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Steve's Current Notes

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Sunday, June 18, 2000

Happy Father's Day

I have been slowly moving my network over to the RoadRunner cable modem system and on Friday, I think I had mentioned that wrote some notes on this move while at the office. As I told Bob Thompson, I arrived at work more than a few minutes early on Friday, so I whipped up a draft of some webnotes and emailed them to my self. I also intended to bring them home with on a disk, but forgot and left the disk in my PC at the office.

The notes never arrived via email and since I had taken the afternoon off, I asked my administrative assistant to emial me the file. She did several times and none of the emails have ever arrived.

We left on Friday afternoon to take Katie to spend a few days with her grandmother and arrived back in town late last night. I went by the office this aftrenoon to pick up the disk and send myself a test email to my house as well as another message witht he file manually atached.

Nothing has ever arrived. I'm going to ask the IR boys tommorroww if we are now blocking mail from going to an outside internet address or have they somehow put a red flag on my home email address? Might be stepping into a bucket of junk here. One good thing this afternoon. My email account was still active on my desktop at the office, so I am not jumping to the conclusion that they've removed my account for a reason that unmentionable. At least not yet, anyway.

Anyway, here are the notes I had intended to post on Friday:

I have meant to post this message on the site for the past couple of days, but have been consumed in reworking my network. Actually, I started writing this message Thursday, but have since disregarded those notes and am starting over here.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a cable modem installed last week. This comes after much pestering of Time-Warner and Bell South. I think I actually wanted ADSL, thinking it would be a better alternative in the long run, but when Time-Warner came through first, I went with the cable modem. I wanted some kind of high speed access.

I first started out with ISDN, which is fairly expensive here. At first it was pretty good. My first ISDN service provider was GTE and I was able to use both ISDN channels which gave me 128k of band width when both channels were up. But then GTE service went south. Actually, GTE did not have its own pop in Winston-Salem, but rather was purchasing its services from UUNET. The unfortunate here was UUNET was selling services to lots of other providers, all using the same telephone number. In fact, the same phone number was being used for dial-up and digital. You guessed it. It wasn't long before my ISDN router wasn't able to establish a connection and that became very frustrating.

My next high speed stop was with BellSouth. Hey, they are the phone company. If their local network is busy, theoretically they would be able to route me to Timbuktu and I would never be the wiser. That's exactly what happened with BellSouth. I can't remember any sustained period when I couldn't get a connection with BellSouth. Sure, there were intermittent outages, but nothing sustained.

However, the only problem with BellSouth was they only offered one channel of ISDN service here. I had a fairly expensive 3Com ISDN router sitting there only half-used and the ISDN telephone service was expensive.

It was about this time that xDSL service began to be talked about and cable television companies began to get into the ISP fray with cable modems. However, we ain't the most progressive place in the world. I live too far from the telephone company's central office for ADSL to be an option. BellSouth does have a substation near my house which would allow xDSL service (it was when this cabinet was installed that I was able to finally get ISDN), but when the cabinet was built BellSouth didn't look far enough into the future and the facility didn't have the capacity. I found out in exchanging emails with someone at BellSouth that there are tens of thousands of these cabinets in their system and they're slowly upgrading them. It wasn't in the cards for me.

And then Time-Warner rolled out its RoadRunner service in our town. I was charged. Only I found out that my house was not in the first deployment area. I had to wait about a year for the service to become available. In the meantime I place a tickler on my calendar at the office and pestered them for the service every couple of months. Computers are a wonderful thing.

The Road Runner service was installed last week. I mentioned on these pages how accommodating the installer was when he ran the new cable drop and how effortless it was getting the connection up and running on one machine.

However, naturally, I wanted high speed internet access on more than one machine. Time-Warner wants to charge you for every machine. I wanted a free router of some sort.

At first I thought my best solution was to build a Linux box. In fact, I began preparing for my entry into broadband back at the first of the year. I built a Linux machine and attempted to have it ready for RoadRunner.

I quickly found out that I didn't know anything about Unix or Linux, but there were fellow daynoters eagerly offering assistance. I should have seen it in the cards. I didn't have the time to learn a new operating system, after all it has taken me years to learn the little I know about the Windows environment. Why did I think I would be able to pick up Linux in a couple of days or weeks. I was fooling myself and eventually put my Linux plans on the back shelf, completely off the burner.

When the cable modem was installed I fired up Linux again and quickly found out that I had forgotten what little I learned back in January and February, but I was still being hard headed. In the meantime, I had alerted my friend, Bob Thompson, that the cable modems were now available in our area and he began to plan his deployment.

Bob had also planned to bring up a Linux box. As an author of computer books Bob has a vast network of readers, so he turned to them with his plans. What he found out was that RoadRunner my not be a true cable modem and that Linux may not be the best solution. At the urging of Tom Syroid Bob changed horses and planned to change his intended Linux machine to a Windows 2000 Pro machine and would use the internet connection sharing service in W2K.

You can read some of the suggestion Bob received on how he (which means we) should deploy the new broadband network.

Bob shared this information with me and after some hemming and hawing, I was finally convinced I should bag the Linux box and do the same. I don't know why I was being so stubborn, but my stubbornness is another story altogether.

After some more discussions with Bob, I made the leap. I pulled out my brand new, still shrink wrapped, copy of W2K Pro and began the installation process on Wednesday evening. The installation went very smooth. W2k recognized everything, including the pair of RealTek PCI 10/100 Ethernet cards I had installed in this box.

I brought Windows up, plugged the cable modem in what I assumed was the first NIC and BAM, I was on the internet live via high speed access.

The next thing was to install Internet Connection Sharing, which was also painless in W2K. Right click on the adapter, click properties, click sharing and select Internet Sharing and OK and you've got it set up.

The next thing to do was to set up the second NIC so the remainder of the machines in the net would be able to utilize the high speed access.

Bob had mentioned that ICS may be hard coded to use only the private network addresses in the 192.168.0.x subnet. My old network was in the 192.168.1.x range. When ICS loads it also mentions something about your network address being changed to 192.168.0.1.

I fumbled around with this for a while with two machines connected to a hub, the new W2k box and one of the workstations from my old network (rubble). I wasn't having any connectivity success. I had tried telling all machines to use an IP address as well as DCHP, but no connectivity, so I called it quits for the evening.

Last night (that would have been Thursday night) when I had another chance to play around with things, the first thing I tried was to tell my workstation to use the gateway address of 192.168.0.1, which was the IP address I had configured to the second NIC in the W2K machine. No dice. I then looked at all of the tabs in the networking tab on the workstation and decided to clear the LMHOSTS tab. Rebooted using DCHP and I was connecting.

In the meantime Tom Syroid and I exchanged a couple of emails and he volunteered to talk me through his W2K and ICS setup, but we never got a chance to talk before I headed off in yet another direction.

For some reason I wanted to use static IP addresses vs. DCHP, but in talking with Bob, he said he remembering reading somewhere that ICS would only work with DCHP, so we tried using the static IP addresses in our networking setup. There was no connectivity.

Bob had originally planned to go the W2K and ICS route, but in the end decided to change horses to a Win NT 4.0 machine and WinGate, which he had working flawlessly at his house in a matter of a couple of hours. You can check out his reasons over on his page.

Before going any further we used Steve Gibson's security check and found that with DCHP there were security flaws in my network. This alone led me to the quick decision to use WinGate, where I could configure my own static private IP addresses. I checked the security of my network with Gibson's Shield's Up service.

The next step was to install WinGate on the W2K machine. No problems there.

Bob helped me configure a couple of things in WinGate and I was able to have Outlook and Internet explorer using RoadRunner in no time. I had to add the service for TCP mapping and do just a little port mapping. Once the TCP mapping was in place, had to make sure it was linked to port 25 and my smtp server address with no dependencies. Fairly simple stuff.

I haven't had any luck yet in getting my telenet software to use the proxy server, but then again I haven't attempted to tweak any of the options in this software to use the proxy yet. Patience is called for here.

In outlook I pointed both my POP and SMTP fields to the proxy server, which in my case is 192.168.1.20 and then configured my user name to conform to WinGate's wishes. The outlook internet mail service username needs to in this format: username#isp.mailserver.net. As for Internet Explorer, I just changed my LAN parameters in Internet Options to use the proxy sever. I chose to key in the server's IP address vs. having Internet Explorer search for the proxy server automatically.

I have begun moving my other machines over to the new network with no pains. So far I have moved over Barney, which is the new machine with W2K Pro and WinGate, Fred, which is my main NT 4.0 machine and file server, BamBam (a Win 98 workstation) and Rubble, the IBM Intellistation NT 4.0 backup domain controller and the workstation I use to post my web updates.

When we first had the new network configured, W2K automatically added the service for Microsoft Networks for both adapters. However, a quick check at Shield's Up noted that I was more open to the public than I felt comfortable with.

Then I removed the Microsoft Networking service on the first adapter and checked my shields once again and only port 139 was visible to the outside world, which I was fairly comfortable with. Actually, I was taking Bob's advice on this one.

When I built the new system I did not make it part of my domain. Typically I have all of my NT 4.0 machines working as backup domain controllers and would have done the same when I built this machine, except it was not on the network and there was no way it could join the domain. Therefore I made it a workgroup machine as part of the Tucker workgroup, of which it was the only machine in the network.

I planned to go back and upgrade the machine to become a part of my normal domain, but when attempting this maneuver, found I could not do so. In order to get Barney into my domain I had to go back and the Microsoft Networking service. Apparently you can't take out this service for just one adapter. When I removed it for NIC #1 it also removed it for NIC #2. I then added the service back and was able to uncheck it for NIC #1, but this still leaves me somewhat open on the security side.

Bob and I had attempted just to removed the bindings for NIC #1, looked high and low for this option, but apparently it has gone away from NT versions 4.0 to 5.0.

I want this machine to be part of my normal domain and am somewhat concerned over the security flaw. Shield's Up reports this not as a major hole, but the potential is there, so I am willing to take suggestions from W2K security gurus as to how I should close this gap.

When I tested my sheilds I got a couple of messages that make me somewhat nervous. I think this will lead me to installing a tighter firewall.

Here are samples of the message Sheild's Up provided:

Your computer has accepted an anonymous connection from another machine it knows nothing about! (That's not good.) This ShieldsUP! web server has been permitted to connect to your computer's highly insecure NetBIOS File and Printer Sharing port (139). Subsequent tests conducted on this page, and elsewhere on this website, will probe more deeply to determine the extent of this system's vulnerability. But regardless of what more is determined, the presence and availability of some form of Internet Server HAS BEEN CONFIRMED within this machine . . . and it is accepting anonymous connections!

The rest of this website explains the implications and dangers of your present configuration and provides complete and thorough instruction for increasing the security of this system. At the moment, any passing high speed Internet scanner will quickly spot this computer as a target for attack. (When this page has completely finished displaying, you might wish to sneak a quick peek at these two pages to see what lies ahead at this website: Scanner1 & Scanner2)

The phrase you must remember is:
"My port 139 is wide OPEN!"

Unable to connect with NetBIOS to your computer.
The attempt to connect to your computer with NetBIOS protocol over the Internet (NetBIOS over TCP/IP) FAILED. But, as you can see below, significant personal information is still leaking out of your system and is readily available to curious intruders. Since you do not appear to be sharing files or printers over the TCP/IP protocol, this system is relatively secure. It is exposing its NetBIOS names (see below) over the Internet, but it is refusing to allow connections, so it is unlikely that anyone could gain casual entry into your system due to its connection to the Internet.

Several of your private names are being served up to the
Internet by the Windows networking system. (see below)
While it's unlikely that this information can be exploited, you
should know what anyone can learn about you and your system.



~ ~   — Your User Name

~ ~   — Your Computer's Name

~ ~   — Your Workgroup

A Next-Generation PRIVACY THREAT is present!
The Media Access Control (MAC) address of the network interface card in your computer can be easily read by any computer or web server on the Internet. Yours is:

00-00- 00-00-

The MAC address is a "guaranteed to be globally unique" 48-bit serial number embedded into every Ethernet network adapter ever made. The problem is you can't change it — it's like your machine's unique indelible fingerprint — and it's being made available to any web site (like this one) that you visit. In many ways it's like a "super web browser cookie on steroids" that cannot be disabled or blocked by normal means.

Many people have become very upset over the unique serial number embedded into every Pentium III processor, fearing the invasion of privacy that such a "globally unique ID tag" would represent. But the exposed network MAC address problem is much worse since it's already here, it's fully deployed and available for the asking from most computers on the Internet! More importantly . . . it's freely available from your computer.

Since the presence and significance of this has just occurred to me, I have not yet added background information about this problem to this website. Therefore, if this is a concern to you, please plan to return to this site a few days from now when you'll find a thorough treatment of — and a solution for — this newly discovered significant privacy threat.

Obviously I removed my MAC address.

One positive about running a true proxy server like WinGate is that web pages will be cached at the proxy server and will load faster, like that's a problem now. I remembered this being a positive when I was using WinGate on a 28.8 dialup system.

My next move will be to configure my RoadRunner mail services. I am still using my BellSouth mail system. The one thing I wanted to avoid was to install RR's special version of Internet Explorer, which I think I have successfully done. In fact, I believe RoadRunner is vigorously announcing they have made some changes to their network and you should not use the special version of Internet Explorer their installers are handing out.

The plan is to keep both connections up for a month or so, but I look forward to dropping my ISDN account. I think I am currently paying BellSouth somewhere around $100 a month for ISDN and ISP services. The Roadrunner account will only cost me around $50, and I can even figure this out, I should very soon be pocketing an extra $50 a month.

I am also thinking that maybe I should have some kind of inexpensive dialup ISP..or maybe one of the free services for the days when RoadRunner is down. I know it's going to happen and I think I should plan for it, rather than scramble when the time comes. It's a sad state of affairs to be worrying about no internet connectivity isn't it. Maybe I should just get over it when those times happen, but you know Murphy's law, it'll come at the most in-opportune time, as if there would ever be a good time to be without connectivity.

As for RoadRunner, I also tried a couple of downloads last night (Thursday). Was able to grab a couple of 2+ meg files at a transfer rate somewhere 18-19 kbps. It was cool watching that file size counter click away vs. the old days of barely watching it move.

In all of this quest for speed I found an interesting link in a note from Jeff Orvin over on Bob's site today. The bandwidth speed test is on MSN's central computing page. My connection caculated at 1068.8 Kbps as I was writing this.

Update 18:00 This late arrival Father's Day Top-10. It's amazing how much I can see of myself in this mirror.

TOP 10 THINGS YOU'LL NEVER HEAR DAD SAY

10. Well, how 'bout that? I'm lost! Looks like we'll have to stop and ask for directions.

9. You know Pumpkin, now that you're thirteen, you'll be ready for unchaperoned car dates. Won't that be fun?

8. I noticed that all your friends have a certain hostile attitude. I like that.

7. Here's a credit card and the keys to my new car. GO CRAZY!!

6. What do you mean you wanna play football? Figure skating's not good enough for you, son?

5. Your mother and I are going away for the weekend. You might want to consider throwing a party.

4. Well, I don't know what's wrong with your car. Probably one of those doo-hickey thingies--ya know--that makes it run or something. Just have it towed to a mechanic and pay whatever he asks.

3. No son of mine is going to live under this roof without an earring. Now quit your belly-aching, and let's go to the mall.

2. Whaddya wanna go and get a job for? I make plenty of money for you to spend.

1. What do I want for my birthday? Aahh, don't worry about that. It's no big deal. (Okay, they might say it. But they don't mean it).

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Monday, June 19, 2000

I was sitting at my desk at the workplace office at about 9 AM this morning and my cellular phone rang. Normally this can not mean good news and I was startled, thinking the same today. I have several crews on the road and like a mother hen I woory about them. But my anxious moments were ended soon after I answered the call and from the other end heard, "Daddy, <long pause> I just called to wish you a happy birthday!"

It was Katie calling form her grandmother's to wish me a happy birthday and so we had a great conversation. She says she is enjoying herself on this visit, but I get the idea she hates to hear what's she's missing at home. I am not not going to take the leap to she's homesick...yet.

We had my birthday celebration tonight (45) and thankfully my birthday doesn't last the better part of a week like the kids'. I was able to talk Suzy into having dinner at Outback and then instead of the traditional, which most of it gets thrown away a week later, we stopped by a yogurt shop for the Happy Birthday ice cream.

Something screwy is going on with our external email system at the office. When I got my system fired up this morning I looked to see if there were any bounced messages I had tried to send myself and there were none. Then I sent a test message, actually two. One to steve@wakeolda.com, which is sent to pair networks and then forwarded to my BellSouth account. I sent the second message directly to my Bellsouth account. I then logged on to BellSouth's email system through the web and neither message was there.

I didn't have a chance to talk to any of our IR people about this, my main contact was not available. However, it sounds like our eternal mail system is hosed or the company is blocking my Wakeolda address. But that won't hold water, since neither the message that should have been routed to pair nor the message send directly to BellSouth arrived. I probably should have sent a message to my RoadRunner mailbox to test that connection.

I tend not to want to believe it's either pair or BellSouth. I can send myself a message from home, which is sent out through RoarRunner's SMTP server to pair, which forwards it to BellSouth and the message arrives almost instantly.

It must be my time for weirdness. We're enjoying a full moon, you know. I was trying to use the machine in the kitchen soon after I'd made it part of the network last night and I suddenly lost proxy. I didn't want to mess with it last night, so I check it out tonight after my walk. Yes, I walked about 40 mins. after we got home from the birthday celebration. Still no connectivity in the kitchen, so I came to my computer room where I found the WinGate screen open on the Barney, I am sure I opened and didn't close gatekeeper last night. When I closed WinGate and tried to restart it, it would fail soon after I keyed my password. I gave the system the three finger salute and once Barney rebooted everything seemed to work normal. Hmmmmmm

I'm headed off the Texas for a couple of days tommorow morning, so we'll see if the network is up and running after two days of me not messing with it.

Fellow DayNoter Frank McPherson [frank@fmcpherson.com] sends this alert of another nasty email virus:

Fyi...There maybe another email virus spreading with a text file attachment and the subject of Funny or Funny text.

I received 2 so far today.

Here are a couple links to stories on this virus:

http://www.cert.org/current/current_activity.html#virus

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/nb/nb3.htm

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Wednesday, June 21, 2000

I picked the longest day of the year (sunlight that is, I suppose all days are the same length) to make a killer one day trip to Dallas. I was rousted out of bed at about 4:30 AM yesterday to begin my trek to Dallas and then arrived back home just after midnight last night. I enjoyed a successful meeting while there, so despite being a little tired the trip was worthwhile.

The mail mystery I spoke of the other day has been solved. I mentioned that mail was not being deliverd to home email address from the office. After a couple days of headscratching our info resources games came clean with a internal mailing this morning.

Seems with all of the virus floating around they decided to install a procedure to scan all outgoing internet email for viruses. That part was working, but the messages were not continuing on. It took them three days to discover this problem and get it fixed. I want to hope the major delay was in discovering they had a problem in the first place.

But the IR boys had an even bigger headache beginning sometime yesterday morning. I noticed when I arrived in Dallas I could not check my voicemail. After several attempts and not being able to get through, I surmised we were having problems with our voice mail system. Thought it was something simple like a PC had crashed.

When I walked into the office this morning I noticed about five or six BellSouth trucks sitting behind the building. These were the panel trucks like the cable splicers use, not the van like servicemen ride around in. There's always some work going on around town, so I didn't really give it much thought. Then at lunchtime today we were talking and someone said they had heard what happened to our voice mail system. Seems a city crew working to repair a sinkhole that developed in the street behind the office took a huge bite out of a cable that must have been a gazillion pair trunk line with the backhoe. That explains all of the trucks with the flashing yellow lights and the little trailer like they normally use to splice fiber. We use a Centrex system, so our business lives depend on the cable that runs between our office and BellSouth's central office just up the street. I'll bet there have been some "tight butts" between the two work crews back there the last couple of days.

There's yet another email virus starting to make its rounds. The "stages" virus is disguised as a text file attachment However, experts damage from the bug is minimal, but it can clog e-mail servers.

It seems Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team may not be agreeing with Microsoft that an earlier released Internet Explorer patch to fix the ActiveX flaw may not be totally fixing the problem. Microsoft says it is CERT says it isn't. Wonder who will win this one.

I received two "meter" gifts for my birthday earlier this week. A pedometer for my walking and a speedometer for my bike. Guess I won't be able to lie about how far I've ridden or walked now. I can always leave the pedometer at home and push the reset on the speedometer. But, who would I be fooling?

There is a rumor going around that Talladega might be the next Winston Cup track to be adorned with lights. Wonder if this will mean more Saturday night racing? Will the series eventually turn into a Saturday night prime time affair? If that does happen I will be some of the luster will be gone from the Saturday night events. Saturday night races are like road courses, the series needs a few, but an entire schedule of road course races or races under the lights would quickly become a yawner.

If I were a NASCAR weekly racing promoter I would be screaming bloody murder about all of these Saturday night Winston Cup events. While it's true the Winston Cup races may not be in the same town, what happens on a Saturday night when the big boys are on the tube. You guessed, race fans stay away from their local short track to watch the Winston Cup event on the tube.

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Thursday, June 22, 2000

Intel is beating it chest today about entering the kitchen. They're way late for the Tucker household.

In fact our very first networked PC was in our kitchen. We talking about going back to 1992 here.

Previously I had used the room off our kitchen as an office and catch all room. In fact it's where I ran my first bulletin board back in the days before the internet. I only had one machine at that time, so I used DesqView and ran the BBS in one DOS window and fiddled around myself in another DOS window.

Then Andrew was going to arrive in June of 1992, so we needed what was then the guest room upstairs to be transformed into his bedroom which mean the office now needed to become the guest room. A friend helped me turn unfinished space in the basement into an office, which has now become computer central.

I think I may have built a second computer by this time and talked Suzy into placing this second computer in the kitchen, where "you can play cards, etc. and I can check email and check BBS's." Sold.

It wasn't long after this that we entered the network world, connecting the computer that still sits by the kitchen table with the machine downstairs via a piece of coax and LANtastic. It wasn't long after this that John Mikol introduced me to WinSock and Mosaic and I was became one of the early web surfers, all from the kitchen.

I think I had even suggested to Suzy that she could keep recipes (a selling tool), etc. on this kitchen computer. So far not one recipe has been entered.

Our network has grown since that time. Right now there are six computers powered up and sharing the NT network with another couple powered down. We have 1.5 computers for each member of our family. And we still have one taking up residence beside the kitchen table. In fact, I have suggested that me move it several times, but now Suzy is the one blocks that plan. She now uses that machine more than I do. Go figure.

Suzy headed up to my Mother's this afternoon to fetch Katie. And Katie is not looking forward to returning to Winston-Salem. Tomorrow is a big day. She's going to have four teeth pulled in preparation for her braces. She thinks the longer she stays in Virginia the longer she can put off this trip to the dentist's chair and I can't say that I blame her. Of course we have all reassured her this is no big deal. Easy for us to say. It's her mouth, not ours.

Microsoft made a big announcement today unveiling its next plan to connect everything for everybody. Microsoft .NET appears to be both be an attempt to squash some of the break-up plans as well as one stop shopping for internet services as well as providing services such as synchronizing files and personal information between all of a user's devices, and performing intelligent searches on the Internet.

I wonder what this will mean for us RoadRunner users? The merger between Time Warner and America On Line will more than likely be approved by shareholders tomorrow. I hope this does not mean we will have to use some crappy AOL-type interface in the near future. They wouldn't be that stupid, would they?

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Saturday, June 24, 2000

Katie made it through her teeth pulling ordeal with flying colors.

Suzy had the dubious honor of taking her to the dentist and sitting in a chair beside her while the process took place and then she was kind enough to share all of the gory details with me last night. There were certain parts of the extraction that I would have just as soon not known.

I was home waiting in the driveway when they returned, having stopped by the local flower shop (I wouldn't call them a florist) and grabbed her a flower basket adorned with Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal and Mylar balloon. Katie adores Winnie the Pooh. We she emerged from the car of course she looked like a chipmunk as he mouth was stuffed with gauze.

Naturally I wanted a photo, but she would hear nothing of this. Finally Suzy was able to convince her that at least one photo should be made and I snapped away. After she agreed to the concept I was able to sneak several in...flash and no flash, digital and film.

Katie was quite lucky. She really didn't have much any swelling and only one socket produced a little extra blood. She went through several gauze episodes trying to mop up the excess blood, which was really in small amounts. She only took one small dose of ibuprofen when the nova cane was beginning to wear off and there was no need for ice packs.

I think this was her first experience with nova cane and naturally it took her a while to get used to drool that we naturally have after a visit of this kind to the dentist's office. We, of course, had a few laughs, which she did not appreciate.

It was her night to be pampered. She got to eat a large frosty from Wendy's and received several gifts of support from friends, got to select a movie to rent, go to sleep in our bed and was generally pampered.

Yesterday was Andrew's last day at the Muggsy Bogues basketball camp. Andrew loves basketball and has attended this camp for the past three years. It's a day camp with one morning session each day. Friday is always photo day with Muggsy and Muggsy will sign just about anything the kids have brought along. Andrew was no exception. He got yet another photo with the NBA star and had him sign a new basketball. Muggsy signs with message, "Always Believe," which is the name of his foundation that supports urban recreational facilities.

Muggsy is a testament to the concept of you can accomplish anything you want as long as you believe in yourself and give more than 100 percent. You would never think of this short man as either a college or pro basketball player. He stands just 5 feet 3 inches talls and weighs all of 140 pounds.

I remember watching Muggsy when he played at Wake Forest and then at when the Charlotte Hornets NBA team came on line. I always marveled at his drive and determination, which has carried him throughout his career.

He is the NBA's All-time leader in assists- to-turnovers - 4.6 and is 16th on all-time assist list. Talk about a team player

After I picked Andrew up, I dropped him at the pool so he could hook up with his mother and sister, who were enjoying a day in the sun since more than likely Katie won't have this honor for the next couple of days.

Have made some additional changes to my network.

I have been mentioning that I was concerned about the security leak Windows 2000 Pro was giving me on my always on system. I didn't find a way to change these bindings on the network adapter that connects to the outside world. When I unchecked Microsoft networking and File and Printer sharing for this adapter, the world could still see the MAC address of the machine as the name of the machine was being broadcast as well. While most of the ports was closed it was not very secure.

I have been discussing this with my friend Bob Thompson and he correctly reinforced that I was not secure and should shut this machine down immediately. He feared that I may have already been hacked into. I hope not.

There were several routes I could take.

I could remove my installation of Win 2000 Pro and replace it with Win NT 4.0 and WinGate. I knew how to change the bindings in WinNT 40 and this was the same setup Bob was using with his RoadRunner installation, so I knew it would work and would be secure.

I could purchase a cable/dsl router which would have a built-in firewall and run my network through this new hub.

I spent a little while looking at the cable/dsl router concept, but after another chat with Bob yesterday afternoon I decided that I would pursue the Win NT 4.0 route. After all, I would have to drop another $100 or so on a router and it would take several days to arrive and I was already in possession of WinNT 4.0 and WinGate, so why not do the smart thing for once.

I spent last night installing the new operating system on the machine I now call Coyote. The only hiccup I had was in the beginning of the install. I usually tell Win NT to make a machine a backup domain controller and did so with this install. Only a small problem. Coyote could not see the network so there was no way it could be authenticated to my local domain.

So I blew away this install, starting over. This time I made the machine a stand alone server and the install went like a champ. Win NT recognized that I had two network cards and after I installed the NIC driver, we were flying.

To secure the network I went to the control panel and brought up the network properties, selecting DCHP for adapter No.1 and the static IP address of my network for adapter No. 2.

The most important step was next.

I went to the bindings tab in network and selected bindings for all adapters. I expanded adapter No, 1 and disabled WINS Client(TCP/IP) and NWLink IPX/SPX Compatible Transport, and rebooted, of course.

My next step was to check if I could get to the outside world, both from this machine and another machine from behind the WinGate proxy server. BAM. We were surfing again. Could once again see the internet from any machine and email worked as well. This step was complete.

Then I checked with Steve Gibson's Shield's Up to see what kind of network risk I was taking. Shield's Up reported and was naturally very pleased. I seemed to be very secure, something I could not have said 24 hours or even fours earlier.

Here are a couple of screen shots of the information Shield's Up is reporting. The only change I made it to strip the IP address of my cable modem connection.

I also asked Shield's up to probe my most popular ports and was pleased to see everything come up closed.

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