Windows 7 Fails to Detect Other Computer on Network

I was becoming acquainted with Windows 7.  Sometimes, when I booted it up, it would immediately recognize the other computer (running Windows XP) on my home network, and would also recognize the (Linux-based) Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) device I had connected.  At other times, unfortunately, the Win7 computer would only see itself.  This post describes steps I took to resolve that inconsistency.

I did a search on this problem.  I was inspired to undertake this investigation after I used System Restore to restore an earlier state of the computer.  Those other devices were now not visible in Windows Explorer.  They had been visible just a few minutes earlier.  To my knowledge, I had not done anything that would have made those devices more visible, or less so.

When I searched, I noticed a post in which someone said that Windows 7 was also losing track of drive mapping after it went into sleep mode.  I wondered if that was related.  The previous day, the computer had magically mapped drive D, a network drive on the Synology NAS, without any instruction from me to do so.  The poster said that he was experiencing both of these problems.  That particular thread concluded without an indication of a solution.  One poster said, "Ultimately this is just the nature of the way networking is sometimes."  But it seemed to me that it had never been that way between the XP machine and the NAS, or between the NAS and the Ubuntu setup that I had been using before I got Windows 7.

I wondered if it was somehow an XP problem.  The WinXP machine was currently in touch with the NAS.  Was it possibly barring the Win7 machine from seeing either itself or the NAS?  I rebooted the WinXP machine, but that didn't make a difference on the Win7 machine.

It wasn't a hardware problem, or even a networking problem per se.  Access to the Synology unit was through a web-based program.  On the Win7 computer, I could go into that Synology program and could communicate with the Synology NAS unit.  Synology could see the NAS unit, but Microsoft couldn't.  Apparently whatever was keeping Win7 from seeing the NAS was also keeping it from seeing the WinXP machine.  It was all or nothing:  either Win7 could see them both, or (as at present) it could see neither.

After going online in Internet Explorer and accessing the Synology NAS from the Win7 machine, I rebooted the Win7 machine.  That did not make a difference.  The Win7 machine was still unable to see the others.

In Control Panel > Network and Sharing Center > Troubleshoot problems, I tried the Incoming Connections option and said, "Find this computer on the network."  It came back with this advice:

Reconfigure your network

To prevent problems other computers or devices might have when connecting to your computer, no more than one device should perform network address translation (NAT).

I followed the link into Windows Help and Support, but that wasn't actually too helpful and supportive.  I clicked Next, and the Incoming Connections troubleshooter confirmed, "More than one device is performing network address translation (NAT)."  So, OK, which device?  I clicked "View detailed information" and went into Detection Details.  All I could find there that looked like it might be informative was a Network Diagnostics Log.  Following the links there in the Help dialogs, it seemed that, to open that up, I would have to use ThermaData Logger software.  This software seemed to be almost completely unknown through the vendor, ETI Software, that Win7 pointed me to, but I did find plenty of links for it elsewhere.  I had no idea why Microsoft required me to download a 29MB file from a slow connection just to read a log file.  While I was waiting on that, I found ThermoWorks -- the need for using thermal logging software was another mystery -- and was right on the verge of downloading their ThermaData Software Suite for Windows when I looked back at the Help dialog and decided to try instead downloading ThermaData Studio 1.0.5, which was apparently an entirely different deal.  That turned out to be a 12MB file.  While that was downloading, I went back to the dialog and clicked on the "Other Networking Configuration and Logs" link to open NetworkConfiguration.cab.  That led me to two text files:  ipconfig.all.txt and route.print.txt.  Neither contained any obvious references to NAT.  I installed ThermaData Studio.  Back in the dialog, I tried again on the link to the Network Diagnostics Log.  ThermaData Studio wasn't going to read it right there on the spot, so I downloaded the log and tried opening it from there.  But when I double-clicked on it, I got a message, "Windows can't open this file."  I went into the Start Menu and opened ThermaData Studio from there and tried to use it to view the file that I had downloaded.  At first, it didn't see anything -- it was looking for .msdb files -- but when I told it to look for .etl files, it found the download.  It gave me a completely empty file.  ThermaData Studio looked like solid software, but since I did not need it after all, I uninstalled it.

We were left with the question of which devices on my system were set to NAT.  Trying another approach, I disconnected the WinXP machine from the network and re-ran the Win7 Incoming Connections troubleshooter.  That didn't eliminate the NAT problem.  I reconnected the WinXP machine, disconnected the modem from the router, and ran the troubleshooter again.  Now the NAT problem was gone, though now there was a new problem, where the troubleshooter said it needed more information.  So, OK, possibly the modem plus at least one other device was doing NAT on my network.  I had seen a post indicating that modems and routers can both do NAT, so I plugged everything back where it belonged and looked at the pages on port forwarding and putting a router into bridge mode that that post linked to.  Following what the latter seemed to be saying, I looked at a sticker on the bottom of my modem.  (I didn't seem to have a manual for it, but could probably have downloaded one.)  It gave me an IP address to enter into my Internet browser; and when I went to the appropriate page, it asked me for a code that appeared on that sticker.  This led me into the configuration software for the modem.  After poking around for a minute, I found a page for the modem's PPP location.  This seemed to be what I wanted.  It gave me two options:

PPP is on the modem.  This is the normal mode for this modem.  The PPP session is initiated from the modem.

PPP is on the computer, gateway or router.  This should only be used if you need to run a PPPoE client on your PC or you use another device (e.g., gateway or router) to initiate a PPPoE session.  This is often referred to as "Bridged" mode.

Since option A wasn't working for me, and since the post seemed to be saying that I should use option B, I switched to that and saved the change.  This gave me a Location Warning.  It said,

When using Bridged mode, your access to the modem becomes limited.  To return to the DSL modem user interface after this change you need to directly connect your PC to the modem without any gateway or router between the modem and the PC, and configure your computer appropriately.

Configure the IP address of your computer to be on the same network as the modem by using an IP address of the form 198.168.1.x (except 192.168.1.254) and a network mask of 255.255.255.0.

You may also return to the DSL modem user interface by resetting the modem back to its initial defaults.  All configuration changes and other settings will no longer be available if this is done.  To reset the modem press the "Reset" button located on the back of the modem.

We still had a problem.  The modem was supposed to be restarting, but it wasn't working.  It had three green lights on, including the one for the ethernet (i.e., router).  But why wasn't its Internet light on?  I unplugged its power cord, waited a minute or so, and plugged it back in.  That didn't help.  I tried the same thing with its Internet (i.e., telephone) cord.  When it was unplugged, the modem's DSL light was flashing red.  So I seemed to have a mistaken understanding of the difference between its DSL and Internet lights.  Well, whatever.  It wasn't working, is the point.  I thought that possibly AT&T (my ISP) needed the modem to be in the other mode.  I thought about calling them to ask, but Christ, to enter again into that vale of tears:  no way.

Well, I would have liked to research the modem situation further, but there was just one problem:  I couldn't, as I now had no Internet connection.  I ripped off the sticker on the back of the modem that said, "Remove only if advised by tech support" and there, in all its glory, behold:  the Reset Hole.  I jammed a paper clip into it and watched in amazement as this achieved ... nothing.  It seemed the Reset Hole had gone stale.  It took a couple of tries, and possibly the discovery that this unit required a minimum of 30 seconds of pressure in the hole to achieve the desired reset.  Even so, I could get online only by cabling the computer directly to the modem.  The router seemed to be dysfunctional.  There was, inevitably, a call to AT&T after all, and it actually took only ten minutes

I went back to the modem's webpage, but was now getting "Unable to connect."  Taking plan B, I cabled the WinXP computer directly to the modem, as advised above.  But still, no joy.  No Internet light on the modem; Unable to connect in Firefox.  Now I had really done it.  I had gone and given myself no alternative but to call AT&T.  A half-hour later, we emerged with the discovery that I, in keeping with the spirit of the event, had lost my router password and unfortunately could not go online to figure out how to reset it, given that the reset button seemed to be having no effect no matter how thoroughly I massaged it.  Oh, and the modem was back in its original mode.  End of bridge mode strategy.

I ran a search on this reset problem.  It produced some possibilities.  One was that I needed to reset my TCP/IP preferences to match the router's IP address.  Another was that I just wasn't following the right steps to reset it.  Apparently it was too early to call it a brick; but even if it hadn't been, there seemed to be some kind of de-bricking option.  Or maybe I just needed to go through the full set of steps for setting up the network properly.  The part that I may have left out, in resetting the router, was that I did not disconnect all except the power cable before doing the reset.  So I did that now, and held the reset button down for an overly long time.  I replugged the cable between it and a computer.  In the computer's web browser, I went to 192.168.1.1.  This connected me to the router's webpage.  The password to get in, after resetting, was admin.  Now I set Wireless SSDI Broadcast to Disable.  The webpage said I needed to initiate the push-button setup at this point.  It seemed they were referring to the backlit Cisco Systems logo on the front of the unit; pressing it revealed that it was in fact a button, and this produced a message on the webpage:

Accepting clients!

You will be returned to the previous page after SES configuration completed.

It then did its thing for a couple of minutes, and then I was back at the webpage.  The manual seemed to indicate that WPA2 Personal would provide the best available security for my setup.  I enabled Wireless MAC filtering.  The manual said that the option to Filter Internet NAT Redirection "uses port forwarding to block access to local servers from local networked computers."  That sounded vaguely like what someone had said I needed to make my network work again, so I enabled it.  A search led to the advice that I should not enable these until I needed them.  I disabled Wireless Access Web, in this wired setting.  A few more settings, and then I was done -- and still unable to connect to the router.  The troubleshooter was going to be unable to give me much help, it seemed until I connected the router to the modem, so I did that.  That still wasn't working, so I used the router's webpage Administration > Diagnostic options to ping the local IP address of 192.168.1.1.  That worked, but was I just pinging the router itself?  I tried 192.168.1.100.  That worked too.  I thought maybe the Traceroute diagnostic would be more helpful.  It wasn't.

The manual gave some troubleshooting steps.  Following its guidance, I made sure the router's light was solid green.  The other instructions weren't applicable.  For a moment there, I gave up on life.  Then I ate a piece of chocolate and tried removing that NAT Redirection filter.  That wasn't the solution, but it gave me enough cockeyed optimism to try the Internet Connections troubleshooter.  It -- a veritable font of sharp-eyed discernment -- said this:

Your broadband modem is experiencing connectivity issues.

It said I had better power down the modem, wait 10 seconds until the lights were off, and then power it back up.  I decided to also plug its cable back in.  I was hoping that the troubleshooter would at least say, "Hey, we have found your modem -- so far, so good!" and I guess in a sense they did.  With everything duly de- and re-powered and cabled, I tried it again.  Now, by gum, we had a breakthrough:

Your computer appears to be correctly configured, but the device or resource (primary DNS server) is not responding.

What could this mean?  I had no idea.  I rolled the dice again on the Incoming Connections troubleshooter.  While that was running, I realized that a minor miracle had occurred.  Very quietly, while I was over there fixating on the Win7 computer, the computer on which I was writing this post had connected to the Internet -- through the cable, through the router, through the modem, through thick and thin!  And ... er, no, it hadn't.  Correction on that.

But at least there was a glimmer of hope.  By this point in the day, I had moved away from the Windows XP system, on the second computer:  I had rebooted with an Ubuntu live CD for maintenance purposes, and was therefore  writing this post in Firefox on that machine while it endured its maintenance throes.  And on that machine, for a minute there, I thought maybe it had made Contact.  But it had not.  I was in error.

Well, I had blown a good part of a day on a single troubleshooting problem.  This was, thankfully, a less frequent experience than it had been in years past.  I really and truly hated networking, and it probably showed, by this point, in my failure to grasp some obvious solution or to utilize some true-blue technique.  I really had no clue.  The problem wasn't with the modem or the Internet connection; I could save this post when I connected directly from the modem to this computer.  Possibly the problem wasn't between the Win7 computer and the router; the troubleshooter had felt that everything was in place there.

Trying something a little different, I got an ethernet switch off the shelf and connected both computers directly to the modem through that.  And, whoa, that changed everything instantly.  The Win7 computer popped up a dialog asking me to Set Network Location, and it was immediately connected to CNN.com, and the Ubuntu live CD spun up and updated this text shortly thereafter.  So.  It was the router.  I knew it all along.  What could this mean?  It could mean (a) the router was malfunctioning or (b) I did not have its settings right or (c) the real explanation, which I did not presently know.  Putting my money on (b), I reconnected the Win7 machine to the router, went to its webpage, and chose the Administration > Factory Defaults option.  When it was done wiping out all my hard work, it required the no-username, "admin" password entry.  I ran the Win7 Incoming Connections troubleshooter again.  It said it needed more info.  I tried it again with the modem connected to the router.  (CNN.com was not responding at that point.)  This came back with the message about how the modem was experiencing connectivity issues.

We seemed to have the beginnings of insight.  It appeared that I should have tried the ethernet switch and the factory defaults, right away, as alternatives to my custom configuration of the router.  Experiencing success with one or both of those alternative approaches would have clarified matters.

But that wouldn't be networking -- because, now that I had unplugged and replugged the switch a few times, it was no longer doing the job on either computer.  Everything was connected to it, as before, and the modem's lights looked right, but neither computer was able to connect.  With the switch still connected, I tried rebooting the Win7 computer.  It was no use.  The Win7 machine was still not able to see the world, and the Ubuntu computer was pretending to connect.  I powered down the switch and tried a direct connection from the modem to the Ubuntu computer.  Still crawling.  I powered down the modem for a minute.  That did it:  the Ubuntu machine was now going online without a sweat.  I tried the switch again.  That worked on both machines now.  So apparently the switch did get confused and need some time off.

The conclusion seemed to be that, if I needed a router, I needed to try a new one, and otherwise I should just use the switch and power it down for a while if it failed to work.

Both computers were now going online successfully.  What did the Win7 troubleshooters have to say about this?  The Internet Connection troubleshooter said that it "couldn't identify the problem."  This was apparently tactful speech:  it seemed to mean that it couldn't identify *a* problem, but didn't want to tell the user that s/he was imagining things.  The Incoming Connections troubleshooter said this:

Troubleshooting was unable to automatically fix all of the issues found.  You can find more details below.

Problems Found

Windows requires more information to diagnose the problem.

Here, too, there seemed to be a bit of a bullshit factor.  I had been taking these troubleshooters as though they meant exactly what they said -- that, in the latter case, there was a problem, though it was difficult to diagnose -- but now it began to seem that they might say this when there wasn't necessarily a problem.  Pointing me to an online source of the "more information" that the program needed was a funny gesture when, according to the troubleshooter itself, I might not be able to go online.  It seemed pretty lame, worthy of Windows 95.  After all, this was Microsoft's software reporting on Microsoft's software.

What remained, it seemed, was to choose between the switch and a new router.  That was a question for another post.

Connecting Network Attached Storage (NAS) to a WinXP Guest in VMware: FAIL

I had two desktop computers running Ubuntu 10.04.  On one of them, I was running VMware Workstation 7.1, with Windows XP SP3 as a guest operating system in a virtual machine (VM).  I had just figured out how to network these two computers using Samba shares within a home network, where the two computers were connected via ethernet cables to a shared router.

Now there was a new question.  Could I add a Synology DS109 network-attached storage (NAS) device (essentially an external hard drive enclosure designed for network backup and file serving) to this network?  Of course I could, in the sense of running an ethernet cable from the Synology to the router; but what I was wondering was whether I could make this work despite the fact that the software for the Synology was available only for Windows and Mac, and not Linux.

It was a question, in other words, of whether I could run the Synology software in Windows XP in a guest VM.  I gave it a whirl.  I ran the Synology installation CD and went through the steps to set up the Synology Server.  This opened the Synology Assistant, a setup wizard; and after a moment, it gave me an error message:

No Synology Server was found on the local network.  Please make sure:

1.  Synology Assistant is not blocked by the firewall of your computer OS or anti-virus applications.

2.  Synology Server and your computer are both connected to the network.

3.  You have switched on the power of Synology Server.

Option 1 was the only one that seemed to explain the situation.  I decided to back up and make sure that I could see a shared folder on the other computer from within Windows.  In my first try, I set up that shared folder on an NTFS partition, and that led to a separate investigation of the difficulties of sharing an NTFS partition in Ubuntu.

That wound up taking longer than expected, so in the meantime I just focused on the link between the Synology and the computer in which I had VMware running.  I noticed that, in Ubuntu's Places > Network, it listed three items:  ANTEC (the name of this computer), Windows Network, and WINXP8 (the name of the computer running in the WinXP VM).  Plainly, Ubuntu was seeing Windows.  Was Windows seeing Ubuntu?  Or did it need to?  A first answer was that, of course, you could go into Windows Explorer > Tools > Map Network Drive and (assuming you had VM > Settings > Options tab > Shared Folders set up) you could gain access to NTFS and ext3 partitions outside of the drive C that existed inside the virtual machine.  These drives would be visible in Windows Explorer > My Network Places > Entire Network > VMware Shared Folders.

I tried running the Synology setup wizard again.  It gave me the same error as before.  I did a search and found webpages describing how to use NAS freeware to use another computer as an NAS device.  This raised two thoughts.  First, possibly I could use some software other than Synology's CD to make contact with the NAS device.  Second, perhaps I should consider using another computer myself, in lieu of the Synology unit.  I decided to go ahead with the Synology project for now; I could return or sell the device if it really wasn't what I wanted.  I probably could have assembled another computer at equal or lower cost, with far greater potential storage capacity, with more RAID options, with a more powerful processor (for e.g., checksum calculations) if needed, with what might prove to be more options in the choice of software packages and commands to manage and adjust it, and with more flexible hardware troubleshooting options (i.e., more than just fix it or replace it) in the event of malfunction.  Its drawbacks would include time and expense for software and hardware selection, learning, installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting; physical space requirements; power consumption; and noise and heat generation.

For the time being, I searched Synology's website and found a post raising the thought that perhaps a Windows connection was crucial only for the initial setup of the Synology device.  So I rebooted the computer into Windows XP instead of Ubuntu and ran the Synology setup CD from there.  This time, the wizard found the DiskStation right away.  So, really, I probably could have set the thing up using my laptop.  It seemed to be just a matter of connecting a Windows-based computer to configure the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.

Following the Quick Installation Guide, I looked for a Browse option in the Synology Assistant, but didn't see one.  Instead, in the Management tab of the Assistant, I double-clicked on the DiskStation entry, and that seemed to be the correct thing to do:  it opened a different Setup Wizard, or maybe a continuation of the same one.  The wizard said, "Please input the path of installation file."  Maybe this was where I was supposed to browse to the .pat file?  Sure enough. Browse brought up four different .pat files.  I chose the one for the 109 and opted for One-Click Setup.  It warned me that all data in the hard drive would be deleted.  I hoped it meant the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.  Lights began flashing on the unit.  It went through several steps:  Apply network settings, Format hard drive, Install DSM (DiskStation Manager) to hard drive, and Write configurations.  For my 2GB drive, the whole process took about 20 minutes.

When it was done, it said, "System has been installed successfully."  Then it just sat there.  Now what?  The other programs on the CD's Installation Menu were Data Replicator, in case I wanted to use the unit for backup rather than as a file server, and Download Redirector, for some purpose I didn't fully understand.  For lack of any better ideas, I rebooted into Ubuntu > Places > Network.  The list of places was the same as before.  I tried another search of the Synology website.  The product page for the DS109 definitely said that the unit was "designed for data storage and sharing among Windows, Mac, and Linux."  But how?

I knew I was desperate when I thought that perhaps I should consult the User's Guide.  But then -- what's this?  When I went to the downloads website, I saw that Synology Assistant was also available for Linux!  I had no idea.  I downloaded that and, while I was at it, also snagged what appeared to be a more recent DSM patch (.pat) file.  The User's Guide on the CD was for DSM 2.3, but the one online was for DSM 3.0, so I copied that too.  Apparently DSM was the firmware updater.  The included instructions were incorrect, as I eventually figured out.  All I had to do was to navigate to the folder where I had put the downloaded .tar.gz file ("cd /LOCAL/Synology") and the accompanying install.sh file, type "install.sh," designate /usr/local as the target directory, watch a bunch of error messages roll by, accept its offer to try again by sudo, copy and paste the command it offered to create a symbolic link, and then type "SynologyAssistant."

With that, Synology Assistant was up and running, and it found the DiskStation.  I double-clicked on it.  It opened a webpage in Firefox.  Having used the One-Click installation previously, I knew there was no administrator password, so I just clicked right on in.  Now I was looking at Management and Online Resources icons.  Management gave me all kinds of options.  I noticed I was in DiskStation Manager 2.3; did this mean that there was no DSM 3.0 for Linux?  On the left side, under System, I clicked on DSM Update.  Ah, of course.  This was the part where I got to Browse to the new .pat file I had downloaded.  It said, "Transferring data to the server.  Please wait."  This time, it was done in under 10 minutes.  It then confronted me with a signin screen.  I could not just click on through; it demanded that I enter something.  I tried Administrator without a password.  No go.  I tried my normal Ubuntu login.  Aha! . . . er, no.  That wasn't it either.  The hell.  I was locked out of my own NAS.  I wasn't alone.  Several other people had experienced this just within the last few days.  I suspected it was due to some quirk in newly released software.  I posted a "me too" note on it in Synology's moderated forum and waited.

But then -- reverting again, desperately, to the manual -- I noticed I was supposed to log in as "admin" with no password.  That worked, and now I was in DiskStation Manager 3.0.  I clicked on "Set up a volume and create a shared folder."  That opened Storage Manager.  I selected Storage > Create and that put me in Volume Creation Wizard.  The only option that wasn't greyed out was ISCSI LUN.  The manual didn't define that term, but Wikipedia said it was short for Internet SCSI, where SCSI is short for Small Computer System Interface.  The idea seemed to be that you were using the Internet instead of cables to create a SCSI setup.  LUN was short for "logical unit number."  An ISCSI LUN was apparently just any one of a set of drives in a SCSI array.  In other words, I was creating a logical drive.  So I went with that.

That gave me a choice of some more properties.  One was Thin Provisioning (default = yes), which was said to increase efficiency.  I was supposed to say how much of my 2TB (actually, 1829GB available, according to the dialog) I wanted to allocate to this first volume (default name:  LUN-1).  I was going to be backing up this file server to a 2TB drive, so I didn't worry about splitting the volume to a size that would match the external drive.  I thought it might be a good idea to have more than one volume, in case one went bad or needed maintenance.  The manual said that, on my unit, I could have up to ten.  I looked at my data and decided to go with three volumes of 600GB each.  (This would be changing later.)  Finally, there was an iSCSI Target Mapping option.  Again, the manual didn't explain this.  I found a website that sort of halfway did.  Eventually I just decided to go with the default, which was no, thank you.  I clicked Next > Apply and, in a few seconds, it was done.  I repeated for the other volumes -- or, I guess, LUNs, not volumes.  Then I clicked on the icons this process had created.  Each indicated that it had a 600GB capacity, but none of them actually seemed to have taken a bite out of the 1.8TB total.  Apparently that was how Thin Provisioning worked.  Then, to finish up with Storage Manager, I went to the HDD Management tab > Cache Management > Enable Write Cache.  I also ran a quick S.M.A.R.T. test.

This was all very nice, but I wasn't sure what it was actually accomplishing.  There weren't any new partitions appearing in Nautilus.  I wasn't sure if there were supposed to be.  I bailed out of Storage Manager.  I was looking again at Quick Start.  It said that now I needed to create a shared folder in the Synology.  I followed its link.  It put me into Control Panel - Shared Folder.  I clicked on Create.  In Create New Shared Folder, I set up a folder for LUNDATA, the first of my three LUNs.  It wouldn't let me select "Mount automatically on startup."  I gave both admin and guest read/write privileges for now.  I did the same with the other two LUNs.  I was confused, though:  after completing that step, I still didn't have anything to show for it.

It seemed that Chapter 7 of the User's Guide was where I wanted to be.  It told me to go to Main Menu (i.e., the down-arrow icon) > Control Panel > Win/Mac/NFS if I wanted to enable file sharing.  But that gave me an error:  "You are not authorized to use this service."  So, oops, that meant I had gotten logged out for dillydallying.  (First of many times!)  After re-login, the Quick Start reminded me that next on the list was "Create a User and assign privileges."  It had admin as the system default user already.  I selected that one and clicked edit.  Spooky thing here:  admin did have a password.  I wasn't sure why I didn't have to enter it when logging in.  I wasn't allowed to change the name of admin or disable that account.  I decided to change the password to something that I would actually know.  Admin already had full read/write privileges to my three LUNs.  The guest account was disabled.  I left it that way.  The manual (p. 66) said that each user could also have his/her/its own "home" folder.  It was something I had to enable if I wanted it.  I didn't need it, so I skipped that.

So now I went back to Win/Mac/NFS.  The User's Guide (p. 59) said that the unit supported file sharing in Linux in SMB, FTP, NFS, and WebDAV.  I unclicked the boxes so that the Synology would not offer Windows or Mac file service, which I did not need (and did not intend to provide to anyone else).  Instead, I clicked the Enable NFS box which, the manual (p. 61) said, was for Linux clients.  I figured that, in my Windows XP virtual machine, I would access the folders or LUNs on the Synology as network drives, just as if they had been ext3 drives inside the computer.

The remaining tab in this part of Control Panel had to do with Domain/Workgroup.  I didn't know if I wanted or needed to have the Synology be part of a domain, a workgroup, or both.  But then I found that the Domain/Workgroup tab was greyed out.  As I might have assumed, "workgroup" and "domain" appeared to be Microsoft-specific.  If I went back and enabled Windows file service, the Domain/Workgroup tab became ungreyed.  So that explained that:  it wasn't something I needed in Ubuntu.

In the Control Panel > Groups section of the Synology DSM, I saw that the default "users" group had read/write privileges only to the public folder, which I had disabled.  It was just me, so I didn't need a group.  So I left that all as it was.  Next, in Control Panel > Application Privileges, it appeared I could give users access to specific Synology applications (FTP, WebDAV, File Station, Audio Station, Download Station, or Surveillance Station).  Admin wasn't listed.  I assumed it didn't need to be.  I had no other users, so I skipped that part too.

Chapter 3 in the User's Guide, "Modify System Settings," told me that in Control Panel > Network, I could choose among several types of networks.  In my version of the Network dialog, those options were LAN, PPPoE, Wireless Network, and Tunnel.  The choice for my purposes seemed to be between LAN and PPPoE.  The manual said that I should use PPPoE if I used a cable or DSL modem and if my ISP used PPPoE.  I didn't know how to check that.  It didn't sound familiar, so I decided to start with LAN, the default (first) tab.  It gave me an option of manual or automatic configuration; I chose automatic (which was, again, the default).  That seemed to be about all I could do there.  While I was in the neighborhood, I went to Control Panel > Time and set it to synchronize itself with an NTP server.  

Now it was time to set up shared folders (User's Guide, p. 69).  In Control Panel > Shared Folder, I saw the three LUNs I had set up.  So apparently a LUN was a shared folder.  I had already taken care of this.  But that raised some questions.  If it was shared, what more did I need to do so that the computer would see it?  Should I have set up a "target" when I was creating the LUNs?  And did I want to encrypt them?

If I clicked on the Encrypt box, the "Mount automatically on startup" option became ungrayed.  I would want to enable that option.  But I had to think about that for a minute.  It seemed that encryption would protect the contents of the Synology in case of theft or loss of the physical device.  But apparently it would not protect those contents while the computer was turned on.  Anyone who could get into my computer, either physically or via the Internet, would have access to those contents.  I wasn't presently requiring myself to enter a login ID when I turned on the computer, so anyone sitting in my position would still have access, despite encryption.  I hadn't yet reviewed the part of the manual having to do with Internet access to the Synology, but evidently I would also have the option of logging in to it from elsewhere.  On the other hand, I had once had the experience of not being able to get into a backup that I had encrypted.  I wasn't sure if I had mis-recorded the password or if the encryption system on that backup had somehow gotten corrupted.  On balance, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to password the Internet-accessible data on the Synology, and to start requiring myself to enter a password to log in on the computer (System > Administration > Users and Groups).  But then, when I entered the password for the Synology and clicked OK, I got a warning telling me, "The performance of the encrypted shared folder will be decreased" and "The encrypted shared folder will not be available via NFS."  That would have defeated the purpose of having the Synology.  So I backed out of that.  No hard drive encryption in the Synology.

Well, the Synology was still not showing up in Nautilus.  I searched the manual for "target," in case that was the missing ingredient.  The User's Guide (p. 41) explained, "An iSCSI Target is like a connection interface . . . . [A]ll the LUNs mapped to the iSCSI Target are virtually attached to the client's operation [sic] system."  So apparently I would map my three LUNs to a target, and Ubuntu would see the target.  As the manual advised, I went into Synology's Storage Manager > iSCSI Target > Create.  There was an option to enable CHAP authentication, where the server would verify the client's identity.  I went with that.  I didn't go further and enable two-way authentication; I didn't need the computer to verify that it was contacting the right NAS unit.  I mapped all three LUNs to a single target.

In Edit > Advanced, I had an option to have it calculate CRC checksums for header and data digests.  The purpose would be to reduce or prevent data corruption.  The calculation would burden the CPU in the NAS, but I suspected the cabling would be more of a bottleneck than the processor nonetheless.  One post said that CRC might be a good idea for data traveling through a router, as would be the case here.  A year-old VMware webpage pertaining to a different VMware product (ESX) said that data digest for iSCSI was not supported on Windows VMs.  I decided to start out with these checksum items turned on, and see what the performance was like.  I also had options pertaining to maximum receive and send segment bytes.  The manual didn't seem to have anything on that, and nothing popped out in several different Google searches.  I decided to leave those at their default values of 262144 and 4096, respectively.

I still didn't see the Synology in Nautilus, but now (as I viewed p. 72 of the manual) I believed that was probably because I had not enabled my own username (ray) to have access.  In Synology's Control Panel > User, I added that username and gave myself full read/write access to the LUNs.  But then, whoa, on the next page, the User's Guide said that, to allow a Linux client to access a shared folder, I would have to go into Control Panel > Shared Folders > select the folder > NFS Privileges > Create and set up an NFS rule.  The first box there called for Hostname or IP.  It looked like the best way to identify the client would be by its IP address.  What was the IP address of my Ubuntu computer?  Zetsumei said I should type "/sbin/ifconfig" in Terminal.  I did that and got a bunch of information regarding eth0, lo, vmnet1, and vmnet8.  Same thing if I just typed "ifconfig -a."  A search didn't shed any light.  The number for eth0 came first and looked most familiar, so I tried that, with no mapping and asynchronous enabled.  This still didn't produce anything in Nautilus, so I thought probably I should have mapped.  But to what?  The only options were "Map to admin" or "Map to guest."  How about "Map to ray"?

A search of the Synology website led to a thread that yielded more questions than answers.  For the first time, the thought crossed my mind that the quality of the Synology organization was possibly not as gold-plated as I had hoped or imagined.  Surely the manual could have been clearer; surely, at these prices, the people posting these questions deserved some enlightenment.  At any rate, links in that thread led to one of those multiyear Ubuntu discussions, this one dealing particularly with NFS.  It seemed I should focus on learning about NFS; among other things, some posters felt that it was far better than Samba for sharing files and folders.

So I did a search and found a recent webpage promising to show me how to set up NFS.  I guessed that the real problem might be on the client side, so I started with that part of the webpage.  First off, they wanted me to install some packages:  portmap, nfs-common, and autofs.  A check of Synaptic told me that Synology had not installed these.  After installing them, I looked in the manual for the Synology IP address.  On page 161 (after many references to the IP address), the manual said that I could find it in Main Menu > System Information -- not, that is, in Control Panel.  The IP address it gave was, however, the same as the default entry it showed in Control Panel > Network > Use manual configuration; it was not the number shown in the DNS Server box.  So in the client, following the instructions on that webpage about NFS, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.deny" and added a line that said "portmap : ALL."  Then I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.allow" and added a line that said "portmap : [Synology IP address]," using the address I had just found in Main Menu > System Information.  Next, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts" and added a line near the top that said "[Synology IP address] [Synology Server Name]," in the same format as the other lines there.  (The server name was shown in Main Menu > System Information.)

Continuing with the NFS webpage's instructions, I was supposed to type something along the lines of "sudo mount [Synology Folder] [Local Folder]."  For that purpose, I understood that Synology Folder = [Synology IP address]:[Synology Shared Folder].  But I was not sure what the Shared Folder part was supposed to be.  Was I supposed to refer to the LUN or the iSCSI Target on the Synology unit?  Since the User's Guide (p. 41) said that an iSCSI Target was "like a connection interface," and that all the LUNs attached to it would be attached to the operating system, it seemed that I would need only one target, as I had set it up.  But now that I had learned more about security on the Synology, I had changed my mind about the number of shared folders I wanted.  I just wanted two, each 900GB in size:  one to contain stuff that shouldn't be changing very often, and that only the administrator should have write privileges for, and one for everything else, i.e., for the stuff that I would want to be able to mess with on a daily basis.  So after changing the LUNs and target in Storage Manager, I guessed that I would be creating two folders using the pattern of "/home/[username]/[foldername]" (where "username" would be "ray" in my case) -- one for each of the two LUNs on the Synology.  One of them was called SYNDATA.  On that basis, I typed "sudo mount [Synology IP address]:[Synology 900GB folder name] /home/ray/SYNDATA."  This gave me "access denied by server while mounting [Synology Folder]."  Not a desirable answer, but at least it was a reply of some kind!

By now, I was completely confused, and more than a little irritated at how very long this was taking.  The NAS was supposed to be simplifying my situation, not making it more complex.

It did seem, at this point, that it might have been easier to troubleshoot this if I had been using a computer as my NAS:  I could have gone into it and typed various commands to maybe get a bit more insight on what was happening in there.  A search for that error message led to the suggestion that I type "/usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p" to see what ports the server was using, but that gave me a "No such file or directory" error.

I decided to put in a support request at Synology.  The form required me to enter the Firmware Version -- but, of course, this was not provided in the System Information dialog.  I just entered something that seemed approximately right.  It also asked for the serial number -- and that, they helpfully indicated, was located on the bottom or perhaps the rear of the unit.  After turning it around and risking unplugging it, doing gymnastics to hold it while typing, I realized that, well, they might have mentioned that that bit of information actually *was* in the System Information dialog.  But when I got down to the part where they were ready and listening to what I had to say, I was not sure what to type.  There wasn't an option of talking to (or even chatting with) a live person.  I had to type something.  But what?  How could I possibly explain all this in a few words?

What I needed, somewhere in the Synology software, was a tool that would tell me what was happening.  "You have connected to a computer" or "You have not connected to a computer," etc.  I wasn't sure -- I hadn't done much networking before -- but I suspected that I could get that kind of information by using regular Linux commands on a computer in a network.

I decided that what I would tell the Synology people was just that they should look at this post.  I had identified a number of areas they could improve; and if they really got on the stick, they might even be able to respond in time to help me, before I returned the unit to the vendor or resold it.  The unit had more than a dozen positive remarks from other purchasers at Newegg, so I was hopeful.  But meanwhile, I started a post on the alternative of using a separate computer to create my own NAS.

Trendnet TU2-ET100 / ASIX AX88772 USB to 10/100 Mbps Adapter

I was having problems with my laptop's Internet connection.  The wireless worked fine; the cable connection didn't work at all.  After lots of troubleshooting with tech support, a replacement motherboard, and so forth, the problem persisted.  So I decided to try a USB-to-ethernet adapter.  The first one I got, a cheap little item, didn't work, so I bought a more expensive Trendnet TU2-ET100.  This one came with a driver CD.  The drivers installed without a problem from the CD.  When I then plugged the TU2-ET100 into the USB port, Vista Ultimate recognized it immediately.  In Device Manager, it showed up under Network Adapters as an ASIX AX88772 USB2.0 to Fast Ethernet Adapter -- but that turned out to be just the name of the controller chip.  (Oddly, CNET seemed to be offering version 3.4.3.11 of the driver, added Sept. 8, 2004, for current free download, whereas Device Manager was telling me that the version installed from the CD-ROM was 3.8.3.5 (built by WinDDK), dated January 20, 2007.)  A Wikipedia article seemed to indicate that ASIX specialized in these kinds of chips.  It looked like quite a few other adapters used the same chip.

Anyway, once it was plugged into the USB port and had finished installing itself, I connected it to my ethernet cable.  (The cable was known to be good; it was the one I was using to post this blog note.)  The unit's 100Mbps light went on solid, and the Link light was blinking.  Everything seemed good.  But neither Firefox nor Chrome nor Internet Explorer (IE) were able to get to a webpage.  Microsoft Security Essentials was also unable to download updates.  And yet, as before, Windows Network Diagnostics said, "Windows did not find any problems with this computer’s network connection."  But when I closed out of that, I found myself looking at something I hadn't seen before:  a Problem Reports and Solutions window.  I don't know -- maybe the system had updated itself, the last time I went online via the wireless connection, and was now in a position to tell me what had failed with the previous wired connection attempt.  I sorted this list by date and selected just one, the most recent item in this first group.  This was an AntiMalware Service Executable item whose problem was MpTelemetry.  When I clicked on Check for Solutions, it said it was "Checking for solutions" and "Reporting problem 1 of 157."  Then it said, "Unable to check for solutions."

The User's Guide on the CD had only installation information.  Using the CD, I installed the TU2-ET100 adapter on this Windows XP desktop computer that had been connecting to the Internet without any problems.  Again, a hassle-free installation.  After I plugged the ethernet cable into the unit, using the same cable, and got a notice that the new hardware was installed and ready to use, I tried getting to a webpage in Firefox, which I had just been using, but now Firefox said, "Connection Error" -- even though Network Connections reported that the ASIX AX88772 was Connected. IE couldn't connect either.  Very strange!  I left the TU2-ET100 connected to a USB port on this desktop computer, but removed the ethernet cable from the unit and plugged it directly into the computer again, and now the connection problem persisted.  I unplugged the TU2-ET100 entirely and tried again.  IE still said, "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage."  I clicked on IE's "Diagnose Connection Problems" button.  It said, "Consult your computer manufacturer's troubleshooting information."  The diagnostic log had several instances of "Error 12007 connecting to www.microsoft.com:  The server name or address could not be resolved" (and likewise for FTP).  I connected the cable (without the TU2-ET100) to a third computer.  It had been online previously and was able to find new webpages again without any problem.  On the second computer, where I had connected the TU2-ET100, I tried refreshing the network connection, but I still couldn't go online.  I had to reboot that one to get it back to a normal online connection.  I suspected that the problem there was that I had previously installed two separate ethernet adapters on that computer (one on the motherboard, one on a PCI card), while troubleshooting a network connection problem there, and that the addition of the TU2-ET100 had simply confused the system.

I wondered if a reboot would help the laptop too.  I went back to it and plugged in the TU2-ET100 and ethernet cable there.  The lights on the unit were functioning as before.  Before rebooting, I ran Network Diagnostics again -- noticing the red X beneath its Local Area Connection icon in Network Connections.  This time, I got, "A cable is not plugged into the network adapter "Local Area Connection."  Well, OK, the ethernet cable was plugged into the TU2-ET100, not directly into the laptop.  I plugged the ethernet cable directly into the laptop, and now that connection seemed to be recognized.  But now I noticed that, under the Local Area Connection icon in Network Connections, it was referring to a Realtek PCIe controller.  That was the controller on the motherboard, not on the TU2-ET100.  So, hmm, maybe the TU2-ET100 had not even been recognized previously?  I right-clicked on Local Area Connection and disabled it, and then rebooted.  When the system came back up, I saw that Local Area Connection 2 was now listed as having the ASIX AX88772.  But IE, Chrome, and Firefox still couldn't go online, and I still couldn't download updates.  I right-clicked in Network Connections, ran diagnostics, and found no problem.  I tried the Reset option, but no joy. In short, it did not help to disable the onboard ethernet connection (i.e., Local Area Connection), plug the ethernet cable into the Trendnet unit, and enable that unit as Local Area Connection 2:  IE and Firefox were still not able to go online.

It suddenly occurred to me that possibly the brilliant Compaq/HP engineers had constructed the laptop such that it would not go online via wired connection when I had the button for the wireless connection turned off.  I punched that button, the red one next to the power button.  It turned to blue, as the system searched for wireless connections in my area.  But no, that didn't do it either.  I tried plugging the unit into a different USB port; no difference.

I went searching for ideas.  I saw an improbably high number of perfect scores for the device at TigerDirect (and CompUSA, which seemed to have the same reviews), making me wonder whether they were padding their customer feedback to make it look like they were getting more buyers than Newegg.  But maybe they were; I had bought from Newegg, where the price had only recently been dropped $8 from what I paid -- to a dollar less than TigerDirect was now charging.  Anyway, Newegg did get a more mixed batch of scores and comments, but no troubleshooting advice for me.  Ditto Amazon. (Later, I found a Wize webpage that seemed to aggregate these multiple sources of buyer reviews.)

A couple of reviewers did say that they had better luck with the drivers from the Trendnet website than those on the CD, so even though the device was being recognized OK, I went to Trendnet's download page.  There, I saw that there were three versions:  A, B1, and V3.0R.  The pictures made plain that I had the V3.0R.  They offered what seemed to be version 3.2 of the driver (full name:  Driver_TU2-ET100(V3.0R)_CD_ver3.2.zip).  That was below the numbers cited above, but the date (April 3, 2008) was newer.  It didn't seem to matter which operating system I had.  I downloaded it, copied it over to the laptop, unplugged the unit, and installed the driver.  The Trendnet dialog said "Install OK," but it came up really quickly, and I wasn't sure -- especially when Vista popped up a Program Compatibility Assistant note that said, "This program might not have installed correctly."  Well, OK, I plugged in the unit to see.  Vista indicated, "Device driver software installed successfully."  With great hopes, I tried going online again.  Diagnostics still found no problem with the network connection, and yet IE and Firefox were still not getting anywhere.  I unplugged the unit, went back to that Program Compatibility Assistant dialog, and tried "Reinstall using recommended settings."  This time, the Trendnet dialog incorrectly identified the system as running Windows XP rather than Vista.  I said, OK, let's see what happens.  I went ahead with that and got a Confirm File Replace dialog telling me that I was about to overwrite the newer file that was already on the system.  I said Do It.  It finished.  I plugged the unit into a USB port again.  Dead!  No lights.  Ah, but wait.  The lights came up eventually -- not immediately, like before -- but no difference.  Still no connection.

Confusingly, I now found a Trendnet page telling me, "Please wait while we are developing drivers for Windows Vista."  But that seemed to be just a generic notice; it led me to another page where I saw a link to a Vista-compatible driver download; but that turned out to be the driver I had just downloaded, which of course had detected that it was being installed on a Vista system.  In other words, it didn't appear that I could be expecting any new drivers -- especially when all these other happy campers were doing fine with the drivers provided on the CD or the website.

These adventures left me with a couple of possibilities for testing and exploration.  One was to cycle the router and the laptop.  I had tried that before, without success, but maybe it would be different with the Trendnet unit -- though I didn't see why it should, when the desktop computer was working fine with the same router.  Another was to try installing the Trendnet drivers on the desktop computer after removing that extraneous ethernet card.  From the comments, it had seemed that virtually the only problems people had were that a few buyers got units that were DOA, and this one certainly wasn't that; it was being recognized and seemed to be installing correctly, especially in Vista.  A third possibility, which I had also tried before, but not with this Trendnet unit, was to reboot the laptop in Ubuntu and see how things went there, in case it was somehow a Vista- or Windows-specific problem.  A few people had indicated that the unit had worked for them in Linux, so it seemed like it should work for me.

I decided to start with the third option.  Leaving the unit plugged in, I rebooted this dual-boot laptop into Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) (I probably could also have tried with a live CD) and clicked on the network icon on the top panel.  It opened a window that said "Wired Network (ASIX Elec. AX88772) -- Auto eth2" and gave me an option to disconnect.  So apparently Ubuntu believed that I was connected.  I clicked on the Disconnect option and got a little notice that said "Disconnected -- you are now offline."  I went back there and connected, and now it said "Connection established."  So, yeah, I was online.  I opened Firefox and tried to go to CNN.com, but after a while it said, "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server."  I also couldn't download package information using Synaptic.  And still the light was blinking merrily on the TU2-ET100.

It seemed that I had a hardware problem on the laptop.  It wasn't clear whether I also had a nonworking Trendnet unit.  But even as I was writing these words, Synaptic began, ever so slowly, to download updated packages.  Woo hoo!  Something appeared to be happening.  So, another possibility:  for some reason, the hardware was so impaired that it could only operate at a very slow speed -- too slow to keep webpages from timing out.  But no, as I looked at Synaptic's list of individual files, it seemed that its efforts were failing in each case; it was just taking a long time on each file to make sure there was no way.

I located another desktop computer, one where I had not previously tried to install the Trendnet unit.  I went through the original TU2-ET100 installation process, using the CD, and then connected the ethernet cable and plugged the unit into a USB port.  Device Manager considered it to be working properly, but the Trendnet unit did not enable this Windows XP computer to connect.  Baffled, I posted a question on it.  That was as far as I went with this investigation.  I moved to a different apartment shortly after this, and the laptop was able to go online normally there.  I never did find out why it was having such a hard time at the other place.

PUSBLANXAD01 AD-LAN01 PC USB Network Adapter Driver Blues

On Amazon.com, I bought an item described as "NEW USB to LAN RJ45 Ethernet 10/100 Network Adapter Card."  The purpose was to see if I could use USB to connect to the Internet, where I did not have a working ethernet connector for the usual cable connection.  The device was cheap -- about $7 with shipping -- and when I plugged it in, it lit right up.  The problem was, contrary to the ad, it did not come with a driver CD.  And since the Windows Vista computer I wanted to use it on was, of course, not able to go online, I could not download and install the drivers automatically.

The device came in a little box with a label on it that read, "16254 PUSBLANXAD01[J133] PC USB Network Adapter."  The UPC product number on the box was 8-77083-03542-3 (or 877083035423).  The device itself had a label that said, "Model:  AD-LAN01."  Both stickers said, "Made in China."

Buy.com had a review that I didn't see before buying, in which the buyer said that s/he had the same problem -- no driver CD.  That Buy.com webpage said the item was made by eForCity.  I went to the eForCity webpage.  It had no link for driver downloads.  There were several reviews.  Some said they had no problem; some said it didn't work.  I wondered whether it mattered if you used it on Windows XP or Vista.  I plugged it into a WinXP machine and tried that.  Windows recognized it as a "USB Network Controller," but the Found New Hardware Wizard said, "The wizard could not find the software on your computer for USB Network Controller."  I chose the option of connecting and searching for the software on the Internet -- using the existing ethernet connection on that computer to do so.  A minute later, it said, "Cannot Install This Hardware.  The hardware was not installed because the wizard cannot find the necessary software."  I verified that my online connection was working OK, tried again, and got the same thing.

Some of these reviews said something about downloading drivers from other websites.  Good way to get a virus.  I tried a search for AD-LAN01 instead of the previous search for PUSBLANXAD01.  That turned up only a couple of hits, one of which was a thread on which the person said they had tried downloading drivers and still had no luck, and another of which was a driver download page for some kind of graphics device that was apparently also called the AD-LAN01.  I tried a search for the UPC.  This gave me a post from someone who said the CD did come with theirs, but it was nonreadable and they had to reinstall the driver weekly.  So, OK, toss it in the parts box and maybe someday I'll find a computer that it works on.  Junk.  Should have bought a brand-name product.  And that was my next step.

Compaq CQ60-420US Laptop Ethernet Connection Problem

I was having problems going online with my Compaq CQ60-420US laptop.  The wireless connection worked, but for some reason the wired connection didn’t, even when I connected it using a cable that was working fine for another computer.  This problem was occurring in both Microsoft Vista and Ubuntu (both 9.10 and 10.04) on this dual-boot machine.  I had spent a lot of time on the phone with HP tech support, and had even shipped the computer back to Texas for a motherboard replacement.  Maybe they didn’t replace the motherboard, or maybe they replaced it with another defective one; but in any event, it still wasn’t working.  For example, if I tried going to a website in Internet Explorer 8, it would say, “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage,” and if I tried in Google Chrome, it would say, “This webpage is not available.”

In Vista (classic view), I went to Start > Settings > Network Connections.  With wireless disconnected, I right-clicked on Local Area Connection (Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller) > Diagnose.  Windows Network Diagnostics said,

Windows did not find any problems with this computer’s network connection.

I tried the option that said, “Reset the network adapter ‘Local Area Connection.’”  After a minute, it said, “The problem has been resolved.”  Yet I was still getting the “cannot display” error in Internet Explorer.  Clicking on the “Diagnose Connection Problems” button in Internet Explorer produced the Windows Network Diagnostics “Identifying the problem” message, followed by “Cannot communicate with” the webpage I had been trying to reach. It again offered me the option of resetting the network adapter, but I declined.

Microsoft offered a “Fix it for me” option, but of course I was not able to connect to that webpage on the laptop.  When I looked into that option on another computer, it said that it was intended to fix problems with Internet Explorer itself (e.g., freezes or crashes).  This was not just an Internet Explorer problem.  Choosing the “Let me fix it myself” option, then, I had already gone through methods 1 (try viewing another webpage), 2 (Network Diagnostics tool), and 3 (reset modem or router), and I did not bother trying methods 4 (delete browsing history) and 5 (use Internet Explorer no add-ons mode).  Advanced Troubleshooting Method 1 called for temporarily disabling the Internet security suite or firewall.  I had tried that, but not recently, so I tried it again.  In Control Panel, I went to Windows Security Center and turned off the firewall.  That did not help, so I turned off Windows Defender.  Still no solution.  In the system tray (at the bottom right corner of the screen, I moused over the various icons until I found the one that said, “Computer status – Protected.”  I right-clicked on that, and that opened Microsoft Security Essentials.  I went to its Settings tab and turned off Real-time protection > Save Changes.  Still no joy in either Internet Explorer or Chrome.  Just to be sure, I killed and restarted Internet Explorer and Chrome and tried again, but still no connection.  In Internet Explorer, I went into Tools > Internet Options > Security, unchecked Enable Protected Mode, restarted Internet Explorer, and tried again; but no.  This didn’t seem to be the solution, so I went on to Advanced Troubleshooting Method 2:  check whether Windows assigned you an automatic IP address.  To do this, Microsoft told me to go to Internet Explorer > Diagnose Connection Problems and click on IP Address, but I didn’t see an option like that.  Instead, I clicked on the Reset Network Adapter option again.  This time, the Windows Network Diagnostics dialog said something a little different:

Windows tried a repair but a problem still exists.
Cannot communicate with www.hotmail.com (64.4.20.174).

As advised on a couple of other websites, in Start > Run > CMD, I typed these commands:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

I wasn’t sure how to read the output, so I went back to the Microsoft advice.  I now saw that Advanced Method 2 didn’t apply, since it was just trying to see whether I had a problem related to my Internet Service Provider (ISP).  I didn’t, since the computer on which I was doing this typing was connected to the same line, and it was working just fine.  So:  on to Advanced Method 3:  test Internet Explorer by using a safe mode startup option that enables networking.  To do this, I went to Start > Search for files or folders > msconfig.exe.  The one I wanted was under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.  I double-clicked on it and went to Boot tab, clicked Safe boot and Network > Apply.  Then Start > Shut down > Restart.  In Safe Mode, I opened Internet Explorer.  It still could not connect.  The Microsoft advice told me, in that case, to skip to Advanced Method 6:  Start > Run > devmgmt.msc > Network Adapters.  There were no exclamation marks.  Microsoft said, in that case, I should go to Advanced Method 7:  run System Restore.  But this, they said, would make sense only if the problem was a recent one, and in this case it wasn’t.  Advanced Methods 8 and 9 were oriented toward fixing problems with Internet Explorer but, again, it was a Chrome problem too.  I tried to go back to msconfig.exe via Search, but it didn’t find it, so I used Start > Run > CMD and then typed msconfig.exe at the prompt.  I went back to the msconfig.exe Boot tab and unclicked Safe Boot.  I restarted back into Vista and verified that the problem was still there.  I re-enabled my various security programs and settings, and pondered the situation.

It seemed I had a recurrent hardware problem that HP was not going to fix for me.  I noticed that Amazon.com had a number of devices that would plug into a USB port to give me an ethernet connection.  I got one that, according to its sole review, was good only for 32-bit operating systems, which is what I had on the laptop.  It cost me less than $7.  If the problem was just with the motherboard, this would hopefully get around it.  Unfortunately, that one failed.  I did not actually succeed in resolving this problem within the existing situation.  Instead, I moved to a different apartment, and for some reason that solved the problem.

Linking Virtual and Physical WinXP Machines with The Tornado

This is a first look at using The Tornado to pass files between Windows XP machines, where one of them is a virtual machine (VM) running in VMware in a WinXP guest on an Ubuntu Linux (9.04) host. (Elsewhere in this blog you'll find quite a few posts on this VMware setup.)

Without The Tornado - favorably reviewed at Amazon, where you can get it for $30, and sometimes even less on sale - I had to use USB drives to transfer data back and forth. For big files, I had to use an external USB hard drive, which had to be turned on, mounted, loaded, dismounted, switched to the other computer, etc.

The Tornado is basically a piece of hardware with two USB cables and a little processor of some sort. You connect the USB cables to the two computers, and then they see each other. You could probably achieve the same thing via an ethernet crossover cable, but that appeared to involve what speakers of my native language would call a "giant hassle." With The Tornado, you just plug it in. It's not nearly as fast as ethernet, but it's easy.

The computers see each other because The Tornado has an auto-run program inside it. So I haven't yet been able to use it to connect a machine running Ubuntu to a machine running Windows. The Windows side sets up OK, but the Ubuntu side can't run the .exe file. Maybe it could be made to work via Wine on the Ubuntu side. Not sure.

After my first stab at using it in Ubuntu, I unmounted it in Ubuntu and took another look at The Tornado from inside a VMware VM running Windows XP. This, of course, was able to run The Tornado's .exe file, and sure enough, the two computers saw each other. The software set up a split screen on each computer. The top half of the split screen (or you can configure it to be left-and-right instead) is labeled "OTHER COMPUTER," and the bottom half is labeled "THIS COMPUTER."

From inside these two panes, on either computer you can cut and paste files from one pane to the other, and then they are moved, just as if you were moving files in Windows Explorer. For some reason, the Cut (as distinct from Copy) operation is available only if you are cutting in the THIS COMPUTER pane and pasting in the OTHER COMPUTER pane; you can't cut from the OTHER COMPUTER to THIS COMPUTER (but you can copy and then delete). At least that's how it seems to work so far. This is not a problem if you have access to both computers; just do the cuts in THIS COMPUTER, on one machine or the other.

* * * * *

Update, November 27, 2009 and Thereafter


I found that TheTornado was not able to transfer files larger than 4GB, at least not on my setup.  Also, when I started leaving it plugged in as a regular link between two computers, it ceased to function.  It would no longer appear in My Computer or in Windows Explorer.  When I plugged it in, Windows XP gave me "USB Device Not Recognized.  One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it."

I was pleased to see that The Tornado was still getting lots of positive reviews, and very few negative ones.  The troubleshooting steps suggested by DataDriveThru (duplicative support page here) did not fix the problem.  Their tech support e-mail address was in New Zealand.  Their tech support seemed to be available only by e-mail.  I e-mailed them about the problem on November 27. I immediately received back a message indicating that the e-mail address I was using was dead.  Double-checked it; tried again five days later; same result.  So it is useless for me.