The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'
- Reference: 1609320611
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/30/12boc/
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Welcome to the [6]Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.
Fixing the kit of friends and family is a fixture for many of us over the festive period. Today's story comes from Register reader "Remy" and describes a situation all too familiar.
Cast your mind back to when Windows XP was the latest and greatest, and people around the world were waking up to a belated realisation that the Internet was perhaps not the safest of places, with miscreants lurking around every virtual corner.
Remy was visiting a friend and, being knowledgeable in the dark arts of IT, was asked by the friend's father to work out why his desktop computer had mysteriously stopped being able to access the home printer.
Said printer was attached to the mother's PC and shared on a home LAN.
Of course, as is always the case from a user's perspective, nothing had changed and the printer had stopped working all by itself. Those cursed config fairies were clearly up to their old tricks.
Remy dutifully checked the mother's PC and found no problems. It was connected, the printer was online and shared, nothing was amiss. "The problem must lay with Daddy's box," he mused.
Again, the PC was connected. Network discovery was enabled. Everything appeared to be working correctly, but for some reason the printer was nowhere to be seen.
"After a bit of head scratching," he told us, "I noticed a (if I remember well) black-and-yellow nuclear icon in the system tray."
It transpired that the father had indeed made a change to his PC and, in a fit of paranoia, sprayed the poor thing with third-party anti-malware software. The software included a firewall.
So worried about the threats lurking beyond his PC's network port, the father had inadvertently turned up the fear dial to 11 and inadvertently blocked everything. Including what was needed to see the printer next door.
Remy has our sympathies. Even though our story takes place over a decade ago, a well-meant attempt at DIY protection can still leave a PC struggling to even boot, let alone access network resources.
Fixing things was blessedly simple, certainly compared to the pain encountered by many when trying to make one Windows PC "see" another on a home network. Remy gently explained that the DSL router had a firewall that would deal with most threats and sticking another one on the PC with everything cranked up to maximum was not a guaranteed protection from malware anyway.
Firewall dealt with, "the mystery was solved and he could enjoy his printer again (as well as the paper jams.)"
"And I," said Remy modestly, "was the hero of the day."
As well as being cursed with a subsequent decade of those lovely freebie support calls, we'd wager. ®
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Re: Printers attached to PC's
You could just start sending random print jobs to it in the middle of the night... or send a message telling them they have could have been hacked and this is how to stop it occurring.
Seriously though the security on these home printers is laughable and should never be allowed out the factory. Forget the unknown IoT stuff, the mainstream manufacturers need to get in order first.
Re: Printers attached to PC's
Not just printers. The amount of stuff inflicted on users that should be shot at concept is scary
Re: Printers attached to PC's
Anything electronic? With some people two rocks would be over complicating things
XP and network discovery?
I don't recall that being a feature... Especially in XP Home! Nothing like trying to get one of those to talk to the rest of the computers at your house!!
Re: XP and network discovery?
Ah... the memories. Yes indeed. It was pot luck if XP-Home could connect to another computer 3ft away. One day it would work and the next... no chance. Windows 7 improved things but Microsoft is responsible for millions of hours wanted as people tried unsuccessfully to get their network... you know networking.
At one job we used a MacBook to prove that the network was fine. A laptop running Linux did the job equally as well (once you got the Broadcomm WiFi sorted). Those were the days.
Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do (when we got that MS network working)
Happy new year to one and all. Carry on Borking!
Re: XP and network discovery?
Yes, I can remember in XP times successfully connecting a PC to my little home network, then totally failing to get a second one to be seen, with the same settings and stuff.
Or random combinations of seen and not seen; PC A could see B but not C. C could see A and B but B couldn't see A ( Or something of that sort- it's thankfully a long and distant bad memory).
Better state of mind for everybody: I do not touch other's computers
Better state of mind for everybody: Do not touch other's computers. Useful quotes:
"I do not repair your car, and I do not repair your computer" / "If you clean my house, I'll repair your computer"
"You can consider to go back to Windows factory settings. You will get a fresh computer"
"Buy a new computer", and since some time "Buy a chromebook"
In case of wifi problems: "Call your ISP"
Sorting other people's stuff
The main problem I get is the user who only switches their computer on occasionally and it a low spec machine with 2GB of RAM and a spinning HD and all the original bloatware is still active and installed. I go round (or did before lockdown...) and the laptop is not charged and switched off. The user switches it on and I watch for 15 minutes while it 'boots' and all the bloatware tries to launch. The ('free') AV and Windows phone home and check for updates (and try to install them) The machine is usable in that you can move the pointer around the screen, but if you click on anything it takes an age to actually do anything. Even getting Task Manager up to see what is happening is painful. Many users seem to think this is 'normal' and tell me it always takes this long.
It saddens me greatly as it lead to landfill as many users think the machine is then too old for anything useful and go and buy something new, when turning off all the cruft and letting it do its updates for a few hours would make a world of difference.
I know, us nerdy-geeks know how to keep our machines running nicely.....
Printers attached to PC's
is so old skool... :) :)
now we have them broadcasting over WiFi. One has appeared near me since Christmas that is so wide open (no I have not sent anything to it but I can get at the control panel)
It is an HP thingy. Beware folks if you are having anything to do with HP printers that have WiFi.
I could easily bork the printer but I'm not going to.
If stuff comes this wide-open then no matter how many firewalls you have... they ain't gonna stop a thing.
Meanwhile, my own website is coming under a concentrated hack attempt from a range of IP addresses in Serbia. I've had to resort to blocking the whole *.* in 111.222.*.* (not the real numbers). Those Serbs seem to think that I have phpmyadmin on the server in /var/www/html. numpties.