This week brought a sweet ending to a bitter problem, namely my crazy Windows 2000 NAT ( network address translation if you haven't been diligently following me, and shame on you ).
After my many battles trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, I gave up and called Microsoft technical support. For a recap, I had followed Microsoft's steps to setting up NAT to the letter, but without final success. Experimenting on my own brought the same result. I was a desperate man: I had cable internet access installed some weeks earlier and needed to share it on my home network to appease my riotous relatives.
I'm part of the Microsoft Direct Access reseller's group and therefore had free "emergency" access to technical support if one of my client's networks was down. Having never tried it out I thought this would be a good time, for the sake of the review of course. It was midnight by the time I called, and after speaking a few minutes to someone about my access ID, I was put on hold for twenty minutes. I didn't mind since it was toll free, plus I was watching Letterman. I then spoke with an MCSE tech rep who walked me through the NAT setup, trying a few different things but getting no internet connection on any of the network's clients. We tried a few things but finally came to setting the clients to use the server as the Default Gateway. Once this was established I added this setting to my DHCP server and had the internet humming.
Since I had a tech on the phone I asked him about the various errors I was getting in Event Viewer: remote access, ATAPI and DNS. For most errors I go to Microsoft TechNet and look up the error code, but these weren't listed. The remote access error involved the Internal device, but was because I wasn't using dial in access and was disabled by the system. The ATAPI error indicated the write back cache was disabled on my boot drive on startup; this he couldn't explain but thought it was normal. I've had the same error on a Western Digital boot drive as well; maybe it's the drivers. The last errors were six DNS problems, which looked to me like the reverse lookup that disappeared after I changed my DNS server from being a root server. Again this couldn't be explained by it hasn't troubled me so I ignore them.
I asked about why a lot of errors didn't show on TechNet: he said until the tech that notes them cleans up and closes his help ticket they're left in the internal records but not published for the public. Reasonable and safe for a company as large as Microsoft.
With internet access finally flying footloose and fancy free, I turned my attention to the network. As I said the downstairs network runs off CAT5 cabling pulled to three rooms. The upstairs network consisted of two machines linked via HomePNA ( phone line network association ). These are very easy to set up and implement; install the card and treat it as any NIC, connect it to the phone line and due to same with all PC's. I had the two running peer to peer but wanted to connect them to the downstairs network. My first thought was to add a HomePNA NIC to my server, but that would get very messy. After looking around I found the Farallon Homeline Ethernet Pack; a small adapter that bridges the two networks. You plug the phone line in one end and CAT5 cable in the other, connect it to your hub and voila! The machines saw the server and Ethernet network with no problems, and the network now had five clients showing. The beauty of this product is that it works; simple and easy to install. Included in the box are some cables, internet sharing software and a manual. The only downside to the Homeline Ethernet adapter is it's HomePNA 1.0 compliance, operating at 1 Mb per second instead of the cards rating of 10Mb per second. Still plenty fast for internet access and email. Finally everyone in the house is happy.
My next step is to set up a firewall, but that will have to wait until I can round some products up for the server. I can heartily recommend personal firewall products from Zone Labs and Symantec.
A personal firewall is a piece of software that watches what comes in and out of your computer via the internet. It looks for known items and watches ports for activity; each network type uses a different port, such as HTTP uses port 80 and FTP uses port 21. With a broadband connection you're always available to the internet and open to hacking or other malicious activity.
The easiest and cheapest way to protect yourself is to download a copy of Zone Alarm. It's a free firewall that blocks all incoming and outgoing traffic unless you allow it, either permanently or one time. It's pretty simple to use and doesn't take much memory. Bottom line: you need this product, and for free how can you go wrong?
As for the world outside, this week was very slow for tech news. The big event was Microsoft's official launch of the retail version of Windows Me ( Millennium Edition ). The OEM version has been available to system manufacturers since August, so new machines could be available with it preloaded for the launch. I attended the Toronto launch and was impressed by the Microsoft PR machine in action. Even more impressive was the display of hardware by Hewlett Packard, Microsoft's official launch partner. I've installed my copy of Windows Me, so look for a review next week.
by Scott VanderPloeg
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