Adventures in Windows Networking:
Ok, today was quite an adventure with Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). I started out great this morning. Everything was working fine until I inserted my Asus CD that came with my motherboard to install the optimzied drivers for I/O and such. Then my machine refused to boot up.
I tried everything. I even re-installed windows in another directory to see if I could get online to find a fix. Then I realized that I didn't have the complete set of files needed to reinstall my ADSL card. So the deal was that I could only get on the network if I could get the original OS installation to boot.
I spent most of the day trying to get that working, and finally around superbowl time I got it to boot once I realized that I could run SCANREG and restore an old registry configuration. ScanReg saved my ass.
When I got the machine running with the restored registry, everything seemed ok, except I was having trouble with the network connecting consistently. I finally got it to connect once and had a chance to download the newest driver for my ADSL card.
I installed the new driver, but then when I went to layer ICS on top, the network stopped working again. The host machine (windows) would not connect to the internet whenever ICS was installed. I finally got the notion to try adding a second dial-up adapter, becuase I remember reading somewhere earlier today that some related product required the VPN support which is added when you install a second dial up adapater. I just tried that about 10 minutes ago and it's working perfectly now.
By the way, I found a cool program while I was messing around with getting my
linux box to connect and came across a site called
analogx that makes some interesting applications, most of which seem to be free. I tried their portmapper for a few minutes to see if I could get to
IRC from my linux box and it worked fine. I might move my
web server or maybe an
ftp server over to my linux box and portmap it from my windows box. *shrug*
Anyway, it's good that I had all of this today even though it was frustrating. It kept my mind off of Sara all day, which is probably the longest I've gone so far not thinking about her. I should stop now before I start.
Tomorrow I have jury duty, but I'm not really very happy about it. I want to go to Japanese class, but that's at the same time. At least I don't have to go to work, I guess. It's 1:24 am now, so technically it's today, and since I have to get up at 6:30, I should go now.
Memo to me: Write up a HOWTO on everything I did to fix the network problems I had today and put it on my website.