One of the handier commandline tools for Windows XP troubleshooting is to blindly type “netsh int ip reset all” into the Start -> Run prompt. Here’s what it does, to my understanding:

• netsh: this is a Windows utility that allows one to display or change network settings locally or remotely. The first part of this command simply tells Windows which utility you wish to use; the rest of the command consists of arguments to this utility.
• int: this argument specifies that you wish to use the “interface” context within the netsh utility. An example of another context that could have been specified instead of “int” would be “winsock.”
• ip: this argument specifies that you wish to use the “ip” context within the “interface” context of netsh. An example of another context that could have been specified here instead would be “ipv6.”
• reset: this argument is an instruction within the previously-specified context and subcontext means what it says, to reset to default. An example of another instruction that could have been specified here would be “show.”
• all: this is an argument to the “reset” instruction. This should tell the “reset” instruction to set all of the settings in the “interface ip” context to default, but also specifies the file into which you would like a log of the “reset” instruction’s actions.

By resetting the Internet Protocol interface, a great many otherwise-mysterious problems can be made to disappear without complaint. Now we have a little better idea of what you’ve been telling your computer to do. Any additional light shed on such murky backwaters of Windows lore is always good, of course.

*Anecdotal evidence recommends a reboot after running this, though none should be strictly necessary.

Microsoft has officially released the minimum system requirements for the new Windows Vista operating system (formerly known as Longhorn). As we all know that minimum requirements aren’t worth the screenspace they occupy, here are the recommended system specs:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero.
• 128 MB of graphics memory.
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive.
• Audio output capability.
• Internet access capability.

For the love of God, please don’t try to cram this new system onto anything less. You’ll only cause yourself pain and misery, and earn the enmity of those who you seek help from.

Recently I’ve brought my own dedicated Linux server online, which has opened me up to a whole new world of technological problems that I had previously left to others to worry about. One of these problems is security. On November 29th, DYAD Security released an advisory regarding a exploit for the Webmin package. Happily, the Webmin folks were quick to patch it, releasing version 1.250 on November 30th. But what does one do if he has an older version? Upgrade.

Contrary to popular belief, the Linux intelligentsia are actually correct in their statements that it can be easy to set things up. Sometimes. To my surprise, this is one such instance:

Log into your webmin interface as root. By default this will put you into the Webmin category. Follow the link to “Webmin Configuration.”

In the Webmin Configuration page, follow the link to “Webmin Upgrade.”

You can be a Linux badass and upload your own copy of the RPM, or you could be a hardcore pencilneck and rebuild it from source. Personally, I clicked the “Upgrade Webmin” button.

Depending on the speed of your upstream connection, as well as the load on Webmin’s Sourceforge peers, it can take several minutes for the download to complete. The current version, 1.250, is only 9.02 megabytes in size (RPM version), but on the day or so after a bug-fix like this, don’t expect your 100Mbps connection to top off. The update runs itself all the way to completion by itself, and does not require you to restart anything manually.

Disabling PPPoE should be easy, and in most cases it really is. This applies to the 5100b and 4100 Efficient Networks Speedstream modems:

1. Surf to http://192.168.0.1/ in your web browser of choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.0.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.0.1 to do so.
2. At some point you should be challenged for a Modem Access Code. This should be located on a sticker on the bottom of the modem itself. Type it in, and click Continue.
3. You will be presented with a swizzy web interface. It will be asking you for your ISP login name and password. Ignore this, and click the blue “Advanced” button on the left.
4. Several options will appear as grey buttons. Click the one labeled “PPP Location” to continue.
5. There should be a radio button labeled “Bridged Mode (PPPoE is not used).” This is what you want, so click it.
6. Nothing has taken effect yet, so scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes.”
7. The change to the settings has been saved, but not implemented. You will be prompted to restart. Click the “Restart” button that is presented to you (this is in the web browser, not the the modem itself).
8. You will be presented with a little countdown page. This page is BS, and will not actually go away when your modem is ready to go again. When your DSL light goes solid green, you should be able to surf. Forcing your computer to renew its DHCP lease may be a good idea if you can’t get back online right after the light goes solid. Of course, if you previously had to manually set your IP address, you’ll want to switch it back to DHCP.

The above instructions apply to the Speedstream 4100 and 5100b only. 5100a modems have no PPPoE capability that I’m aware of, and should work on any ADSL circuit using pins 2 and 3.

The 5100a has four lights, and should not require any special configuration:

The 5100b and 4100 have five lights, and may need PPPoE disabled (5100b shown):

For those who don’t care for lists of written instructions, and simply have to learn by doing, check out the 5100b Interface Simulator from Rick n Mia’s World. Thanks, Rick!

Speedstream 4100 User’s Guide (PDF)
Speedstream 5100 User’s Guide (PDF)

A couple weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Nippon Ichi‘s new isometric tactical super-deformed big pile of silliness, Makai Kingdom. These are the same folks that created the breakout hit Disgaea, which did so well they were able to bring us the somewhat less-well-received, but utterly lovable La Pucelle Tactics (released in Japan before Disgaea, and wrongly considered a prequel). I must admit I completely missed out on Phantom Brave, the game in which they departed from the “movement grid” tradition of their previous titles and classics like Final Fantasy Tactics. I hear it was pretty good, but this is about Makai Kingdom.

The plotline of Makai Kingdom is, as with all games of the tactics niche-genre, totally unimportant to the enjoyment of the game. In apparent acknowledgment of this perception amongst gamers, players are given the opportunity to explicitly skip any plot-point animations entirely. Basically you’re a demon overlord hell-bent on regaining his netherworld and his original body after he’s trapped in a book. He uses minions to wage his struggle to regain dominance in the netherworlds, as books aren’t very handy in a fight.

The lack of characters that are pivotal to the plotline is tremendously liberating in this game, as you are given absolutely no disincentive to building up, using, customizing, sacrificing, and recycling your minions. Minions that have been successful in battle earn “mana” that can be used to make wishes, ranging from the creation of new facilities in your underworld to the creation of additional dungeons that you can use to strengthen your army and fatten your coffers.

Unencumbered by a movement grid, many unusual tactical formations are possible. One serious drawback I’ve found is that there appears to be no means of denying movement to your enemies. This means that your tough, strong melee-fighters are not useful as meat-shields for your more fragile-but-quite-useful magic-using types. Enemies dart right through your front lines with nary a care, delivering untimely deaths to your valuable Witches, Wizards, and Healers.

The musical score is pleasant, with enough variation to keep hours of play from grating on your eardrums. The graphics are cute, and hearken back to the console platforms of our forefathers (or in my case, my slightly-more-spoiled neighbors). The animated plot-points are possibly the most disappointing portion of the game, as super-deformed sprites of supposedly-mighty netherworld overlords argue amongst themselves while floating in an utterly-uninteresting void. Clearly the plot wasn’t terribly important to the designers, which is fine by me, but such a lapse in effort detracts from an otherwise-excellent work.

Various notables, some with honest-to-goodness factual data at their disposal, say that the United States is falling behind in broadband deployment. Some places have high speed connectivity available at speeds and monthly prices that put US broadband providers to shame. There are a great many contributing factors to the state of broadband deployment in the US as opposed to, say, Japan.

Population density is often cited. As of 1990, Japan had a population density of 327 (in Tokyo it was 13,416 persons per square kilometer). As of 1990, the United States had a population density of 27. It’s considered easier to deploy telecommunications systems in high-density areas, as shorter loop-lengths can reach a greater number of potential users. Shorter loop-lengths mean less capital outlay for the transmission lines themselves (less copper or fiber involved), less attenuation on the circuits themselves, and so forth. For wireless technologies it means a single transmission site can reach more subscribers. Density is great, and the US isn’t very densely-packed.

This is a bit of a red herring, as places like New York City have similar densities (20,194 per square kilometer). That is, until politics gets in the way. By this I don’t mean Republican vs. Democrat politics, but company vs. company vs. municipality vs. state vs. feds vs. the consumer.

In the United States we have a phone system that is based off of a bureaucratic private enterprise, which is inherently bad news. A great read on the inherently flawed nature of this system can be found at the Bell System Memorial.

I’m not terribly familiar with the telecom companies of Japan and Hong Kong, but it’s my understanding that they have managed to avoid the deeply-entrenched stasis that has characterized our phone system for decades. For a good look at how Japan’s government bureaucracy is broken, I recommend Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr.

Add into the mix a general tendency of big-money capital expenditures in Japan to have no plausible link to realistic expectations of profitable returns (hence the “bubble economy” and its subsequent burst), and you get an environment in which tremendous amounts of money can be funneled with little regulatory pushback (the bureaucracy sees it as an opportunity to try to push for more subsidies) and mix in a well-educated, high density population of technophiles and you get 50mbps broadband for ¥3,167 per month (roughly $30, reference).

American telcos, on the other hand, have to deal with unreasonable stockholders that expect profits, unreasonable regulators that want them to run copper out into the countryside, unreasonable banks that want returns on their investments, and unreasonable customers demanding access in remote locations.

Cable companies in the US benefit from a far less confrontational relationship with regulators and a physical infrastructure that lends itself pretty well to sharing big fat bandwidth amongst subscribers. After decades of AT&T and a general failure of the baby bells to dig out of leftover public resentment, US consumers have been more than happy to latch onto this method of connecting. A big problem with cable broadband right now is the lack of choices one has in getting it. In Santa Rosa I can only get it through Comcast. If I don’t like the services associated with the bandwidth, I’ll take my money elsewhere. I could switch to SBC/Yahoo!, but that feels like doing business with the phone company (the only entity more reviled than the phone company is the Franchise Tax Board), or maybe a big ISP like Earthlink, or even some local folks like Sonic.net. Note that three of these choices are DSL. That’s three customer service departments, four sets of add-on features to suit my needs, four chances for the telco to get into my pocketbook at bit. If you look at consumer reviews of their broadband services, such as those a DSLReports.com, you’ll see that smaller, local companies are well-loved by their customers, and most of them are providing DSL from their local phone monopoly. The cable companies are shooting themselves in the foot.

With cable and telephone companies at each others’ throats for market share, regulatory bodies are being used as enforcers. Right now people like Brand X are trying to break the stranglehold that cable companies have over provisioning connections on their networks (reference). Phone companies are trying to force out ISPs (reference), and both cable and phone companies are working hard to prevent municipalities from entering the field by providing service in places that neither are willing to.

All of this just amounts to excuses, though. Nobody has called out the National Guard to stop folks from laying fiber, and it doesn’t take an act of congress to bring up an area multiplexer.

With any luck, new technologies like MoCA‘s 100mbps trials or FTTN will go head-to-head on their actual merits, consumers will be able to pick the services they want, and all the companies involved will be able to make a decent profit. Only time (and probably a fair amount of litigation, legislation, and regulation) will tell. I rather doubt that either cable or telephone as a transmission medium will completely die out if the monopolies don’t have to share with other ISPs; people have a tendency to “cross the street” when they run into poor customer service or connectivity problems.

*edit on 2005-04-13: A good read on the subject of America’s inability to roll out good new connectivity to its consumer base can be found at MediaCitizen.

In a move reeking of Orwellian irony, the Department of Homeland Security is appointing D. Reed Freeman to its Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. For the uninitiated, Mr. Freeman was the Chief Privacy Officer for Gator (recently renamed to Claria), a company that brought sleazy spyware to the forefront of Internet lore. Gator software has been notorious for surreptitiously inserting itself onto end-user computers. Its installation was frequently misrepresented to the user, and requires painfully-elaborate means to properly remove. The parent company uses Gator software to spam you with pop-up ads and collect — and resale — information about your computer use habits to various marketing groups. Now his job will be to assist the DHS surreptitiously gather information about folks with an eye towards not unduly intruding upon the privacy of the citizenry.

A ten-month stint working for Gator shouldn’t disqualify him outright from such a position, and his selection in 2004 was certainly intended to add credibility to Gator’s consumer privacy efforts. That said, Gator’s parent company is still rightly considered one of the sleaziest, over-litigious spyware-peddlers in the industry, which calls into question Mr. Freeman’s ability to affect substantive policy change in that environment.

Every once in a great while, one runs across a truly great, timeless game. Chess is one example. Hide & Go Seek is another. This past December, my gracious employer acquired an Ultracade machine for the break room. At 5 credits per quarter, this has been a big hit with the staff and tenants, but a recent motherboard failure resulted in something wonderous: an upgrade.

In addition to the several dozen cheesy 1980’s games, we got Robotron 2084. This 1982 stand-up video game uses two joysticks, one to move the hero on the playfield, the other to direct his lazer beams in any of eight directions. The graphics are remedial, the colors horribly garish, but the gameplay itself is superb. If you can’t afford your own stand-up machine, get a copy for Windows.

The folks at Wired magazine have published an article entitled The BitTorrent Effect, including an interesting interview and look at Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent protocol (and official client). In typical Wired fashion, the article goes to great lengths to proclaim the death of the older, entrenched means of media distribution, which really isn’t what I was looking for in an article about BitTorrent and its creator. Give it a read anyway.

Oddly, no mention was made of the broad variety of user agents that utilize this protocol. From my personal experience, very few use Mr. Cohen’s original client, but some spinoff such as Bit Tornado or my personal client of choice, Azureus. The proliferation of such alternate interfaces speaks volumes to the success of the BitTorrent protocol and its perceived value amongst software developers and content-pirates alike.

Wired article: The BitTorrent Effect

Earlier today I had the pleasure of troubleshooting what looked an awful lot like Norton Internet Security wrecking havoc with Outlook Express, but it just wasn’t so. The user was attempting to send mail, and was getting an error to the effect that SMTP was failing for an unknown reason on port 0. As we all know, SMTP runs by default on TCP port 25, or alternately on TCP port 587. For it to be operating on another port would normally indicate either a misconfigured mail client or a seriously misbehaving firewall or mail proxy.

Disabling Norton can be a bit of a hit-or-miss endeavor, as it is somewhat notorious for not actually leaving your traffic alone when you tell it to. We attempted all the usual Norton-bypassing tricks, nearly going so far as to uninstall it, when we discovered that the problem was OE itself. Error 0x800C0131, the cryptic Microsoft code for unknown errors with SMTP transactions, can also be caused by, of all things, a corrupt DBX file. The telling symptom showed up when, on a whim, we check the “Sent Items” folder, which wouldn’t load, complete with another cryptic error message. The solution follows:

1. Open Outlook Express
2. Select Tools » Options » Maintenance
3. Click the button labeled “Store Folder…”
4. Select and copy the path to the Store Folder ([CTRL] + [C] to copy)
5. Close out of all Outlook express windows
6. Go to Start » Run and paste the Store Folder’s path in ([CTRL]+[V] to paste)
7. Click the button labeled “OK” to open your Store Folder
8. Delete the file named “Sent Items.dbx”
9. Restart Outlook Express
10. QED

Here’s a relevant Microsoft KB article. A big hat-tip to mcse.ms for having a Google-searchable forum. How such a thing can be reliably troubleshot from a starting point of “I can’t send mail” remains a mystery.