A Virtual Problem

Posted by grapemon1611

Oct 10

My experience with doctor’s offices is that like all other businesses, they want to do as much as possible with as little expense as possible. In the last couple of years I’ve had to work on systems in offices that were still running Windows 98 on work stations and Windows Server 2000. My attitude, of course, is as long as a system does what you need it to do why change it? I’m not one that likes to upgrade every piece of software just for the sake of upgrading software.

However, the problem that comes up is when those same systems can no longer do what is needed. Recent changes in the way health care providers do business is forcing people in the industry to purchase new systems. Doctors are running out to buy new “Electronic Medical Records” (EMR) software to meet new requirements. These new systems require significantly more processing power than an old server running a P4 chip with 2GB of memory is going to provide. The problem then is how to stay in the old system while installing, training, and deploying the new system? All those patient charts aren’t just going to move to the new system instantly.

The issue I keep encountering is twofold: 1) The new EMR vendor is requiring a “clean server and clean workstations” for their software. No other programs (including active directory domain services AD DS) can be on the server; and, 2) the old software simply won’t install or work on the newer workstations anyway. Many of the older programs will not install on a 64 Bit OS, and even if it will, the client probably hasn’t paid for support in quite some time so you’re not going to get the new install disk. (If they had been paying for support, they wouldn’t still be running their system on Windows 98 or 2000 system!)

I just ran into this exact situation. Office was running a DOS based medical manager software on 32 Bit Windows XP machines. The office did have Windows Server 2003 as it’s domain controller, but the software would run just fine on an XP machine. The new EMR software they just purchased required a 64 Bit Windows 2008 R2 & SQL 2008 server with a LOT of hard drive space just for the EMR and the workstations were strongly encouraged to be Windows 7 64 Bit OS.

I got called in to do the initial set up. The lease on the servers and workstations was up so all the old equipment and a server needed to be returned to the vendor and new equipment was purchased. What I was asked to do was move the old EMR server to another computer and put the old EMR client on the new workstations so they could be in both systems during the transition.

This was when I discovered the problem with old 32 bit programs and new 64 bit systems. While there are compatibility settings on all the new OS’s, they don’t always work they way we’d like them to work, and without support from the old vendor, I was pretty much out of luck.

The solution I implemented was to use VMware Server 2.0. If you limit the number of virtual machines per server to 3, the license is free. I registered the client with VMware and downloaded the server software.

It would be pretty impressive to tell you that I just set up a virtual machine for each of the workstations we needed to replace, however, nothing is ever that simple!

I downloaded and installed a backup program that would convert my workstation to a virtual machine. It seemed simple enough. I created a virtual image of the standard workstation. Then I loaded that image to the first VMware Server thinking I’d just boot it up and go.

I was wrong.

The virtual machine did boot up. I was feeling all satisfied with myself and congratulating myself with my brilliance when I saw this message:

Since the last time Windows XP was activated, major hardware changes have taken place.  Windows XP needs to be activated again…”

At first I didn’t understand why I was getting this message. I didn’t understand that even though you should be able to run XP on a VMware system, that the VMware machine did indeed have different hardware specifications than the machine I made the backup from. So far I didn’t think I had anything more than a minor annoyance as I just would go ahead and reactivate Windows. I click on the prompt to activate Windows and go through the prompts. No luck. Cannot activate. I finally get the prompt to call the telephone number and activate my product. I’m thinking this shouldn’t be an issue since I’m moving the system from one machine to another. I have a valid key and it will still be installed on only one machine (albeit a virtual one). No problem until the message on the line said (and this is a paraphrase), “Microsoft has no record of that product number. You may be able to return your copy of Windows to the vendor you purchased it from…”

I was shocked! I went through the whole process 3 or 4 times, each time with the same result. I then went and copied the XP key off all the old machines in the office and one by one tried to use each key to the same result.

Long story short (if that’s even possible after 900 words just to get to this point…), the copy of Windows XP I was using was legal so long as it was on a DELL computer of a specific model with a specific bios lock. Apparently Dell has or had a proprietary version of Windows XP Pro OS. I have since found out that HP did the same thing for awhile. This was an entirely new concept to me because I have for years had to reinstall Windows XP on OEM workstations (Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, etc.) and have used a Windows XP PRO OEM install disk using keys from every machine with little to no issue.

What I ended up doing is building a new virtual machine from scratch, installing the OS and the old EMR software, and other programs, and then deploying THAT machine to each of the virtual servers.

This of course created a couple new problems. The first one I knew ahead of time. I’d have to change the windows key on each machine to keep the copies legal, and then of course change the name of each machine for the intranet domain. The second problem is the one that embarrasses me that I didn’t count on it ahead of time.

After adding my virtual desktop to the VMware Server and powering it up, a dialog box would pop up on the screen asking if I was copying or moving the machine. I didn’t really know how to answer that question, so on the first one I said that I was copying the machine. When the virtual machine powered up I got the dialog box asking me to activate windows. I change the key and no problem. Next machine. This time I said that I was moving the machine. When I powered up this machine, no activation dialog box. I went in, changed the domain name of the computer and went on to the next machine. Feeling all smug, I then proceeded to move another 8 machines.

Each machine appeared to be working just fine. It wasn’t until the office attempted to actually work that we discovered the problem. The problem was the computers were S L O W. I don’t think I typed that slow enough. They were S – - L – - O – — -W. They were dropping packets and timing out and causing all kinds of general havoc.

The problem in a nutshell: When you move a virtual machine, the MAC address of the computer stays the same. As far as VMware is concerned, the physical machine is identical, including the MAC of the NIC card. Even though I changed the name of the computer and changed the IP address and even the Windows key, the MAC address is the same. This is what I’m embarrassed about. I spent a lot of time looking at the DNS server for an answer. The IP addresses and the system names matched up correctly, but intranetwork switching (LAN before getting to a router) uses layer 2 addressing (using the MAC address) rather than layer 3 addressing (using IP addresses). I had 8 machines with the same MAC address.

Once I figured out this problem and then subsequently how to go in and edit each machine to change the MAC (I ended up doing manual MAC addressing, converting the IP address to hex for the part of the address I could create, sort of like private IP addressing) the network was rock solid and the client extremely happy.

They are now the first and only office in town with a complete deployment of virtual machines running their old EMR at the same time as the same physical machines are running their new software. I discounted the time I spent figuring out how to make the VMware work (I don’t believe in charging clients for me to learn something they are paying me to know!) and all is well.

0 Comments
Filed under: Uncategorized

Help for Blackberry Curve Trackball

Posted by grapemon1611

Jul 17

Sunday morning I’m sitting in church during the service when all of a sudden I hear my Blackberry Curve sound off a Facebook notification. I quickly reach into my pocket and pull out my phone to silence it when I realize that the trackball on the phone will go every way except down! I couldn’t move the mouse to where I needed to go to silence the notifications so I yanked the battery out of the phone. Between services (my wife sings in the praise band so I get to go to both services…) I pull out my laptop and google “blackberry trackball not working” On the first page was this link.

Instructions there for cleaning the trackball on several models of blackberry.

0 Comments
Filed under: Uncategorized

Assuming the Worst!

Posted by grapemon1611

Jun 26

Unfortunately, the life of an IT professional often requires one to work outside of normal hours. It’s difficult to replace a switch when you’ve got 40 users screaming at you that the network is down! This last Memorial Day weekend was one of those times. I had to come into the office on Saturday morning to do an install on the network.

The entrance to our corporate offices is a porch that has been added to the building. I walk onto the front porch of the office at 7:00 AM and the first thing I notice is that it’s really cold. I walk over to the thermostat and see that it’s set on 65 degrees. Right now the daytime temperature outside is running in the 100′s so that unit had been running all night and would have been running nonstop for the next two days when no one (sans the IT guy) would even be on the porch. Next I walked into the hallway where my office is 72 degrees. Then I walk into the kitchen/break area and that thermostat is set on 68. That’s when I had an epiphany.

We’re wasting quite a bit of money cooling our buildings when no one is occupying the offices. How much money is this wasting? If memory serves correctly, HVAC averages about 40% of the overall utility bill. So the question is “what can be done to run the A/C units significantly less when the buildings are unoccupied?” The simple solution is to have someone physically change the thermostat settings when leaving the building each night. Unfortunately, that plan obviously hasn’t worked. We also already had some programmable thermostats and some thermostats in lock boxes, but neither of those does any good if people over ride them and if the lock boxes are not locked down.

Being an IT guy, I looked to technology for a solution. My idea was this: What if we installed IP Thermostats? They are programmable and if someone over rides the program, they can be reset remotely anywhere the Internet is available. My estimate is that switching to IP Thermostats will cut our electric bill by at least 8% annually.

I ended up buying Bayweb thermostats for $195/each from diycontrols.com

The instructions would have you believe that they are easily installed in 30 minutes to an hour, but my experience was closer to two hours each (and I put in 15 of them). The reason it took so long is our HVAC units are in the ceiling rather than in closets (as most residential units would be) and because the thermostat is actually two parts, the keypad/sensor and the thermostat itself, arrangements had to be made to extend wiring for the thermostats (not the keypads) to places where they could be accessed, but hidden from plain sight (not the most cosmetically appealing device in the office…) and in the majority of cases, we had to get an electrical outlet to where the thermostat was located. 2 of our HVAC units were able to provide power to the unit without an external power supply.

The thing that amused me however, was this…EVERYONE that I spoke with while installing the thermostats (9 in the corporate offices alone) automatically assumed that the purpose of the thermostats was to “burn them up.”

“So, I guess Da Boss’ going to sit at his beach house and set all our thermostats to 85 during the day?”

Even “Mrs. Da Boss” looked me in the eyes and asked, what do we supposed to do when it gets too danged hot?

Fortunately, except for the one argument I had with a couple of people in one section of the building about 74 degrees vs. 72 degrees (it was unbearably hot at 74), it’s been a non-issue. Official office hours are 8 – 5 with some people coming in as early as 6:00 AM and others staying to around 6:00 PM. I have all the thermostats set on 72 degrees from 6:30 – 6:00 and then they gradually increase to 85 over night and come back on about 5:30 in the morning, gradually bringing the temperature back down to 72. For the most part, the units are completely turned off at least 8 hours of each day and on the weekends they run about half as much as they do during the week (still have computers and switches and routers, etc., that are heat sensitive, so the highest the thermostats is set for is 85). Amazingly enough, most of the same people that assumed the worst about the IP thermostats comment to me about how cool the building is now.

I think the real secret is that the entire campus is now the same temperature during the day (72 degrees) so when you walk from section to section or department to department you don’t have radical variations in temperature. We haven’t gotten our first electric bill yet, but I’m confident that it’s going to be significantly less because the HVAC units in areas set lower than adjacent areas aren’t now trying to cool a bigger area than they were designed to cool and by raising the temperature to 85 over night the units are completely off 8 or more hours a day.

I bought the thermostats from the link above, but you can get more specific information about them at bayweb.com.

0 Comments
Filed under: Networking | Tagged as: , ,

Modern Day Pick Pockets

Posted by grapemon1611

Jun 16

This is the text of the speech I gave to the Seniors and Law Enforcement Together (SALT) meeting in Hemphill, Texas, on June 16, 2011.

When I went to junior high school, my dad was stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana. By the time I made it to high school, he had retired to Lufkin, Texas.  Growing up here in West Louisiana and East Texas, some of my fondest memories of my dad are when he would take me fishing.
We’d get up at 4 in the morning, load our lunches and tackle boxes, hook the boat up to the car and head out to either Toledo Bend or Sam Rayburn. We’d always
have the boat in the water and be at our favorite fishing hole to watch the sunrise.  I remember dad teaching me how to bait a hook and “drown minnows”. We’d drop our lines in one spot and wait.  Sometimes we’d hook a fish, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we’d get a big fish on the hook and be reeling it in when it would jump out of the water and throw the hook.  If the fish weren’t biting, we’d pull our lines up and go to another spot on the lake, bait our hooks, and start all over again.

Computer criminals go fishing too. Computer fishing is when a criminal goes fishing for personal information. They don’t usually have a specific person in mind, they
are just fishing to see what they catch.

See if this sounds familiar.

A few years ago I sit down at my computer and open my email. I see an email from PayPal, the online bank I was using for buying stuff on Ebay. “Dear Customer, there is a problem with your paypal account that requires your immediate attention. You will not be able to use your paypal account until you log in and verify your information.”  I click on the paypal link at the bottom of the email, and my browser opens up with a page that looks just like the paypal page.  I
start to log in.  I put in my user name and I even put in my password, but before I hit the “enter” button, something smelled fishy.  Something just wasn’t
right.  I looked up at the address bar and it had some strange web address. Plus, I hadn’t actually used my paypal account in quite some time. How could there be a problem? Instead of hitting the enter button, I clicked on the close button on my browser. I became the fish that got away, I threw the hook.

What the criminal does is create a web page that looks just like your bank’s log in page. Then they send emails to every email address they can find to bait you into
getting hooked.

You might get an email like the one I just described looking like it’s from First State Bank right here in Hemphill. If you happen to bank at First State Bank,
you might even take the bait.

The link in the email even looks like the correct web address for First State Bank. You click on the link, go to what looks like the First State Bank page, and before
you realize just how deep the hook has been set, you give the crook the keys to your bank account.

Here are some ways to look to see if you’re being fished or baited.

First of all, if you ever get an email from your bank, or from UPS or FedEx or Ebay or PayPal or any other web site that you have an account with, they will ALWAYS
use your name in the email.  “Dear Customer” is your very first clue.

Second, your bank or other account provider will NEVER ask for you to give personal information in an email.  You will get a message telling you to log into your account, not click on a link in the email, and see what the actual problem is.

Last, never ever use a link provided in an email.
If you really think the email is honest, go to the web page by typing in the link in your browser.

As recently as just ten years ago, if a criminal wanted to pick your pocket, they had to actually have some sort of contact with you in the market place or at the fair or somewhere in public.  Then, if they did pick your pocket, mostly what they got was what limited cash you
were carrying and a few credit cards that you would quickly cancel as soon as you figured out you had been robbed. Usually you knew pretty quickly and could take action to protect yourself.  Unfortunately, those days have gone the way of the typewriter.  Today,
all a criminal has to do is sit behind a keyboard in their underwear and wait for you to give them all the information they could ever need to rob you of
every dime you have in the bank.

First and foremost, you need to keep your computer’s operating system up to date.  Nearly everyone that has a home computer uses a Microsoft Windows operating system.  Hackers and criminals love Microsoft.  While Microsoft has a near monopoly on personal computers, it is far from secure. There are hundreds of web sites devoted to allowing hackers to share information about weaknesses in Microsoft products. The problem with these security weaknesses in Microsoft are so bad that every single Tuesday night Microsoft has to post
updates to your system.  Your computer has a built-in automatic update feature. However, there are issues with auto update. Many malicious programs turn off auto update.  Also, when your computer is set up, auto update has to be turned on.  The other problem is that most often, auto update is scheduled to run in the middle of the night when you are most likely not using your computer; if you shut down your computer at night, the update won’t run!

Along with keeping windows updated, make sure you have anti-virus software.  No anti-virus program in the world is going to prevent every infection, but they do put up a nice defense against known viruses.  You can buy anti-virus software, and there are lots of them to choose from, but if you don’t have one already, Microsoft Essentials or AVG-Free are free anti-virus programs. I like AVG-FREE so much I bought their version for A Pineywoods.

The second thing that we can do to prevent our identities or bank accounts from being robbed is in how we interact with our computers.

We tell our kids to “just say no” to drugs. That same philosophy applies to clicking on boxes that pop up on our computers!

I got called by one of my clients at a doctor’s office in Nacogdoches a couple weeks ago.  “Danny, what does it mean when all I have on my desktop is a blue screen with a folder on it?”.

“It means you clicked on something you shouldn’t have!”

Now, the important question for us is what did she click on? She told me that she had gotten an email from Dr. Vicki, someone she knew and trusted, with an
attachment called “The Package”.

I asked her, “Does Dr. Vicki normally send you emails with attachments?”

“No, I thought that was really odd, but it was from Dr. Vicki. As soon as I clicked on the attachment something very inappropriate popped up on my screen and I
knew it was a mistake.”

Just say no.

When dealing with emails, NEVER open an attachment unless you are 100% sure of what it is and who it is from.  Don’t open links, don’t open files, just say no!  If
you get an attachment from someone and you think it might be okay, wait until you can talk to that person to make sure they really meant to send you something and can tell you what it is. It is really easy for a criminal to fake an email to you from one of your friends.

At work I often get asked how to prevent viruses, spyware, and malware from getting on a computer. The only honest answer to that question is to never plug
the computer into the wall or anything else. Computers are going to get viruses just like people. You can do nothing wrong, wash your hands and face repeatedly every day and still get a cold or the flu. In the old days the only way you were going to pick up anything really nasty on your computer was to go to disreputable web
sites. Today, however, that isn’t the case.

Recently, one of our medical equipment technicians was looking for parts for a wheelchair. He went online to
look for the part and entered “wheel chair parts” into a yahoo search engine.  Within minutes I got a phone call, “Uh, Danny, can you come back to the warehouse?” When I got back there, the computer screen was littered with pictures of naked girls with horses and I had a very
embarrassed technician profusely explaining to me that they didn’t do anything wrong. The link he had clicked on had installed a malicious program on the computer that was promoting all sorts of immorailty.  After I cleaned up the computer the tech was still trying to convince me he did nothing wrong, I opened the yahoo search page and entered the exact same phrase he had earlier and *POOF* we had instant virus.

When you’re surfing the internet and find something you want to download and install Same rule here as opening attachments in your email. Make 100% sure you know
what you are downloading. Often a hacker will promote a program you might want but in reality it’s just a disguise for their evil tool. One of the greatest tools a hacker has is called a “key logger”. What a key logger does is keep
track of every key you press on your keyboard and then send a record of it to the remote hacker.  You’ll give away usernames, passwords, account numbers and anything else you do on your computer.

Speaking of programs you think you want. When using Facebook and other social media, never ever under any circumstances use the same password for Facebook that you use for anything else. Hackers LOVE to hack Facebook and steal information. When you first join a social networking site like Facebook, the very first thing
they ask you to do is invite all your friends to the site.  They ask you for your email address and your
password.  Next thing you know, you’ve got friends you hardly know but were in an email that came from someone else calling you asking why you are sending them emails asking them to join Facebook.

A lot of the games on Facebook are really just programs designed to steal your information. Look at the window that pops up when you go to access an application on Facebook. It always asks for permission to access all your data. You can give away everything you own by
installing things on Facebook.

One more thing about social networking web sites. Never put your birth day on there.  Identity thieves go to town with a name and a birth date.  While your birthday may not be a mystery to your real family and friends, it should be to the causal web surfer.

One last thing about passwords.  Don’t use
your kid’s names or your pet’s names for passwords. Why would you want to make it easy for a hacker to figure out your password.  All a hacker usually needs is a user name and a password. At my office I can almost guess the majority of people’s passwords if I know their children or their pets.  You might find it easy to remember that your password is your dog’s name Buster,
but if I know your dog’s name is Buster, then I can probably guess your password!  A better way to make passwords using a phrase like “BusterLikesBones” and replacing letters like “E” and “S” and “L” with numbers “3”, “5”, and “1”.  P-a-5-5-W-0-r-d is a lot
harder to guess than p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d.

These few things will prevent all but the most sophisticated professional criminals out of your life.

Danny

 

 

 

1 Comment
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged as: , , , , , , , ,

Using Wireless-N to do the Impossible

Posted by grapemon1611

Jun 11

Complete with moat and dragon!

My employer lives in a castle. Really. I asked him this morning if he had built the castle, or if it was taken brick by brick from another location and rebuilt in east Texas or what. He told me that when he was in the 8th grade, all his friends were taking mechanical drawing, but that he wasn’t able because he was taking band. The assignment for the class was to draw a house floor plan. My employer’s English class was in the same room as the mechanical drawing class, so rather than pay attention in class, he decided to draw his house. The castle he lives in is almost identical to those drawings. He told me the bottom floor is to the square inch the same as his floor plan.

About a month ago, he decided to install a security system in the castle. Cameras, motion sensors, etc., the works. One of the cool things the system is supposed to do is allow him to view the images from the cameras on his computer or any other computer in the world. This, of course, required some sort of network connection between the DVR console (which records the images) and his network. The cameras fortunately were all mounted on outside walls (either inside or outside) so the cables could all run outside from the camera to the control closet on the first floor.

I was at the office when the call came in. “Danny, I need you to come out here to my house and figure out how to hook this security system to my router.”

I thought that was an “interesting” request since I assumed the security system installers would know how to connect the systems together.

So I head over to the house. When I get there, the problem becomes a little more obvious. All the cabling up to that point had run on the outside walls and were neatly hidden using the architecture of the house for cover; however, the router is located in the kitchen which is in the middle of the house. Since there is a second floor, there wasn’t an easy way to route an Ethernet cable from the router to the DVR. It appeared some major construction was going to have to happen just to route 30 feet of cable.

“Why don’t we just go wireless?” I asked.

“Won’t work,” was the reply.

I asked why not, and was told that “the boys down in Austin” have told him that wireless won’t work because of the bandwidth. No one had been able to make it work before.

My boss just smiled. As the title of the blog suggests, he just automatically assumes I can deliver the impossible!

I saw him smile and asked this question: “Okay, so you’re telling me a Cat. 5e Ethernet cable running 100 megabits per second will work, but wireless won’t because of bandwidth?”

“That’s right. The boys in Austin have tried it over and over and there just isn’t enough bandwidth.”

At this point I pointed out that wireless-N was rated at 300 megabits per second which if I do my math correctly is 3 times faster than 100BaseT Ethernet. :D

The real problem, it turned out, was that the DVR has no wireless transmitter.

The solution was a Linksys #WET610N Wireless-N Bridge. The router in the kitchen is only about 15 feet from the control closet and other than the closet door, it is a pretty straight shot. I don’t know if longer distances would cause any problems.

I spoke with the security technician a few days later following up to see if my solution worked. He told me that the boys down in Austin didn’t believe him until they were able to see the images for themselves on their computer.

Danny

0 Comments
Filed under: Wireless | Tagged as: , , , , ,

Vista Cannot Obtain An IP Address From Server

Posted by grapemon1611

Jun 9

This morning one of my co-workers came to me and asked if I could do her a big favor. “You know I’d do anything for you, Ruth. What do you need?” Her daughter was starting her new job as director of a child’s advocate non-profit agency here close and had been spending the last 3 ½ hours trying to log into her email. Would I talk to her over the phone and help her? Of course, I agreed so Ruth got her daughter on the phone.

I was at an immediate disadvantage because of a couple of issues. The first was she has Windows Vista on her computer (I avoided Vista like the plague, buying enough XP boxes to carry me over to Windows 7!) and the second was I had no clue whatsoever of the network she was trying to access. The office is located in a sub-division and there could have been multiple wireless networks she was trying to access. We spoke on the phone and I tried to troubleshoot it best I could. She assured me that the network that the computer said it was connected too is in fact the correct network. Being that I only have one computer with Vista on it, I was trying to describe what to look for and where it is. We managed to get a command window open by left-clicking on the START button and typing “Command” in the search window at the bottom of the window that comes up when you left-click on start. Another way to do that is to press Ctrl-R and them type “cmd” or “command” in the run box. I had her type “ipconfig” on the command line and read me the IP address of the computer.

This was the first clue what the problem is:  169.254.25.1.

Any address that starts 169.254.X.X is an auto-configured IP address. What that means is that the computer sent out a DHCP Discovery packet (Hey! I need an IP address?) and for whatever reason didn’t get a response. I told her, “The first problem is that your computer didn’t get an IP address from the server.”

I asked her if she had rebooted the computer since she discovered she was having issues. She assured me she had. Next I had her type “ipconfig /renew” to try to get an IP address again. It timed out.

At this point I wasn’t 100% sure we were even on the correct wireless network. Fortunately, her office was less than a mile from where I was, so I just went over there to look at the network in the flesh.

On her desk was another computer that was functioning properly. I opened a command prompt and typed “ipconfig” and saw that this computer had a private class C 192.168.X.X address. I also looked at what wireless network the working computer was on and it was indeed the same one on the Vista machine that was not working.

First thing I did was configure an alternative IP configuration on the computer so that if it didn’t receive a DHCP OFFER (Yeah, I got your request, here’s an address you can use, you want it?) it would default to an address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS server of my choosing.

Here’s how to actually do that on a Vista computer.
1. From the Network Connections folder, open the properties dialog box for the connection you want to configure.

2. In the list of installed network components, select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and then click the Properties button.

3. On the General tab of the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog box, select Obtain An IP Address Automatically.

4. Click the Alternate Configuration tab and then select User Configured.

5. Enter the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS servers for the alternate connection(You can safely ignore the fields that ask you to enter a preferred and alternate WINS server. WINS stands for Windows Internet Name Service, a name resolution system that maps a computer’s NetBIOS name to an IP address. WINS servers are used on large corporate networks to allow domain servers to communicate with computers running older Microsoft operating systems, )

6. Click OK to save your changes. You do not need to restart after setting up an alternate configuration. When you’ve configured an alternate IP configuration for a network connection, Windows looks first for a DHCP server to assign an IP address automatically. If no DHCP server is available, the system falls back to the static IP address defined on the AlternateIP Configuration tab.

On a home or small business network that may or may not have their own DNS server, I like to use Google’s public DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

That actually took about 45 seconds to complete once I sat down at her two computers. This got her online and able to retrieve the important email she was looking for. What took a moment longer was figuring out why her computer wasn’t picking up the DHCP offer.

The collective intelligence of the universe is held on Google servers somewhere. I’m convinced of that. I Googled the problem and found a Microsoft service bulletin on this issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

Yet one more reason why it’s important to properly configure auto-updates!

Danny

0 Comments
Filed under: Vista | Tagged as: , , , , ,