Service Providers

In a natural progression, let's move to service providers.

My parents are now a week into their enforced Internet silence. Last Tuesday evening they had Internet access via their excellent Netgear DG834 firewall through to a service provider, had changed nothing and there were no problems. Since then, zip.

Mother is sufficiently technical that she can dance around Windows and her firewall. Firewall says "LCP is allowed to come up" but it simply will not connect. IP address is dynamic, username and password have been checked.

Here are some of the things that the ISP have said:
Your firewall is at fault, please contact Netgear
You have to flash the firmware on your firewall
You are running Vista / You need to reload your computer
You need to change your DNS settings to be able to connect to the Internet.
You need to uninstall your anti virus software on your PC.
You need to disable the Windows firewall on your PC.

The line is fine (a BT engineer has tested it).
The ISP is insistent that the problem lies in their house.
They have deleted her email address and recreated it incorrectly so had I not spotted that, all emails would have bounced after 2 days.
The firewall has been changed, so has the RJ11 cable and so has the micro filter.

But the best one is to insist categorically that the Netgear firewall will connect if the drop down box containing the options "PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet)" and "PPPoA (PPP over ATM)" is changed to "PPPoA 2364".

Now correct me if I am wrong, but you can't change a drop down list box for a start and I think that number corresponds to RFC 2364, the request for comments document for PPPoA on the Internet Engineering Task Force site.

Still, I saved the best for last. The ISP in question appears to have a more pressing problem. I'm not going to say which one it is, but click on https://webmail.talktalk.net/ and you'll find that the security certificate is invalid.

Should we have a whip round?

Vista, Office and graphics cards

Having bought a nice 128MB 4x AGP graphics card for Mother for her Athlon 2400, 1GB etc computer, she OUGHT to have been ready for Vista. Rather annoyingly, her Windows XP Pro won't upgrade to Vista Home Premium despite the software being an upgrade so a clean install was what was on offer.

Actually the upgrade is quite sweet as it removes the Documents and Settings folder, the Program Files folder and the Windows folder and drops the lot into Windows.old folder for future use. The install went its usual way, clicking Next a lot really.

Gremlins and gotchas - Windows driver signing. If the driver is signed, install it. It might not work, but install it. The video card driver installs beautifully but a code 43 error means Vista disables it. Hours online gave a handful of workarounds but only one managed to get a driver to install but when you do a Windows Experience Index (Vista speak for 'How fast is my PC?'), we see our first BSOD from the nVidia mini display driver. Argh...

Printer? Sure - Vista hyperlink available on the manuf's site. Page then blank.

Lots of other software was not compatible but the new versions were downloaded and installed. Modem software isn't compatible either.

Office went in easily enough though.

Then came Windows Live Messenger. You'd think this one was simple wouldn't you? New Microsoft app onto new Microsoft OS. Surely they'd speak the same lingo? Installed, configured, won't connect. Problem traced, of all things, to the firmware revision of the hardware firewall (Netgear DG834G v2). If you DOWNgrade the firmware by a couple of steps it works. Cynically, I made no changes whatsoever to anything but the firmware and sure enough it works. So what is it that stops Live Messenger from connecting through the Netgear? Some kind of broadcast that looks like a packet level attack? But there is no outbound blocking, everything is allowed out.

Eventually it was all done and by 'all' I mean time. Early adopters beware - Vista can really wipe out your weekend.