This problem started happening when I moved back to school in January. The previous semester my computer was working just fine. Then I took it home and hooked it up to my router at home for break and didn’t change any settings. When I returned to school I attempted to run our registration utility and it blocked me everytime.
After hours and hours trying to figure out why it wouldn’t let me register we attempted to ping my box on the network. The request timed out. And it wouldn’t let me register because one of the conditions in the script used to authenticate a properly registered box is to check to see if 6 ports are open that are necessary for the McAfee ePO that we use here. Since it couldnt verify if those ports were open it wouldn’t let me register.
I eventually just registered with my laptop which worked beatifully but I still can’t get these things to work. AIM works, the internet obviously works, PuTTY works, Ws FTP works fine. But no one on the network can ping me, I can’t remote desktop from any lab computers or my laptop when it’s on the schools wireless network, and although Ws FTP will connect just fine to my website Dreamweaver connects but times out when attempting to open and view the folders and their content.
I have no idea what got changed or is different but I’d really like to know if anyone has any ideas. If you want me to try something let me know and I’ll be happy to do it, I just need to get this back to normal. Thanks in advance!
PS - I’d give you my IP but it’s an internal leased IP that probably won’t do you any good.
I’m not sure I made that clear. I was at home using a Linksys Wireless-G though so I didn’t make any changes on the box. I use Firefox and have no problem with the internet. Just some other aspect of my network connections that i can’t lay a finger on.
Did you by any chance install XP Service Pack 2 while you were away? It enables a firewall by default, so you’ll probably want to either turn that off or enable the ports that the script is looking for.
galt has a good question there. Did you install SP2, or change anything else at all on the computer while at home?
Beyond that, I’m stumped.
I assume that you spoke to the IT people at your school; what did they have you check?
When I first (mis)read your OP, I was coming off a looong shift at work, and I was thinking it might be a router problem; having spent the last many hours troubleshooting routers over the phone, though, I was probably predisposed to jump to that conclusion.
No worries Astroboy14. SP2 has been installed since August. Everything worked fine then. My firewall has been enabled the whole time with only a few select ports unblocked for different applications and the already mentioned 6 ports for the McAfee ePO. The settings there though remain the same. I have no installed or uninstalled anything between last semester and this semester but a wireless pci card. Even then at home on the network everything was fine.
Once I got back to school is when I started having problems. I couldn’t get through the registration process. Basically what happens is at the beginning of each semester you download a utility. That utility makes sure you have SP2 installed, McAfee VirusScan installed, the McAfee ePO installed, and also runs a batch file that opens the 6 ports in the windows firewall. After that a small script is run on the registration page making sure the ports have been opened. As long as you pass that you’re port on the schools network is activated. The problem was mine wouldn’t get past that step. This basically meant that it determined that my ports were not open and I could not be registered. Working with the IT guys here we first checked to make sure exceptions were being allowed and that the 6 were indeed open. Everything was fine there. They then tried to ping my box on the network and failed. We then tried disabling the firewall all together. No registration, no ping.
The last thing we tried was booting into safe mode with networking. Doing that my box could be pinged and everything worked well. So the conclusion was that some service or application is mucking up the network settings or preventing me from being seen on the network. That’s really all I have at the moment. Hope that helps a little! I’m stumped and so are the IT guys here.
I was originally going to suggest this to isolate the problem:
Borrow another computer that you know works and hook it up to the network jack. If it doesn’t work, the problem is (most likely) not on your end.
However, it seems that you’ve effectively done that. I think. So, let’s get this straight…apologies if I misunderstood any part of the situation. You have both a laptop and a box. The laptop is working properly, indicating that the network jack is operational. The box is generally not operational on the network; however, if you start in safe mode with networking, it’s fine. That indicates that something on the box is misconfigured; something that is not loaded when you enter safe mode is affecting the connection. Oh, yeah - I think you have both a wireless and a wired network card in the box.
Since I don’t use Windows, I got nothing to add regarding the software. I’m guessing that when you figure out what’s wrong, it’s going to be something you’re gonna kick yourself for. Like an incorrect setting in McAffee. Is it possible that one of the network cards is misconfigured and interferes with the other one? This would only be the case if only one network card was started in safe mode.
Doesn’t Windows have the option to selectively start each program/device at boot time? Seems to me that if the box works in safe mode, the answer to isolating the problem is to go through startup programs one by one. Yeah, lots of rebooting, but at least you’ll have an answer to what is causing the problem.
OK. That seems to narrow it down to something on your computer itself then… the only thing that you’ve installed on the computer since the last time it worked well was a wireless PCI card? Have you tried uninstalling that card to see if it will work afterwards?
I’m fishing here… (and bumping the thread as well, as I’m curious to know what the cause is).
Ditto what Digital Stimulus said regarding going through all the startup programs one by one; a pain in the butt, however it might isolate exactly what is causing the problem.
