Windows XP Login Bug

In the last month or two a bug seems to have appeared in the login software of our fully up-to-date Windows XP Pro installation.  We have the login screen set to display the users' icons.  If I log in as an administrator and then l log out again and try to log in as another user, then the login screen does not detect the keypresses used to enter passwords.  It might be that logging in as any user and then logging out again is enough to produce the problem, I haven't tried it (and I don't care enough to do so).

There is a work-around: pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice brings up the old Windows NT login box and this does detect keypresses correctly.

McAfee Internet Security Suite 8.0

I have been using McAfee Internet Security Suite on Windows XP since 2004.  Although it is a little awkward to set up and a little intrusive in its operation, I have always managed to get it working in a reasonably acceptable way, that was, until I upgraded to version 8.0.  This version seems to be flakey and badly designed.  In particular during installation I managed to get Windows XP into a state in which it would repeatedly reboot during startup.  Furthermore, it does not appear to be possible to set up the Privacy Service so that different Windows XP users have different Privacy Service levels without having forcing some of them to log in to the Service each time they log into XP.  I would have expected the Privacy Service to use the Windows XP password authentication and I find it really unacceptable that it does not.  Consequently,  I have now uninstalled the Privacy Service.  I now have a usable installation which consists of just McAfee VirusScan and Personal Firewall Plus (I have never felt the need for the SpamKiller). 

Something is wrong.  For software as important as this, I shouldn't have to fight to get it installed.

A DNS Problem and its Solution

On Wednesday afternoon Zoe and I got home to find that our connection to the web had stopped working. When we tried to go to a web-site such as www.google.com the browser would just sit there waiting for a minute or so before giving up. We couldn't think of anything we had done since the previous evening that could have caused the problem.

We have two computers that connect to the internet through a Zoom ADSL X5 modem router. The problem was common to both computers so the problem was either with the modem or with our broadband supplier. I opened up a MS-DOS window in Windows XP and tried to ping Google:

  ping www.google.com

Google replied. Then I pinged Google from a terminal window in Linux, with the same result. So, the underlying internet connection was working. The problem must therefore be with the DNS name lookup (the mechanism which converts URL's such as "www.google.com" into the 4-number network addresses such as "245.10.45.97"). I dug out the printout I kept of my broadband supplier's connection instructions (you should always have a copy of these, either as a printout or as a file on your PC because when something goes wrong you won't be able to get to their web-site!). What I needed were the addresses of primary and secondary domain name servers (DNS) which were 195.74.102.146 and 195.74.102.147. The Zoom ADSL modem router is configured using a web-browser interface.  I started Firefox, entered http://10.0.02 as the URL and pressed 'Go'.  I then logged into the modem router with the username and password which I have noted down from when I installed it.  Then I went to the DNS Setup page (its under Advanced Setup).  The existing DNS setup was 'Use Auto Discovered DNS servers only'.  I changed this to 'Auto Discovery + User Configured' and entered 195.74.102.146 and 195.74.102.147 as the Preferred and Alternative DNS servers.  I then saved the changes and wrote then to Flash.  The modem rebooted and then we could get through to Google (and the rest of the Web) again. 

I still don't know what caused the DNS lookup to fail when it did, but I don't care because I have got it working again and Zoe thinks I am a hero!

Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS) Upgrade

Last night I upgraded the operating system on my IBM Thinkpad R50e lap-top from Unbuntu 5.10 to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support). 

The whole process took less than an hour and was completely automatic except for one point where it asked me if I wanted it to delete some packages that were no longer maintained (I said yes as I didn't notice anything in the list that I used).  There was only one minor problem (well, more of an annoyance) in that an icon I had set up for a shortcut to Idle (the Python IDE) must have got deleted which resulted in lots of "Can't find icon" error boxes.  However, this was simply fixed by deleting the shortcut (I will set up a new one when I use Idle again). 

The only differences that I have noticed after the upgrade are that the login screen is more glossy and Firefox is now at version 1.5.0.4 instead of 1.4.2.  On the whole, I am very impressed with Ubuntu.