Thomas Penwell

I had one of mine and Ross's clients call me this morning stating that one of their programs isn't working. The night before, Ross had installed Panda Internet Security on their server but forgot to set up the firewall. I have a program that I wrote and installed on their network that allows me to "remote in" to any of their computers securely. I was able to set up the firewall rules in Panda from my office to get things back up and running.

The program that I wrote works as a launcher program for UltraVNC (http://www.uvnc.com). It accepts "launch" commands (these commands are sent encrypted of course) to UltraVNC and instructs it to make an outgoing remote desktop connection. UltraVNC is a great remote desktop replacement for those who do not have Windows XP Pro. UltraVNC is available for download from their website above. The launcher program I wrote is only available to my corporate customers and is not available for download (sorry!)

I had someone that I work with call me stating they can't browse to any websites. Google.com would come up but they could not do any searches.

I started with standard diagnosis with a command prompt and the ping command. I was able to ping common websites such as msn.com, google.com, yahoo.com. I then opened up IE and discovered it was "working offline." If you find yourself "working offline", simply go to the file menu, and uncheck "work offline" and you will be back online! If you do not see your menu bar in IE, press the 'alt' key and your menu bar will appear.

When IE is "working offline", you are only able to browse to websites that you have visited while "online."