MAILBAG - Letter to the Editor

ENT, Dec 13, 2000

Binding Protocols Not So Intrusive

This is a comment on Greg Scott's Nov. 8 column, "Maybe Not Mutually Exclusive Goals." I like the solution of dual homing and specific cabling of "inside" servers and "Web" servers and binding something like NetBeui or IPX to them. Binding the protocols to specific adapters shouldn't be too much of a stretch to a relatively experienced NT administrator. Creating really good documentation of what has been done should make future maintenance reasonable and speedy. For the sake of sanity and disaster recovery, a really thorough doc isn't a bad idea.

Brian Thiel

LAN analyst

Minneapolis Medical

Research Foundation

thiel@wporg.com

Taking Time with W2K

This is regarding Al Gillen's Nov. 8 column, "At the Desktop: Whistle While You Work." We just installed Windows 2000 Professional "fresh" on a new machine. The first hassle was getting the latest video drivers. The vendor would not officially sanction the NT drivers on its Web site as "safe."

Next, we installed two Linksys NICs: one for the cable modem and the other for the internal network. Under Windows 2000, no matter what we did in the BIOS, the cards would "share" the same IRO despite there being two others free. Linksys tech support told us this was causing our problem of having the network card "go to sleep" and recommended that we move the cards to different slots.

They still didn't work after six weeks. Finally, Linksys sent new drivers and, voila, the network card finally connected on the first reference.

Previously, any "shares" to that machine would require two minutes before the shares would become available. Apparently the power-down logic settings were not working under Windows 2000. The card would "go to sleep" despite settings to the contrary.

Before the above fix, we attempted to install a 3Com NIC as a replacement. After opening it, we saw an erratta sheet that indicated drivers for Windows 2000 would not become available till late in the year. We thought, "It's October, let's get the drivers from the Web site."

Guess what? Still not there. We had to send the card back, and this is 3Com for crying out loud. Not some foreign cheap manufacturer. Can you now see why the slow adoption of Windows 2000?

Mark Simms

Technical director

Javizon Corp.