Recently Orange (my isp) sent me a LiveBox, an all in one wireless router solution for my broadband package.

I used to use an old pc running smoothwall connected to a little wireless router I was given. I moved away from the Linux solution (I kind of wished I hadn’t now) cos: a) The disk on the old pc was starting to go a bit flaky and b) I had to run a cable upstairs as there was no room for it near the phone socket.

The Livebox wasn’t to bad (apart from a crap wireless signal strength), until i tried to connect my Wii to it. The Wii connected to the web fine under my old setup, so I thought it would under this one. I was mistaken.

Doing a scan reveled my network ok, so i gave it my WEP key, it did it’s test and kept coming back with a variety of error message. I did a quick Google on the matter and it turned out that other people have had the same problem. I tried a couple of there solutions but all they did was result in a different error code.

I was certain is was something to do with security, and just befor I turned of all the encryption on the livebox i noticed something on the Wii, on the screen where you input the key. It said the security was WPA-PSK (TKIP, as you can see from the screen shot

As far as I could tell, the Livebox was using WEP. So, I hit the Change security settings option, selected WEP, input my key and it connected! Problem solved, more by luck than judgment.

One of the new features in version 2.0 of spiceworks is the ability to monitor for certain events in machines event logs, or to check for certain machine software configs, such as 2 different anti-virus products installed. There are other products out that will do a similar job but this article is about what the new Spiceworks brings to the party.

All the options can be configured from the Settings tab in the main Spiceworks window, and we are interested in 3 of these sections:

• Monitors and Alerts
• Email Notifications
• Event Logging

Recently I have been made aware of a network management package from Packettrap.com. The idea behind the software is it will provide you a central interface and reporting service for all your network management and diagnostic needs. The free version includes the following services:

• Overview dashboard
• An enhanced ping
• Graphical ping (it shows the info on a graph)
• Trace route
• TFTP server
• MAC address scan
• WHOIS tool
• Various other features, see them on their site

The main idea behind the software is that you can do all of your normal networking tasks from one place. A fine idea, but how well does it work?

Anyone who has ever worked in a IT helpdesk environment will know that probably 50% + of calls are related in some way or another to the user getting there password wrong, and locking out there account. No mater how much you educate the users, this will always happen, especially if you enforce a complex password policy (and i hope you do!)

I have seen on the odd occasion where thre is something more at work. The user could be happily logging on in the morning, working for a bit when suddenly there account is getting locked out, and as far as you (and they) can tell everything should be fine. You can unlock the account, they carry on working for a bit but then it happens again. There are a few things it could be:

• Someone is trying to use that users account, doesn’t know there password and so keeps locking it. This could be malicious or another reason
• The user has logged onto another machine, and not logged off. Then, if the user has changed their password while the other machine is logged in, it could be requesting resources using the old (and now incorrect) password. Every time it tries to get a network resource that requires authentication it will cause a bad password attempt
• Similar to the above, but the user is logged into a terminal server session an not logged out. For none console sessions on terminal servers users have access to, its always a good idea to enforce an automatic log off after a period of inactivity
• The user could have a connection to a network resource (such as a mapped drive) , that is using old credentials. Personally i’ve never seen this on XP, but it did see it on Win95/98

So, we know what can go wrong, but how the hell do we find out what machine the account lockout is occurring on?