unstable

CA3LE, I know you're working on my last idea'r. But I had another one that doesn't really make the test any better, but ties the forum to the test. What if when someone is logged in and they run the test, you could tie those statistics to the username. Then if you look at someone's profile you could see what their speeds look like. Then again that might be kind of a bad idea if it somehow exposed their IP.

So I decided it was time to learn Linux. I've played around with it on and off for years and it usually doesn't last more than 24 hours on any of my hard disks...because 9 times out of 10 when I install and boot into Linux for the first time...stuff is unresponsive, I have to kill crap and it gets annoying real quick. Anyways, to make a long story short. I installed Fedora 2 the other day and it has been running pretty well. I managed to blow it up yesterday trying to upgrade to X11R6.8 so that I could play around with the Transparent windows...that is just too cool. Reinstalled today and got the transparent windows working...which is fruggin awesome. I might actually be able to keep this thing running long enough to learn a thing or two.

Looks more like the two ran off together. The guy is 17, girl is 16...not unfeasible that they said "Screw you guys, we're taking off".

I broke something. DId download test and went to beta-area and it displayed fine, said I haven't done an upload test yet...so I did. Then I went back and I get invalid query displayed. nevermind...just realized I went to WHOIS.PHP rather than the hoststats.

:::.. Download Stats ..::: Connection is:: 8299 Kbps about 8.3 Mbps (tested with 2992 KB) Download Speed is:: 1013 KB/s Tested From:: http://www.testmy.net/ Bottom Line:: 148 times faster than 56K you can download 1MB in 1.01 second(s) Validation Link:: https://testmy.net/cgi-bin/get.cgi?Test_ID=P14PYU9DX

Well I'm glad I got you thinking. Odd thing is, when I'm at work I'm in a 128.128.0.0/16 all should be registered to Woods Hole. At home I'm on Verizon. So not sure where you pulled Cox from boss.

Like I said (as guest, damnit that's pissing me off! lol). I don't know PHP but with the programming skills that I do have, I would assume "Explode" is somehow linked to nslookup. I spent alot of time developing when I was in the Marine Corps about 3 years ago, but since then I haven't written a single thing, other than batch scripts.

If there is a way of tapping into Arin, why not script an IP scan to do it? Not sure how long this would take but maybe you could even distribute the load out to a few other people and we could get it done quicker. It would basically just be a complete listing of all the IP's in the world, and we'd run an automated NSLOOKUP on it, and output it to a text file in the format that you want. then we parse everything from the right to the left, and we end up with just the root domain 65.123.4.12 = tiedyenetworks.com

I'm checking around for this. The first thing that came to mind when you said "they are using it for GEO" is Visual Route, so I downloaded it and it appears that they've got that application built in Java and the databases aren't plaintext...I'm not familiar with Java so I'm not sure if the classes they have do some kind of interpretation on the data. I'll keep looking, but I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to maybe consider setting the logic up like: -user shows up, page pulls IP address -Query database for netblock/isp match in local MySQL database -NO MATCH? -->Do Arin and insert ISP into local MySQL database -MATCH? good. Sure it will run slow if you have to bounce it off of Arin, but eventually you will build your own copy of the netblocks/ISP's. I think as long as you throw a message up for the user to know, then it'll be ok. Then eventually you can abandon Arin entirely. I actually think that this should be an opt-in thing that is ran either before the test or after the test and the user gets to choose. (will keep checking around)

Here's a link to the actual report published By SANS http://isc.sans.org/top10.php They have an explanation for why each port is listed.

Here's a proxy list: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/alive-proxy/proxy-list/ Can search google for more "proxy list" If I understood you correctly you are trying to get to an HTTP based email server and for some reason you cannot? Proxying should work for you, only thing is that you're going to have to muck around with many of these "free proxies" until you find one that works. When I was down at DELL in Texas for training, they had MSN messenger blocked, which I use to talk to my wife all day when I'm at work...Proxies did the trick.

http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/content/goodtobeindc/frameset.html

Posted over at Abit, I thought you may get a kick out of this

Glad someone got a kick out of it. Like I told the boss-man, if there's anything in particular anyone wants to hear about--and I feel I know enough about it to sound halfway educated, I'll give it a shot and do a writeup.

I had this same problem earlier today. F8 wasn't doing the trick...so I held down shift (prior to XP splash screen)--immediate after you see the "Press F2 for setup" and the box posts.

What Swimmer says is true. Copy your pertinent files off of the disk and do a reinstall.

As I mentioned before I mod over at Abit on the networking section and I wrote up a bunch of these "HOW TO..." documents to help people learn a little more about networking and hopefully buy myself a little bit of time (instead of answering the same question 100 times). Hopefully everyone will get some use out of them.. But i DO have a note on Network Primer Part II (found here: https://testmy.net/forumz/viewtopic.php?t=794 ) I say that it can be advantageous to manually set certain hosts on your network statically instead of using DHCP. First of all, I recommend doing this as an "all or nothing" type of deal. If you're going to statically assign internal hosts, do them all static and turn of DHCP on the router entirely, OR leave DHCP on. I recently encountered someone who wanted to setup a single static internal host. Usually this would be done using a DHCP reservation or Exclusion...but as good as the SOHO Routers are, they are also a pain in the ass because of their limited functionality (yes we all want more power). See, if your DHCP pool has 192.168.0.2-100, and you statically assign 192.168.0.2, there is the remote possibility that the DHCP server in the router may hand out 192.,168.0.2 to another host and screw you over. So, obviously you don't want that happening, and with *real* DHCP servers you can set that IP address aside for a particular mac/host. The SOHO routers won't do this. FINE. We'll just change the scope to be 192.168.0.3-100 (0.1 being the router internal interface and 0.2 being our server). Ok, that works, we statically set 192.168.0.2 on the server. Then we went to setup port forwarding on the router to allow port 80 traffic through...and guess what...it wouldn't let us. Said 192.168.0.2 was not within the DHCP scope. That's my update on Network Primer II. Now I just need to update the original on the other forum.

Here's something that I found that's awesome. It is an effective way to BREAK some adware/spyware, it kills popups and it gets rid of alot of crap ads loading in your browser. The best part of it...it uses 0 resources...that's right, 0 resources. Here's a link to the zip, since I can't attach files: http://forum.abit-usa.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=414446 It's zipped up, extract the text file out, copy the contents of the text file and paste them into the following file: c:windowssystem32driversetcHOSTS (open using notepad). Now here's a little basic tip for those of you who don't know what the HOSTS file is all about. Before we had name resolution servers (DNS), we had the HOSTS file, which everyone on the internet had a copy of. When a new host was added to the internet, every file had to be updated. This file has the IP address and Hostname of each computer. So rather than typing 67.19.36.6 to get to www.testmy.net, I just type www.testmy.net...it's easier to remember. Eventually there were too many hosts to keep adding to this file, so someone who was using their brain came up with DNS servers which hold all the names/ip addresses of the computers on their domain. Anyhow..how does this pertain to SPYWARE/ADWARE. If you put 127.0.0.1 in your host file for WWW.SOME_SPYWARE_SITE.COM, guess what? it makes it not function. (127.0.0.1 is loopback address for your computer) This works for popup ads and various ads on the internet. Try plugging this into your hosts file and you'll notice alot of ads don't load. HTH

Network Primer Part II -Submitted by UNSTABLE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Router Features Ports First lets talk about ports for a second so that nobody gets left out. An IP address is comparable to a street address. You go to a specific address, but what is happening inside? Different stuff could be happening in different rooms. In one room there might be people playing Doom 3, in another room people listening to music or watching movies, in still another room people are chatting and trading items. So think of a computer

Network Primer Part I - Submitted by UNSTABLE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hate writing, I actually despise it. Putting thoughts into words and trying to talk about something like networking is a major pain in the butt. But I've always believed in sharing information with people, if someone gets something useful out of this document, then I guess it was worth my time and effort to type it up. Networking...there is more that I don't know about networks than I do. After being involved with computers for years and learning a little here and a little there, I actually started putting stuff together and it began to all make sense. Despite what pre-concieved notions that people may have about my skill level, I'm NOT a network technician. From 9-5 each day I work as a glorified help desk attendant. I run around and fix paper jams in printers, install operating systems and applications and do all of the normal crap a help desk guy would. I guess the only thing that sets me apart from a standard help desk attendant is that I am responsible for 160 some-odd computers, 20 some-odd enterprise servers, some switches and some firewalls. I know a little about alot of things. Desktop Computer On your computer, click "start-->run" and then type "CMD" press enter. From the command line type "ipconfig" You should get something like: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C:Documents and Settingsunstable>ipconfig /all Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : myhost Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :mydnssuffix Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : somenet.net Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : somenet.net Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet NIC Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-50-8D-A8-2D-C2 Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.100 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.10.255.1 10.10.255.2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Physical Address a.k.a. Mac Address Physical addresses, in this example "00-50-8D-A8-2D-C2" is supposed to be unique in the entire world. I can say that I have heard of computers with duplicate Mac addresses, which should not be possible, but mistakes happen. Anyhow, what is important about Mac Addresses? Well, the mac address is basically the lowest level that a computer "talks" to another computer at. You often hear about "IP addresses" or "Host Names" but actually the communication is happening at the mac level. Here's the important facts about macs. First of all, Mac addresses do not traverse a router. When your computer sends communications beyond your router (or default gateway), the router strips off the mac address, makes a little note that your computer sent out this request, the router then puts ITS OWN mac address on the communication and sends it to the next hop router. The next router takes the communication, strips off the prior router mac address, makes a little note, puts ITS OWN mac on and sends it along. The same thing happens on the way back. Pretty amazing when you think of it. Second important fact about Mac addresses is, you can't have two computers with the same mac address on the same network segment, it won't work. If you ever run into this problem, you can usually fix it one of two ways, (1) throw a router in front of the duplicate mac or (2) most high-performance network cards allow you to change the mac address in the settings. IP address IP addresses. These are the numbers you will deal with probably the most in networking...unless you're a genius and you're able to tear packets down and do all of that stuff. If you're at that level, drop me a line I'd love to learn a thing or two, you're probably not going to be reading this though. Ok, back to IP addresses. When I first started to understand IP addresses, I (mistakenly) noticed that the third octet in an IP address usually specifies the network, the fourth octet specifies the host: i.e. quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IP ADDRESS: 192.168.1.1 NETWORK ID: 192.168.1.0 HOST ADDRESS: XXX.XXX.X.1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well guess what? This is actually an OK way of looking at networks and hosts for a beginner. If you're not subnetting a network, this method is accurate, if you are subnetting this is not always going to be accurate...But what exactly ARE networks and what good is all of this information? Networks Let's say we've got two computers addressed in the following fashion: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOST1: 192.168.1.1 NET ID: 192.168.1.0 HOST2: 192.168.10.2 NET ID: 192.168.10.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you look at the third octet you will see these two computers ARE NOT on the same network. Host1 is on 192.168.1.0 and Host2 is on 192.168.10.0...If they are both plugged into a switch, can they "talk"....NO they cannot "talk" without a router. A router "routes" communications between networks. So what is the point of having 2 seperate networks like this? There could be any number of reasons for setting up seperate networks. Usually it's a mixture of management, accesses and network efficiency. The more computers you put on a single network, the slower it's going to be. I'm not going to get into the details of broadcast domains and all that nonsense because I don't think it's really too important. Again, chances are you're an average guy (or girl) who wants to learn a little more about networking not read about crap that doesn't really pertain to you. Subnet Masks So what the hell is a subnet mask? Usually it looks like: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- netmask: 255.255.255.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But how the netmask actually works is REALLY cool, if you're a complete geek and you like this stuff. I don't really like figuring this out on paper, but KNOWING how it works is pretty cool. Let me attempt to explain. We have the following: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IP ADDRESS: 192.168.1.100 NETMASK 255.255.255.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now if you recall earlier, you should be able to look at this IP address and see what the Network ID is (192.168.1.0) This is an easy one and it's pretty pointless to work through the math, but it should be good for illustration. First we need to convert the IP address into binary: (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j...260/subnet.html) quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IP Address:192.168.1..100 Binary:11000000.10101000.00000001.01100100 now we convert the subnet mask into binary IP Address:255.255.255.0 Binary:11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- now we put the IP address (in binary) over the subnet mask in binary and add them. quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IP BIN: 11000000.10101000.00000001.01100100 NETB: 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11000000.10101000.00000001.00000000 is the netmask in binary. Convery it back to an IP and what do you have? IP Address:11000000.10101000.00000001.00000000 Base10:192.168.1.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alot of work to do by hand and at this point you may be scratching your head wondering what the point of all this is. Well, when your computer makes a request to some IP address, it will take that IP address and compare it to your net address to tell whether or not the computer you are trying to get to is on YOUR network or a different network. This is how it figures it out. If the other address isn't on your net, the request gets fired to the default gateway. This example was intended to be really easy, but when you start talking about subnetting a network with a netmask of 255.255.255.224 things get a little more difficult. =) DNS - Domain Name Service Wow, Mac addresses, IP addresses...but what about http://forum.abit-usa.com ? Well that's a hostname/Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) and it's a helluva lot easier to remember than: 65.123.7.5 To my understanding, back in the day when the world wide web consisted of 3 lunatics with 3.5kbs modems, they used a file called a host file to refer to each other's computers. It's kind of an "Alias" type thing. This file is still found on modern computers but is rarely used (c:windowssystem32driversetchost) Everyone had to update this file individually whenever a new computer was added to the network, it made it easy to refer to other computers on the network by a simple, easy to remember NAME. abit, unstable, deepblue etc. Bad thing about this file is that, for every computer added to the network, the name and IP address had to be added to EVERY file on each one of the computers on the network. Eventually someone got wise to this and came up with DNS, I think it was called "BIND" to begin with. Instead of each computer having a record of every other computer, there was a single computer that had the complete list. If you wanted to know the IP address to get to "Abit" you had to ask the name server. The name server returns the IP address and your computer sends out the request to Abit to initiate communications. Works basically the same nowadays. You can open a command window (start-->run type "CMD" press enter), in the command window type "ping forum.abit-usa.com", it will return the IP address of forum.abit-usa.com. You can also do an NSLOOKUP on the IP address of a computer to find out the hostname or NSLOOKUP on a hostname to get the IP address. Knowing this should really help some of you out. Sometimes when a page doesn't load for me, the first thing I do is ping my DNS servers, I usually don't get a response and I know there's a communication problem between my router and my ISP. Also, sometimes if your DNS servers aren't working correctly, you won't be able to get to websites using their hostname. For example, say you try to go to http://www.google.com, your computer says...hmmm, where is "GOOGLE"? It's not in my cache...let's ask DNS. DNS isn't working so you don't get a response, so your computer doesn't know where to go and you get an error. BUT if you knew the IP address of Google, you could type that in the address bar and get where you need to go. DHCP

Windows XP Security - Submitted by UNSTABLE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is so much ground to cover here that I

Basic Network Troubleshooting - Submitted by UNSTABLE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Possessing a simple understanding of networking and the tools used to troubleshoot networks will be incredibly helpful to everyone viewing your post. Under a microscope, networks are VERY complex, if you knew what was really happening when you open up Internet Explorer and type http://forum.abit-usa.com and the page pops up, you'd be surprised it even worked! If you built your own computer, you can troubleshoot a network problem. Analytical skills are universal. When you flip the light switch to turn on your bedroom light, and it doesn't turn on, you don't replace the switch, or bust a hole in the wall to check the wiring, you replace the light bulb. I'll do my best to keep this post to a bare minimum, but I have to assume that you know next to nothing about networking. Keep in mind as you look at the length of this, that I spent the time to type it up to HELP YOU. TOOLS 80% of network troubleshooting happens at the command line. To access command line: Win 9X: click start-->run type "Command

ack, sorry-I wasn't logged in when I posted this last night, I didn't know (most forums don't allow guest posts). Well maybe this could just be an option that is turned on/off, so that if people want to participate they can. Then all of the results of the fastest ISP's and stuff will be public and nobody would need to ask what the best ISP is for a particular area. Same thing with the tweaks. Publically available information for people who opt-in to test and provide the tweaks they did (browser/os etc).

one explanation may be the "automatically log me in" option. I don't leave it checked, so when I come to the board I am on as a guest until I decide to post once. Then I'm shown as being on...but if I leave and come back, I show up as a guest again.