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Several months ago my Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router crapped out. It had a history of locking up after several days of heavy use (read about other people’s experiences with this device at SeattleWireless) and this was coincident with a couple of denial of service attacks being announced for it so I figured someone hosed it. Except it would not reset. Even upgrading to a then recent firmware and doing a hard-reset to clear out any remaining settings failed to revive it. Oddly, that did cause it to emit UPnP and dhcp requests on the LAN and WAN ports but the internal dhcp server and the embedded http server for the administration pages remained inaccessible. Maria and I both ran out of patience after a few days so I put my Lucent RG-1000 in its place and tossed the dead blue box into a storage tub beside my desk.

Today, for no particular reason, I tried again. I snagged a recent firmware image and a hacked tftp client that supports the password extension that Linksys uses. After fiddling with a static IP, I remembered that these units have a touchy IP stack so after editing /etc/sysctl.conf net/ipv4/tcp_ecn=0 and doing a sysctl -p to turn off ECN, I could ping it. I updated the firmware and did the reset-power on-hold 30 seconds-power off routine and the damn thing works.

A few minutes later, I had it reconfigured and put it back in place outside the firewall. I’ll see how long it runs before something happens. It’s a shame it isn’t as reliable as the RG-1000 as it has much better range and signal.

I thought I might get in a motorcycle ride but the heavy rain put the kibosh on that. It’s one thing to get caught in the rain once I’m out but another to drive the car through a downpour for two hours and then have a hope for going out on the bike. Since Saturday was shot I took the car and had it shod with four new tires and ran some errands. The rain did let up for about an hour and let blue skies peek through while I was waiting in the lobby of the tire place but by the time I got back to my in-laws it was raining. Whee. Maybe next week.

It’s taken quite some time but I think I found the problem: the internet guest account used by IIS, under which ASP pages run, must be permissioned on the file system not through the Internet Service Manager administrative tool. It seems obvious now.

Two interesting things: First, IIS seems to wholly rewrite its logs with each entry so tailing them is not possible. Tried it with a three implementations of tail and it doesn’t work. It’s as if it copies everything to a new file, unlinks the old one and renames the new one to the old name. Weird. Second, and this is probably in the “Well, duh!” category for Windows developers, is that there is a nice little server-side debugger for these scripts with break points, stack trace, etc. in IIS and if enabled will emit useful information when an exception occurs. Neat.

I wish it were because I just had to play around with the material I mentioned in Inside Microsoft Windows 2000 but it wasn’t. I agreed to do some work for a friend involving Active Server Pages and a Java Applet. I figured it would take, at most, four hours to get the two to play nicely together. I figured wrong. Wrong by about 16 hours and still counting.

I became so frustrated with the interaction of the two and the inability of the webhosting service to tell me anything useful (are there no logs? I know IIS can log.), that I spent three more hours today assembling a PC from two incomplete ones that had been given to me and installing a 120-day evaluation copy of Windows 2000 that I had lying around. Then installing additional components to get IIS. Then configuring IIS. And that’s just the start because I want get it patched up with all the current bugfixes before I do anything and that means multiple trips to the windows update site and that means multiple reboots.

You could just chalk it up as the time needed to get the tools ready but that isn’t all that needs to be done. Now you need to:

• Download and install WinZip
• Get OpenSSH on Windows with the bundled Cygwin tools and configure it.
• Install a working JVM and browser plugin, so go to Sun’s Java site and pick something more recent than Java 1.1.
• Finally, because there is no such thing as remote administration on Windows and the Microsoft intellimouse (hey! they make a great mouse) driver plays dead when used with a KVM switch, install TightVNC
• And, if you might ever need a decent editor, stop and install either XEmacs for Win32 or Vim for Win32.

If I end up doing any more Windows work- and that’s a big IF- I think I see a small project beforehand to put all of this together into a self-installing archive with the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System.

I don’t know why. See http://www.talklikeapirate.com/.