Someone should tell Dari Alexander that Mackinac Island is pronounced “Mack-i-naw,” not “Mack-i-nack.” You can sure tell she’s not a Michigan native.

Laughing Wolf was live blogging incipient tornadoes in northern Alabama.

The saga continues.

When I hardwire a DNS into my client, it works. Sort of.

I can get to transterrestrial.com, but pages from Instapundit and National Review (and who knows which else?) won’t load.

This is the case not only for my original solution of Earthlink’s IPs, but also for Dave Mercer’s recommendation of cybertrails.com’s.

What the heck is going on?

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

OK, I finally got it working. Sort of. I can ping the LAN. I can ping the internet. I can even get to web sites if I know the IP. But when I ping an internet domain from a client with no IP (even something as simple as yahoo.com) it goes “Huh!” as only computers can do, and sits doing nothing.

Any ideas what I have to do to get ZA (and please, no more stories about what a fool I am to use ZA–those are not helpful at this point) to allow DNS? Or diagnostics I can run to figure out where the problem is?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I still don’t know why it’s not doing DNS properly, but I fixed it by assigning some DNS servers manually to the client (Earthlink’s). It seems to work now, but it also seems like a kludge.

Check out this “Dog Bites Man” headline.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m told that the link requires registration. It didn’t require it of me–sorry about that. The headline is “Libertarian Seeks Small Government.”

…if Dick Riordan is starting to lose it?

OK, I think I’ve found the culprit. Zone Alarm does seem to be blocking UDP between host and client, and I can’t figure out how to stop it without completely disabling my Internet firewall. It thinks that the ethernet adaptor for the LAN is to the internet, and it won’t allow me to edit or change that. It’s the only firewall I have, so I can’t take it down.

I may have to upgrade from the free version to Zone Alarm Pro, because while the Help menu says that there’s an option for setting it up for ICS, it doesn’t seem to display it for the version I have.

[Update a few minutes later]

I finally figured out how to change the zone for the adaptor from “Internet” to “Trusted.” My LAN is working properly now, but clients are still not seeing the internet.

[Late afternoon update]

I’m having trouble thinking that it’s a Zone Alarm problem at this point, because I’m watching the log, and I’ve seen no activity on the LAN being blocked, even when I attempt an internet connection from a client.

I can ping the host machine, but I can’t ping anything on the internet, either by name or IP.

This is most frustrating.

[Update a couple hours later]

At Ian Woollard’s suggestion, I momentarily disabled Zone Alarm, and that was the problem. It seems to work if I reduce the security level for the Internet Zone from “High” to “Medium.”

I’m not sure that I can configure it more specifically without getting the full version, though.

Now the question is, do I spend the forty bucks on Zone Alarm Pro, or on a router…?

I’m inclined to the former, because I can buy it on line, and it will be a good belt-suspenders system for when I get a good hardware firewall up.