TCP/IP problems

[cpvh]

Hi all,

My wife was happily working away on her work computer (installed at our home by "local council who shall remain nameless") when suddenly the scren went black and now it refuses to play TCP/IP. Specifically, she can't login to her VPN connection.She rang the council's tech support and a woman who didn't seem to know a great deal about networking told my wife it must be our internet connection. My wife told her our machine was working fine on the internet, and the woman then said it must be the network cable.

I came in an hour or two later and tried a few tings, I established that our computer (connected to the BT Homehub) could ping the council's computer, but when I tried to ping our's from it it came up with an error someting along the lines of

Unable to transmit - error 65.

I googled the error and allthat I foundwere refs to PCs which are running Zone Alarm (the council machine might be for all I know, though it's not obvious that it's installed.

I tried releseing and renewing it's ip address, and that went fine, so it seems that it's got some connectivity, but it won't do the wholeTCP/ IP thing.

My thoughts are....

1. The council has altered some firewall setting on the pc using group policy or some such which now prevents connection.

1. Something has just gone wrong randomlywith a firewall or maybe the TCP/IP stack in the council machine.

2. The BT Homehub has "taken agin" the council PC for some reason and won't let it talk to the outside world. I did try a few google searches today to see if the BT Broadband community were up in arms over similar problems, but it doesn't seem to be widespread.

Anyone have any ideas which is the most likely and or how to go about fixing it? Or any other ideas as to what might be the problem? She will of course get back to the council, but she's expecting to have to fight her way to someone who know's what they are talking about.

[chris French]

In message , [e-mail] writes

Some corruption within Windows causing some problem with the network connection? I wondering if the machine crashed when it got the black screen.

Alternatively I'd suspect a hardware problem with the network card.

How locked down is the machine? Are you able to boot the machine from a Lnux Lice CD (or USB stick)? I'd start by trying to booting one of the live distributions, this will at least show if the network card/connection work ok or not.

[therustyone]

I would eliminate different bits by (a) borrow a different computer and try to get into the VPN. Or if you have a WiFi smartphone try that with the router. (b) borrow a different router and do the same (c) do both at once (d) go to someone else's house and try their computer using your access codes (e) check they haven't changed the access code. Is it sent out as a TXT to her mobile ?

rusty

[Andrew Gabriel]

It's quite likely the computer is setup so it can only talk to the council's network, and even any internet browsing goes via the council's network so they can filter out anything they don't want on their computers. So I would not necessarily take the inability to access any other computers in your home from it as a fault. That's how many companies setup their VPNs.

Unless you have details of how they've setup the system, you're going to have to do some detective work, and the system might have been setup so you can't anyway.

[cpvh]

Thanks for that Andrew, it hadn't occured to me that the behaviour I was seeing might be "normal".

Certainly there is no IE icon while the VPNisn't connected, though I can get to the run command and control panel.

It is always possible that the fault has cleared by now.

Cheers

Chris