dbasnett - Developer IT

My Big Break - this is my story and I am sticking to it ;)

- by dbasnett

The value of undertaking new and difficult tasks can have many wonderful consequences, don't you agree? Here is the story of my big break. Remember yours? During the mid 70's I was in the Navy and worked as a computer operator at the CNO's Command and Control computer system (WWMCCS) in the Washington Navy Yard. I was a tape ape, but knew that I wanted to be a systems programmer. One day the Lieutenant in charge of the OS group was running a test that required the development system to be re-booted, and I was politely hinting that I wanted out of computer operations. As he watched the accounting tape rewind to BOT and then search for where it had just been (severalminutes) he told me if I would fix "that" he would have me transferred. I couldn't say "Deal" fast enough. Up until then my programming experience had been on Edsger Dijkstra's favorite computer (sic), an IBM 1620. It took almost 6 months of learning the assembler for the Honeywell 6000 and finding the code responsible for rewinding the tape and then forwarding it. After much trial and error at o’dark thirty I succeeded. The tape barely moved and my “patch” was later adopted by many other sites. Lieutenant Jack Cowan kept his promise and I have gone on to have a varied and enjoyable career. To Jack, and the rest of the crew (Ken, Stu, Neil, Tom, Silent W, Mr. Jacobs, Roy, Rocco, etc.) I’d like to thank you all.

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Windows XP SP3 - Upgrade - No longer part of workgroup

- by dbasnett

When I woke up this morning I decided to have a really lousy day. For a long time I have been telling auto updater to remind me later about installing SP3. But not this morning... It looked good, until I tried to access my NAS. Can't connect, can't see it, nothing. The other computers can see it, so it is my PC. Oh, and they can no longer see me. It turns out the only thing I can see is the printer. So if you know what wonderful thing Microsoft decided to change during the upgrade (oxymoron in my opinion), I would be grateful. Short of turning on all of the services I have tried so many things, and rebooted so often, that I am just sick of it.

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NAT / PAT Theoretical Question

- by dbasnett

Given the following simplistic network Would it be possible to construct NAT / PAT pools such that the PC's attached to the network could be identified by their port number. I understand that if I assign a public IP to each user I can identify them. What I am trying to do is to conserve Public IP's, but maintain the ability to identify the user from the public network. If your answer is vendor specific that is OK with me. Thanks in advance.

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ICMP - TTL - Trace Route

- by dbasnett

I asked this question at Stack Overflow and then thought this may be the better place to ask. Given the following situation: PC --- |aa RTR1 bb| --- |aa RTR2 bb| --- |aa RTR3 bb| etc Each of the |aa rtr bb| is meant to be a router with two ports aa and bb. My question is this. When you do a trace route from PC which router port address should respond with time to live exceeded in transit message? I seem to remember being taught to think of the router as being in as many parts as ports, so that in my scenario when aa is forwarding the packet to bb and decrements the ttl to 0, it will be the address of the aa port in the failure message. I am trying to find the definitive answer. Thanks.

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Ping / Trace Route

- by dbasnett

More and more I see programmers developing web based applications that are based on what I call "ping-then-do" mentality. An example would be the application that pings the mail server before sending the mail. In a rather heated debate in another forum I made this statement, "If you are going to write programs that use the internet, you should at least have a basic idea of the fundamentals. The desire to "ping-then-do" tells me that many who are, don’t." On this forum and at Stack Overflow I see numerous questions about ping / trace route and wonder why? If it is acceptable to have a discussion about it here I would like to hear what others think. If not I assume it will be closed rapidly.

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d-link 4500 - Not visible in tracert

- by dbasnett

I can ping my router (192.168.1.1), but it does not show up in the tracert. My router is a d-Link 4500 v1.22. Is it some config item I have missed?

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Amusing or Sad? Network Solutions

- by dbasnett

When I got sick my email ended up in every drug sellers email list. Some days I get over 200 emails selling everything from Viagra to Xanax. Either they don't know what my condition is or they are telling me you are a goner, might as well chill-ax and have a good time. In order to cut down on the mail being downloaded I thought I would add all of the Junk email senders from Outlook to my Network Solution mail server. Much to my amazement I could not find that import Spammers button, so I submitted a tech support request. Here is the response: Thank you for contacting Network Solutions Customer Service Department. We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible. One of the first ways we can demonstrate our commitment to this goal is to quickly and efficiently handle your recent request. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers. An alternative option is for you to create a Custom Filter that filters unwanted e-mails. To create a Custom Filter: Open a Web browser (e.g., Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.). Type mail.[domain name].[ext] in the address line. Login to your Network Solutions email account. Click on the Configuration left menu tab. Click on the Custom Filter link. Type the rule name. blah, blah, blah Basically add them one at a time. "We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible." No you are not. You are trying to squeeze every nickle you can out of me. "With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers." Maybe I should apply for a job to write those ten complicated lines of code... Maybe I should question my choice of vendors, because if they truly "cannot" then they are to stupid to have my business. It is both amusing and sad. I'll be posting this in every forum I am a member of.

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Amusing or Sad? Network Solutions

- by dbasnett

When I got sick my email ended up in every drug sellers email list. Some days I get over 200 emails selling everything from Viagra to Xanax. Either they don't know what my condition is or they are telling me you are a goner, might as well chill-ax and have a good time. In order to cut down on the mail being downloaded I thought I would add all of the Junk email senders from Outlook to my Network Solution mail server. Much to my amazement I could not find that import Spammers button, so I submitted a tech support request. Here is the response: Thank you for contacting Network Solutions Customer Service Department. We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible. One of the first ways we can demonstrate our commitment to this goal is to quickly and efficiently handle your recent request. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers. An alternative option is for you to create a Custom Filter that filters unwanted e-mails. To create a Custom Filter: Open a Web browser (e.g., Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.). Type mail.[domain name].[ext] in the address line. Login to your Network Solutions email account. Click on the Configuration left menu tab. Click on the Custom Filter link. Type the rule name. blah, blah, blah Basically add them one at a time. "We are committed to creating the best Customer experience possible." No you are not. You are trying to squeeze every nickle you can out of me. "With regard to your concern, please be advised that we cannot import blocked senders in to you e-mail servers." Maybe I should apply for a job to write those ten complicated lines of code... Maybe I should question my choice of vendors, because if they truly "cannot" then they are to stupid to have my business. It is both amusing and sad. I'll be posting this in every forum I am a member of.

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System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("")

- by dbasnett

Yesterday s**ked, and today ain't (sic) looking better. I have an application I have been working on and it can be slow to start when my ISP is down because of DNS. My ISP was down for 3 hours yesterday, so I didn't think much about this piece of code I had added, until I found that it is always slow to start. This code is supposed to return your IP address and my reading of the link suggests that should be immediate, but it isn't, at least on my machine. Oh, and yesterday before the internet went down, I upgraded (oymoron) to XP SP3, and have had other problems. So my questions / request: 1. Am I doing this right? 2. If you run this on your machine does it take 39 seconds to return your IP address? It does on mine. One other note, I did a packet capture and the first request did NOT go on the wire, but the second did, and was answered quickly. So the question is what happened in XP SP3 that I am missing, besides a brain. One last note. If I resolve a FQDN all is well. Public Class Form1 'http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.dns.gethostaddresses.aspx ' 'excerpt 'The GetHostAddresses method queries a DNS server 'for the IP addresses associated with a host name. ' 'If hostNameOrAddress is an IP address, this address 'is returned without querying the DNS server. ' 'When an empty string is passed as the host name, 'this method returns the IPv4 addresses of the local host Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, _ ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click Dim stpw As New Stopwatch stpw.Reset() stpw.Start() 'originally Dns.GetHostEntry, but slow also Dim myIPs() As System.Net.IPAddress = System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("") stpw.Stop() Debug.WriteLine("'" & stpw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds) If myIPs.Length > 0 Then Debug.WriteLine("'" & myIPs(0).ToString) 'debug '39.8990525 '192.168.1.2 stpw.Reset() stpw.Start() 'originally Dns.GetHostEntry, but slow also myIPs = System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses("www.vbforums.com") stpw.Stop() Debug.WriteLine("'" & stpw.Elapsed.TotalSeconds) If myIPs.Length > 0 Then Debug.WriteLine("'" & myIPs(0).ToString) 'debug '0.042212 '63.236.73.220 End Sub End Class

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Start Default Browser - Windows

- by dbasnett

When starting the default browser like this: Dim trgt1 As String = "http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=612471" pi.FileName = trgt1 System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(pi) It takes about 40 seconds to open the page. If I do it like this, though this isn't the default browser Dim trgt1 As String = "http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=612471" pi.Arguments = trgt1 pi.FileName = "iexplore.exe" 'or firefox.exe System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(pi) it opens immediately. Is this a bug or a feature? I have tried this with both IE and FireFox set to be the default browser.