrong course of action. One of the best ways I&#39;ve found in solving a Computer problem (And this goes for my Professional job as well) - find out what changed. The only way you can do that sometimes is to go back to a vanilla state and see if it works then. If it does then something that&#39;s coming AFTER is causing the problem.

And last of all you never stop learning :)

Cheers

Blade

[onslaught]

*amen*

/me passes the donation plate around :)

[_WTF_Raiden]

Reminds me of the time Windows wouldn&#39;t shutdown or restart...and when it did it took about 5 minutes. Uninstalled practically everything and then did a reinstall...and worked out it was my friggin Logitech Keyboard software&#33; So now I gotta turn it off manually before restarting - since windows seems to have trouble doing it.

[MadMax]

I&#39;ve been through similar sorts of problem finding missions, and the methodical approach eventually gets to the heart of the problem, but very frustrating when it turns out to be that dumb a problem.

My networking solution wouldn&#39;t see shared folders either, and in the end it was just zonealarm stopping it. Grrrr.

And yes many problems are totally unrelated to what you might think it is, and most often it&#39;s the fault of the stupid user&#33;

I borrowed a swanky IBM keyboard and could no longer hold CNTL and SPACE at the same time, making it impossible to duck jump in half life mods (under my configs anyway), and vaguely recall that shared folders across my LAN started misbehaving when this keyboard was installed, suffice to say I uninstalled it, and went back to my old sticky key keyboard.

And on that note, I sent an sms to someone other day saying i was having a cheese and ham sanger for lunch, but with those phones that predict words it ended up sending "cheese and ibm sandwich", which was quite funny coz the person i sent it too works at ibm or does she work for ham??&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;

Cheers,
Max

[MrBigglesworth]

I had a funny problem with battlefield 1942 along these lines. Playing a game of desert combat and as usual yelling my head off at smacktards that dont know how to use a vehicle they probably stole from me when I got kicked from server.

I thought a GA admin had banned me because after that ild have 10 seconds in game and it would give me disconected from server. I tried other non GA server, it seemed to work for 5 minutes then disconnect. It worked fine for RTCW:ET and Medal of Honor AA and Half life mods, just not for Battlefield.
I was baffled why, reinstalled 4-5 times, checked our lan network, maunual and auto ip and all that other ip B.S. What in the end I found out after almost 2 weeks is that for a change we hadnt been turning our cable modem off every night. Pulled out the power and tried it again and it worked no problems. Now when ever I have a problem in my trouble shooting for battlefield I turn off the modem. :)