By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Worms August has been a bad month for computer worms. First there was the Blaster which exploited a flaw in DCOM RPC using TCP port 135 in Windows XP and Windows 2000. Microsoft had supplied a fix over a month back, but many people had not applied it, including several of our members. You really need to have Windows automatically check for updates whenever you go online. The second worm, SoBig.F, has been clogging up email inboxes for the past 10 days or so.

I first came into contact with SoBig.F while traveling. The first day of the trip I didn’t bother to check my email. The second day I had about 30 messages with the worm attached. The next day there were about 120 with the worm, and the following day after only 15 hours between checks, there were around 150 bad messages. For the most part RoadRunner was now replacing the attachment with a message of their own to the effect that they had deleted the attachment since it was infected with the SoBig.F worm. Needless to say, on a dial up connection I have to use when traveling, it was a slow go downloading all of them and deleting them. After that, the messages sort of tapered off

On the day I received the 150 or so messages in less than 15 hours, I think it was Thursday, August 21, I was checking out my daughter’s computer setup in her dorm room when I noted that I couldn’t go anywhere on the WWW. I then checked email, and it worked. I checked that I could go to the university’s main page, and it worked. But you couldn’t get anywhere outside the university. I then tried to ping several outside sites like tpcug.org, IMB.com and Microsoft.com. No luck, the university was cut off from the world. I called the campus computer help line and was told that they were taking very heavy traffic. Apparently the worm was jamming everything. It didn’t get back to normal until the next day.

On returning to Tampa, I had to face all those bad emails again, since while traveling I have the email program leave the mail I read on the server. But I downloaded them all and deleted them.

It was relatively quiet for a couple of days, then there was a bit of heightened activity of just short of 100 wormy emails over a 24 hour period. Then came a day or so of next to nothing on the worm front. And then, all hell broke loose with over 350 such messages in a day. After that the worm infected email tapered off to almost nothing. And that is where things stand now.

This sort of thing is getting to be a major disruption for me. 350 bogus emails in a day takes up your time. The odd thing is that they all came in on my RoadRunner account and none on my Earthlink account, which is the one that gets the greatest number of Spam messages.

The only funny part of it was all the messages I received from U. S. Senators, bogus ones at first caused by the worm, then later legitimate ones to me as replies to bogus ones sent to them by the worm with my email listed as the sending email. Of course, the replies were pro forma and stated that they were too busy to respond to me individually due to security reasons or the large volume of messages received by their office and that I should write them using the regular mail.

Printer To go with the Gateway we bought for my daughter to take to college, we also purchased an HP 2175 all-in-one printer. That seemed like a good idea since it gave her both a scanner and a printer. Everything seemed fine with it both here in Tampa and at college. However, the evening before we were to come back to Tampa, she called to say that the printer was producing a message on the computer to the effect that it might be running low on ink. Well, we hadn’t printed much more than a dozen pages to see that it worked OK. However, I recalled that in the description of the printer, there was a statement that it came with starter cartridges. 12 pages doesn’t seem like enough for even starter cartridges, but what the heck; off to the local CompUSA to buy, for about $50, a replacement pack of a black cartridge and a color cartridge. Then to the dorm to install the new cartridges, and guess what. You know what: The same message appeared when you wanted to print. Fifty dollars that shouldn't have been spent

A quick check of the HP site said that all that really needed to be done to be finished with the spurious message was to reset the printer’s mind by turning on the printer (it has to be on to make the cartridges accessible), removing the cartridges, removing power from the printer for at least five seconds, returning power to the printer and replacing the cartridges. I am sure you can guess what the result of that was--same error message. But it got worse.

When I put power back to the printer and put in the first cartridge it started trying to print before I could put in the second cartridge. So I had to unplug it so as to keep it from printing without the second cartridge. Perhaps there was a print job in the computer’s print queue. I don’t know. But it seems to me it shouldn’t try to print with the holder for the second cartridge still open.

I finally tricked it into letting me put in both cartridges by not closing the lock on the first until I had the second cartridge also inserted. Then I pushed them both closed at the same time. This second problem made me think there is something wrong with a sensor for the second cartridge.

What to do? Nothing. The printer was bought in Tampa, and the receipt was in Tampa so I couldn’t take it to the local CompUSA. And once back to Tampa, I didn’t want my daughter to have to deal with returning it to CompUSA (by then the time to do that might have already passed), and I didn’t want her to have to send it back to HP since she would have no printer and anyway the box it came in was in Tampa.

The printer prints fine, and the message can be made to go away for a month. After a month, she can make it go away for another month, and as with her previous printer, she can tell when it is running out of ink by observing the results of printing.

However, this is just another reinforcement of my feeling that HP is putting out products lower in quality than they did a few years back. I also have a newer HP flatbed scanner that cost $300 a couple of years back that has lost its ability to scan photographic negatives with the HP software. HP says that it is a hardware problem and nothing can be done.

The new HP 2175 printer/scanner cost $200. My first HP flatbed scanner cost $1,000 in 1994 and my second HP laser printer cost $1,400 in 1995. So at that time I had a printer/scanner combination that cost $2,400. Perhaps you can not make such a thing that is rock-solid reliable for $200.

Wireless Access Merle Nicholson has an article about setting up a wireless home network in this newsletter. Like Merle, I have had a home network working through a router for a number of years. With the addition of my daughter’s new laptop with wireless connectivity, I wanted to allow it to connect wirelessly to the network, although it also had a regular Ethernet connection we could have used to connect it with network cable.

My method of accomplishing this was to purchase a Lynksys Wireless-G Access Point (model WAP54G) and connect it to one of the ports on my already existent Netgear router.

To install the Access Point, you simply plug it into the network and run a piece of software from a CD to do a minimal configuration. One thing you should do, in my opinion, at this point is set the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption for the wireless network. This will generate a WEP key. You will then need to enter this key into the wireless setup of any computer that wants to access your network wirelessly. If I hadn’t done that, anyone could stand near my house with a laptop with wireless connectivity and log into my network.

With the WEP key entered into the laptop’s wireless setup, the laptop was connected at 54 Mbps, which is the correct speed of the new g wireless standard, not as fast as the 100 Mbps of my hardwired LAN but faster than the old wireless b standard of around 11 Mbps.

As anyone who has tinkered with routers know, you are supposed to be able to configure them by pointing your web browser to their address on the local network. The address for my Netgear router is 192.168.0.1. Linksys routers have an address like 192.168.1.1, I think. Similarly you can configure (in more detail than the software program allowed) the Linksys Access point. The default address is 192.168.1.245, and I could not reach that with my browser. A little thought told me to go back into the software program for configuring the access point and change the address of it to 192.168.0.245, so that it was “on the same page” as the Netgear router. Once that was done, I could access it with the browser.

With the wireless access point in my computer room on the SE corner of the house downstairs, the laptop picks up the network fine in the kitchen which is about 50 feet away and through one or two walls. When I go upstairs to the back bedroom, which would be on the NW corner of the house upstairs, it still works, but the speed is reduced to 5.5 Mbs from 54 Mbs. If I go into the downstairs room below that bedroom it works at 54 Mbs--if I face the direction of the access point while holding the computer. That distance is about 50 feet and has two walls to go through. The windows have metal frames and dividers too, so that may make a difference. If I face away while working with the computer it appears to lose the connection occasionally.

So it appears that it would be better to put the access point in the middle of the house. Possibly even upstairs in the middle. I till try that when I have a lot of time to play with things. u