Fudged network

I had to do some work from home today and was using a VPN connection to work when my laptop suddenly just turned off.

When I switched it back on I couldn't get any network connection at all. Running ipconfig resulted in absolutely nothing. But then I remembered listening to a show of Hanselminutes (I couldn't recommend this show enough btw) where Scott talked about tools you didn't know you already have.

The part I specifically remembered was about a command line utility called netsh. It lets you control your network settings from the command line. So the command I entered in my console was

netsh interface ip reset c:\resetlog.txt

That resulted in a logfile and after reboot my network was back to normal.

Thank you Scott :)

Passive FTP and the Netgear WGT624 router

An ftp site I use suddenly stopped accepting my connections. Since this was out of the blue I found out that the router on the server's side had been updated, but the ports had been reset to what they were before so it should've been working.

The site uses RaidenFTPD and the error message received was 'no one connects to me at ip: xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx port:xxxx'

According to the forums at Raiden that meant the connection was blocked by the router.

After a bit of searching I noticed that the passive ports I setup in raiden wasn't the same ports that got sent out to the client when it sent PASV. Very strange. Apparently someone was messing with the ports!

True enough, I found a setting in the router that said "Disable SPI Firewall". SPI checks the packets so it can handle DOS-attacks. I disabled SPI and everything worked like a charm.