link470

Just to let you all know, the IBM Lenovo software was making encrypted backups on the drive, and it didn't show within windows or anywhere else. More like a rootkit backup But I found it just using the IBM backup software and deleted it. Just thought I'd post that in case anyone else ever had this problem with IBM Lenovo laptops.

lol, I'm a 20 year old Network Administrator in a server room in a high school overlooking the main hallways of the school, and the first day one of the students came in and asked if I was a new student here. Another student went to the office on the first day cause they needed help with a login password, and they got sent here, didn't come in but I saw her looking through my window and then went back to the office, and later I found out that she had asked the office where I was, they told her to go down here, and she went back and said "network admin guy wasnt there, it was just some boy", to which they replied "that's the network admin".

Thanks for your reply! I tried that, and unfortunately the popups are still coming up on every boot. Any other suggestions? I also was suspicious it was IE's doing. EDIT Instead of just unchecking Include all network paths (UNC), I unchecked all 3. Still no difference.

LOL. That's the kind of thing you don't want to laugh at while you're trying to find it and it's actually quite annoying, but when you do that's a totally awsome story to keep lol.

Wow, I'm having a really wierd issue with XP SP3. Most machines went alright. But I just formatted a new machine here I'm building for a client on the side, installed windows, all new components. I connected to the internet, ran Windows Update and installed drivers as I usually do, however this is doing something I've never seen a fresh install of windows do on boot. EVERY TIME Windows boots up, it gives me a security warning of if I want to load each driver. EVERY TIME. Even if I uncheck "always ask before opening this file". Anyone else come across this yet? Just to see if it was a fluke, I reinstalled 3 times. I'm on my third try. Each time doing drivers, windows update, and office 2003 install in different order. http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa188/link4scott/sc1.jpg http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa188/link4scott/sc2.jpg It's really really annoying. I swear I've seen something like it befor... Oh...Oh wait...

I couldn't originally. BUT... Thank you all for your replies. Much appreciated! I ended up thinking of what you all said and took a laptop into work, ran wireshark, found a TON of packets, like, in the 100,000 range almost instantly. I ended up seperating our switch stacks, isolated it to one switch, and that switch was looped into another switch...twice. Everything is back up and running after disconnecting just one of those cables. What's strange, is I think it's been like that for quite awhile and nothing ever happened before. I may be wrong, but does this sound possible? As of now, the entire network is up and running again, and I thank you all so much for your support and quick suggestions and replies. I'm just chillin' at home now very happy but still wondering if it's possible that there could have been a delay and that the storm of broadcasting didn't catch on till later? The set up was that the main switch [switch 1 out of 3 switches connected together via gigabit uplinks] was plugged into a spare 4th switch down below that the previous tech had used as a spare because there wasn't enough places to plug things in [the patch panel had more ports than the switches could support in that room]. Only 4 things were plugged in. 2 of them were from patch panel locations to connect wall jacks around the school, and 2 were the redundant connections plugged into switch 1 that after removing 1 of those, everything worked again. Any ideas if it's possible for a delay to happen and it not really get to the point of this until now? Any ideas of what triggered it so suddenly to be problematic? Either way, it's up and running. Thanks a ton! I love this place.

lol, awsome. Sounds good, thanks for the advice! I'll add that to the todo list.

Thank you very much! I'll try that tomorrow. Much appreciated! Any other ideas anyone to add to the list?

Alright guys. So as you can imagine, network goes down, I'm hoping to get this resolved soon. Here's what happened. It's 12:30 P.M. [Do YOU know what you're networks' doing?]. Everything is running great. 3 main switches in the server room, 48 port managed switches [Dell PowerConnect 3348's] and all is well. Everything functions normal, all servers are online, all desktops are happily happenin'. I go out to get a shipment of 50 new machines that arrive and start piling them outside my office. Next thing I know, I have lots of requests saying the entire network is down and nobody can access anything. I quickly head back to the server room wondering if a UPS went down, if a server restarted, if a switch turned off, anything. But what do I see? Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Everything is functioning great. But wait...no it's not. I can't get on the internet. I can't ping ANY computers, I can't remote desktop into the servers, the RDC's I DO have up with servers all fail, and everything is extremely slow. So I call the school board office. They head over with their handy $18,000 fluke meter. They plug it into one of our switches, and it measures our network and quickly throws back at us a 100% Network Utilization. The guy from the board office goes WHOA!!! I've never EVER seen it that high before. So we try swapping the first switch in the stack under suspicion it may be bad. We put in a 3448, Dell's next model of the 48 port 10/100 PowerConnect switch and take out the 3348. We use patch cables to link them together in a chain setup and see if that works. In the end, the switch switch [lol] did nothing. I still can't ping any machine in the school or get out of the network. I checked our main router, and it's functioning normally. I restarted the servers and they all appear to be functioning normally. So I think to myself, what would cause 100% network utilization. I noticed that ONE ping got through, but only 1 out of the 4 pings got a reply. So I knew the infrastructure itself was probably ok, but I had the assumption that something was loop backing. So off I go around the network. Documenting every single wall jack and port in the school [took 7 hours] and checked EVERY switch we have for any type of loopback that might be possible, like a jack plugged into a switch, and another port on the switch plugged into another jack. I also shut down every machine I came across and every network printer I came across so the network can essentially have nothing to broadcast [except for powered nics but since the machine isn't on it's less of a chance of being anything malicious running on the machine itself]. Nothing from what I could see in any of the labs was like that. All the jacks had either a direct connection to a PC, or a connection to a switch, that contained only other connections to PC's, not back to a wall jack. So here I am guys. It's the weekend, Friday night, schools not in for the weekend so I've got 2 days to work and go in for some overtime. Anyone have any suggestions of what to try next? Thanks a ton you guys. I really appreciate this community and hope we can get this resolved! Network Notes: -Windows NT Based Network running Windows Server 2003 servers and 250 XP Professional client stations. -6 Windows Server 2003 servers total -3 main switches in server room, 7 others around school. All checked thoroughly and restarted. Take care and have a good weekend. We have multiple IP's to the school so since I can't access the internet inside the school because of extreme lag, I'll plug in to the main external switch plugged into the modem and grab an IP for my laptop if I go in so I can check Edugeek. Thanks guys!

Hey everyone. Just installed SP3 here on a few test machines to see how it goes. First off I'm very impressed at how well the update went on most machines. I had to use a registry tweak to edit all the permissions for Administrator full control to make it install, but I managed to get it installed right after that. The question I have is about Office. I can't seem to install Office 2003 on a machine that has SP3 installed. The office install gets to the point where its JUST about finished, and then displays this box, and after clicking OK, rolls back the installation. Anyone run across this issue? EDIT: I'm attempting the install as local administrator. Windows XP Home machine. EDIT: Appears a patch has fixed it, it suddently works no problem. http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa188/link4scott/Office2003InstallErrorAfterXPSP3Ins.jpg

So it looks like it was released today. I run Windows Update and it shows up like Service Pack 2 for Windows XP used to show up, with a page that comes up saying SP3 is available and it's highly recommended to download that first [or continue to other updates]. However it appears that the link doesn't exist. Windows update can't get the file, and the Microsoft Download Center can't get the file. Maybe it will work if I share the direct link with all of you? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=90&p=&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=5b33b5a8-5e76-401f-be08-1e1555d4f3d4&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2fd%2f3%2f0%2fd30e32d8-418a-469d-b600-f32ce3edf42d%2fWindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe Together, with enough power, we can make that link active!!!!!!!1111111oneoneone[no we can't]oneoneoneoneone EDIT: It works as of now [2:58 PM PST]

Just wondering if anyone has experienced this issue. I've managed to get a connection to the desktop automatically on dial up of the server now through netmeeting, however the quality is still horrible. I've included some screenshots here of what it looks like when you try to remote connect. Can't figure out why. Thanks!

lol. I agree. Crazy to think that students will go this far to bypass protection and access things like games and facebook. Now THAT's a sign of addiction. No school work gets done, and it's their school time they're using to try to bypass the protection. If staff ever say "why can a student do this". Sure, I'll block it. But my question right back to them is "why aren't your students wanting to study".

lol thanks bud. Actually lol, they never noticed. They were used to being locked down and upon checks of the school and monitoring, nobody even tried anything. Well behaved students

Thanks for your reply. I did try setting it to merge as I had it before, but it never worked. I'll try adjusting the order it's applied. Thanks! For everyone who has reviewed this topic, thank you. I've figured it out. It WAS the loopback policy. I removed it, and everything works perfectly now. Thanks again!

Hey everyone. I've got a system here at the high school that allows the office staff to remote connect into a Windows XP Professional based machine that has a video card in it with a TV tuner that then splits into 5 different coax lines and goes throughout the school to 5 different TV's and displays powerpoint. The previous tech went with Netmeeting so that a lock screen wouldn't appear everytime the office staff went to connect because of course if she used RDC, she could see the screen, but the TV's would all appear as lock screens. So netmeeting remote desktop sharing was the way to go. However, I just configured a new box for netmeeting. For one, remote desktop sharing is a pain, I sometimes get it working, and sometimes dont. The server computer has desktop sharing turned on and running, but the client when calling in, can successfully call, but no desktop shows up. [EDIT: Desktop now shows up after restart] But on top of that, when the office lady connects, it shows up really really grainy. Like, netmeeting remote desktop quality looks like how explorer.exe looks when its crashed and you can essentially paint with your windows and they overlap each other. It's terrible. You can't see a thing, you have to wave your mouse above each part you want to see like a scratch and save card. So my question is, if there's no easy way to make netmeeting work, would you recommend a secure free VNC solution? Or has anyone else had this issue and have a favorite software package [preferably free, but also secure] that they like? Thanks!

Thank you very much for your reply. It all makes perfect sense. I actually called my ISP a few weeks ago and asked them how I could do this. They said no matter what plan I got from them, their mail servers still restricted recipients/relays/messages to 5000 a day. Where as popular forums will send out MUCH more than that a day. This was their reply to when I asked them about all this below. Pay close attention to the end, is this what you were describing? It's not a c-name record, but it may help because it's reverse. Yet, still only 5000 emails. Grrr. Who knows maybe it's enough but I just can't see my mail servers growing for batch emails like newsletters and people subscribing to forums etc., that mail server would be firing off a new email on each reply to a subscribed forum, and who knows how many people are subscribed. Before anyone says it, yes I know there's hosting packages out there that do stuff like have a prebuilt phpbb server etc. but hey, lol, I want to learn and do this myself! I'm close!

Hmm, so let me see if I understand. If someone else for example sends an email, it goes to the mail queue just fine. That's on port 25. Now, my mail server, if I have the SMTP service set to another SMTP port, is the mail going to get to its correct destination? Like hotmail, google, etc.? I'm using Kerio MailServer 6. I seem to remember changing it to a different port and it didn't make a difference. Mail couldn't be sent. However the MY mail server receives mail to be sent perfectly and our guys with with those email accounts on my domain can receive mail perfectly from anybody. Just sending out of the server seems to be the problem. I get error 4.1.1 host could not be contacted because of course 25 is blocked by ISP. With all these forwarding services though they seem to charge by the amount of mail sent, per recipient, but I just need that port OPEN, my mail server does all the sending, it's sending itself, I have my own SMTP server, if I'm thinking right I shouldn't need to forward to anybody else to send my mail because my server can do it itself. My IP address doesn't change. It's dynamic yes, but it hasn't changed in a year and a half. I'm very happy with it. Also, I can purchase a static IP if I need it for $15 a month which isn't a problem, but since mine hasn't changed I haven't gone that way. My DNS is hosted at GoDaddy and I have all my MX and SPF security records to point to my IP here at home. Again, if I'm somewhere else and I telnet to my server on port 25, I get a valid response that SMTP is ready, so I can go IN 25, so my clients at other places can send mail TO the main mail server from their mail client program from anywhere and it gets to my mail server to be sent to its destination, BUT, my mail server can't send out. That's the only issue. So again, Kerio has settings for which port each service uses. Would I need to change SMTP to a nonstandard port, and have each of my clients set THEIR smtp settings to a non standard port so the mail server receives the request on that port, AND sends on that port and isn't blocked out the ISP and to it's destination? Or would I need to find a way to have Kerio receive on port 25 so clients could keep their same port 25 settings for sending mail, and the mail server just SENDS on a different port [which I cant find the option for because it appears theres just one option, "smtp = [port number]" under services, and the only other option for specifically sending mail on a different port is using a SMTP relay and it asks for that relay's mail server address, which of course then gets to me paying money per email relayed and I don't want to deal with that].

Psht, no worries! I'm glad you replied, I'm willing to accept any and all ideas. Just replying to each one I get with what I've done to eliminate what it could be. I think we may be onto something with that loopback policy but ya that's exactly what I was wondering at first, that it may have been something to do with certain computers on the domain or the DC's being restarted so I'm glad I wasn't the only one who suggested that! Unfortunately didn't do anything but we'll see. I'm looking forward to testing that removal of the loopback policy processing tomorrow. I'll let you all know how it went. Once again thank you all for your replies I really appreciate this community. I still think back to the beginning of the school year when I first found this place after getting my job and was like "no freakin way....there's a forum for OUR JOB!!!". Totally diggin it. It's helped me many times.

Awsome! Thanks, that's great. So that's one question answered. In this way, would I probably need a pretty intense system as an ISA server with a really good gigabit card in there [and it looks like I can just add it anywhere on the network]? I was planning on using a small form factor box with 512MB of ram and a 1GHz Pentium 3, but dedicated to JUST serving ISA. Would that be enough? They make great servers and really compact for everything else.

I've restarted both my DC's and added a new machine to the domain and tested. I haven't, I'll have a look on Monday along with PiqueABoo's idea of that loopback policy being set at "replace". Thanks!

Hello everyone! I have a set up here at home which has 3 web servers [on different ports], a mail server, and various other servers running other tasks. What I'd like to do, is have these servers behind an ISA server on the network. I want to have all websites using port 80 [on different servers under ONE IP address]. First off I'd like to thank all of you who replied to my post about how to do that and suggested ISA in here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/17217-how-do-i-host-all-these-sites-services-under-1-ip-address.html Now that I know ISA is probably the way to go, I have a couple questions. My current setup is that all my servers are behind one main router here. It's a DIR-655 from D-Link, nothing like an enterprise would use but a really solid home router. My computers are all gigabit and on a local network here, I have a few gigabit switches covering everything. But they're all on the same network. No subnet for the servers or anything. Now, if I added an ISA server, would I be able to just add it to the network and reroute requests to it, or do I have to have two network cards in it and create a SECOND private network behind ISA just for my servers and seperate from my other systems? Like, if I want it to handle domain requests for websites and mail servers, would I set my DNS in GoDaddy [my domain name providor] to point to my IP, and I'd just forward the ports for all my services [80 for web, 25 for mail etc. etc.] to the ISA server and configure port forwarding in the router to fire everything to the ISA server and it forwards onto the correct internal network from there? I'm not sure if that's right. Right now all the websites are on one server and just using host headers with IIS. But I'd like to expand and use multiple web servers each with a specific service. The next question I have is now does ISA send the result back? So lets say someone has requested one of my websites. They type the address in, the request goes to GoDaddy, which reads the A record and fires the request to my home network where at this time, my IIS server picks it up and reads the host header and sends it the right site, but instead would an ISA server read the result, forward the request to the correct internal web server, and now for the question, does the internal server send the result to the ISA server which sends it back to the person who made the request? Or does the ISA server send the request to the web server, and the web server fires the website out the main door [router] and straight to the person who made the request? If THAT's true, would I need more ports open? This would completely defeat the purpose of having a reverse proxy because I can't do that, I can't forward 80 to two internal computers. Therefore I'm thinking that it goes Request>Router>ISA>Internal Server which sends the website to>ISA>Router>Person who made request. This is all a learning experience for me. Yes, I could buy more IP's. No, I don't want to do that partly because I don't want to spend any more money and partly because I really want to learn how to do this in case I ever come across another setup where it may come in handy, I think it's really cool and dispite how much I'm not really a fan of ISA for a web filter at a school cause it was way too bypassable for me [and I ended up buying a Barracuda Web Filter 310], I think it could be really cool and serve the purpose of a reverse proxy/firewall very nicely. I hope my post was clear enough to read and understand. Thank you all very much for reviewing my question. Hopefully I'll learn something! Thanks again.

Alright everyone. This is more directed to the admins of edugeek since they run forums and I'm pretty sure at one time they were phpbb, but here it is for anyone who can help. Below is a copy/paste from phpbb's support forums. They couldn't help me. I'm basically trying to run an SMTP server from inside my house where I have 7 servers and growing. My current setup is that my ISP has port 25 open ONLY if using their business internet, and even then, you can only send off to a max of 5000 recipients a day. If you're on a normal high speed connection or my ISP's upgraded high speed connection [about 3MB's a second down] which is what I have, you get 1000 emails a day as you'll read below, and that's ONLY if you're using the ISP's SMTP. I'm looking for SOMETHING unrestricted because I'm running my OWN mail server, not somebody elses. If anyone feels they can help I'd really appreciate it. I have all the hardware working, I can receive emails to the mail server perfectly from any address. But sending is the issue. Thanks for reading! --------------------------------------------------------- Hello, I run a website that uses PHPBB. I host it on my own servers and have MX records in DNS pointing to my home servers as well where I have a mail server running. That mail server receives mail fine, and the PHPBB forums authenticate with it perfectly and the mail gets added to the queue. However, there comes a time when that email actually has to be sent away from the mail server and to the actual recipient [duh]. Most ISP's these days block port 25 for obvious security reasons such as SMTP Relay's being open and allowing spam through. However I am NOT a spammer. I'm trying to use my own SMTP server, and since port 25 is blocked on my current internet connection, my perfectly good mail server with absolutely no restrictions on how many recipients there are can't send mail. Unless I can find a relay somewhere, but most relays are pretty limiting to say, 100 recipients a day. My ISP allows for 1000 relays a day, however that's only if you're using an ISP email account. I'm not. I'm using PHPBB and a custom mail server that ties in with my DNS Domain Name. My question I'm posing to all of you who run very successful PHPBB forums, is how...how do you possibly send mail to so many people? Whether it's people who have subscribed to a forum topic, new members wanting authorization, or mass emailing every member of your board, how do you do it? Thanks!

Thank you very much. I'll remove the loopback processing policy within the Set Homepage policy on Monday and see what happens. I'll report back as soon as I've tried.

The policy is a seperate User policy under the Students OU called "Set User Interface". The Students OU contains 4 OU's, one for each grade, and each grade contains those students in that grade. Everything under the Students OU is a user. Yes. Yes. Thanks for your replies!