davehayes.org

i have never seen so many bizarre, mysterious, that-shouldn’t-be-possible types of networking problems as with windows. you can blame it on software, users, hardware, whatever… but i have never seen problems like this with computers running osx or linux. take for example the problem i’m dealing with today.

i have a user who calls me this morning and says he can’t connect to the internet. or e-mail. usually this is a standard type of complaint that takes 30 seconds to troubleshoot and resolve. however, this one is different because as of now, an hour later, it is still unresolved and i already want to drink drano.

basic troubleshooting. first things first, reboot. lord knows that fixes probably 75% of windows problems anyway, but we have no such luck here. so let’s see if we can figure out what the problem is. why can’t the user connect? i attempt to ping our router:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\>ping 192.168.111.1

Pinging 192.168.111.1 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.111.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

Ping statistics for 192.168.111.1:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

well, he’s obviously connected to the network and passing traffic to/from the router without any trouble. how about the proxy server:

C:\>ping guardian
Ping request could not find host guardian. Please check the name and try again.

what the heck? let’s try pinging the ip address of the proxy:

C:\>ping 192.168.111.6

Pinging 192.168.111.6 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.111.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.111.6: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

Ping statistics for 192.168.111.6:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

that worked fine, so apparently it’s a DNS issue. i checked the DNS settings, it pulled the correct ones from DHCP but i set them manually just to be sure. still a no go. well, let’s try to ping the e-mail server, which also provides DNS:

C:\>ping 192.168.111.2

Pinging 192.168.111.2 with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 192.168.111.2:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

now this is really weird. i can ping that server from any other computer on the network. i’ve checked and double checked all the network settings on the offending computer, there’s nothing wrong. so i think maybe the switch is flaking out on me, so i move the cable to a different physical port. no luck.

so basically, i have a user’s computer that connects to the network and can ping every other computer on the network just fine, except for the computer that provides DNS and e-mail services. all of the other computers can use the DNS and e-mail services without a problem. how is this even possible?

if you have any ideas, please let me know. otherwise, just stop by with some gin, drano and olives and make me a cocktail to put me out of my misery.

there are a number of small, annoying things about a fresh ubuntu (or any linux distro… any operating system, for that matter) installation. one tiny thing that contributes to an overall feel of incompletion is the fact that the “create document” portion of the nautilus context menu complains that there are “no templates installed”

all you need to do is create a folder called Templates in your home directory (that’s ~/Templates) and open your favorite spreadsheet or word processing software and save an empty document to ~/Templates and name it however you want it to show up in the menu. this works for any type of file that makes sense to have in a “create document” menu. magic!