General

Firewalling Problem

OK, I think I’ve found the culprit. Zone Alarm does seem to be blocking UDP between host and client, and I can’t figure out how to stop it without completely disabling my Internet firewall. It thinks that the ethernet adaptor for the LAN is to the internet, and it won’t allow me to edit or change that. It’s the only firewall I have, so I can’t take it down.

I may have to upgrade from the free version to Zone Alarm Pro, because while the Help menu says that there’s an option for setting it up for ICS, it doesn’t seem to display it for the version I have.

[Update a few minutes later]

I finally figured out how to change the zone for the adaptor from “Internet” to “Trusted.” My LAN is working properly now, but clients are still not seeing the internet.

[Late afternoon update]

I’m having trouble thinking that it’s a Zone Alarm problem at this point, because I’m watching the log, and I’ve seen no activity on the LAN being blocked, even when I attempt an internet connection from a client.

I can ping the host machine, but I can’t ping anything on the internet, either by name or IP.

This is most frustrating.

[Update a couple hours later]

At Ian Woollard’s suggestion, I momentarily disabled Zone Alarm, and that was the problem. It seems to work if I reduce the security level for the Internet Zone from “High” to “Medium.”

I’m not sure that I can configure it more specifically without getting the full version, though.

Now the question is, do I spend the forty bucks on Zone Alarm Pro, or on a router…?

I’m inclined to the former, because I can buy it on line, and it will be a good belt-suspenders system for when I get a good hardware firewall up.

Economics

Economic Confusion

Stories like this, about how much owners of intellectual property are losing to piracy, always bug me, because the industry press just accepts the figure without criticism or comment.

They claim that they lost almost thirty billion dollars last year to pirated software. They derive this number by estimating the number of pirated software installations, and multiplying by the price of the product. But it’s almost certain that their losses aren’t that high. The only amount of money that they’re out is the amount that the people using the software would have been willing to pay if they hadn’t been able to get it for free.

This kind of disingenuous story occurs because people don’t understand the difference between price, cost, and value. For software, the marginal cost (resources required of the seller to produce it) for the software is almost zero, while the price (the amount asked by the seller) may be very high relative to its actual value, which varies from individual to individual. No rational person will pay more for a product than they value it, so if they can’t get it for free, the only amount of money that the vendor is out is the sum of the value of it for all potential buyers. Clearly, it wasn’t worth the full price to many of those individuals, or they would have paid it, and I think that the amount of loss is vastly overstated–many of them would have simply gone without, rather than pay full price, so the revenue in that case would still be zero.

General

I Want To Share

My internet connection, that is.

Until I complete the move from California, and bring my Linux firewall and wireless router to Florida, I need to set up a quick’n’dirty router and port forwarder for the network here. I had a spare switch, so I just went out and picked up a second NIC for my main Windoze 2000 machine. The instructions for sharing the internet connection are seemingly simple, but they don’t seem to work. I’ve got the new network set up in DHCP mode, and the machines are talking to each other, but I can’t see the internet from the client (i.e., pinging a known IP address times out, though I can do internal network pings). I tried turning off the Zone Alarm firewall for the LAN, but it didn’t seem to help. I’m obviously posting this from the machine with the working connection.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Update on Thursday morning]

OK, when I do ipconfig on the host machine, I get this:

***************************************
Windows 2000 IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Interglobal LAN:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Ethernet adapter AT&T DSL Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.163.94
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

*******************************************

Note that “Local Area Connection 2″ is the physical ethernet connection for the DSL (called here AT&T DSL Connection”)

netstat -n yields:

*******************************************

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State
TCP 127.0.0.1:445 127.0.0.1:3093 ESTABLISHED
TCP 127.0.0.1:3093 127.0.0.1:445 ESTABLISHED

*******************************************

I’m having trouble talking to client machines right now–the LAN seems to be flaky. I can ping client from host, but I can’t ping host from client. More when I get one of more of the in communication.

War Commentary

Dominoes Lining Up?

Well, well, well…

They’ve captured two Iranian agents in Baghdad, fomenting much of the murder and terrorism in the newly emerging nation. This, of course, is an act of war.

Allawi has been making justifiably belligerent noises toward Syria as well, saying that he wouldn’t necessarily mind if coalition forces were to take offensive action there.

I wonder how far off we are from a war between Iraq, and Syria and Iran (in which we would participate on the side of Iraq)? That would be a continued draining of the swamp, and we know that a majority of the Iranians, if not the Syrians, would like to see the end of their current government. If so, it would be the next step on the path toward a saner Middle East.

The problem, of course, is that if it happens before November, the conspiracy loons will claim that Bush is going to war out of desperation, in the face of the “exciting” (oh, be still, my heart) John-John ticket, to distract the populace with another war based on “lies.”

One thing that might help in the near term would be a UN resolution condemning Syria and Iran for their attempts to destabilize Iraq. Any bets on whether such a thing would pass? After all, it wouldn’t be condemning the US and Israel, which is the only kind of condemnation in which the UN has shown any historical interest…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!