IT Werkz Sometimes

I thought I’d try and sort out the intermittent iTunes problem where the Bonjour service is apparently running but I get a message saying it isn’t running and iTunes doesn’t connect to the appstore.

I did the most basic of tests and switched off OneCare’s firewall and the Bonjour service appeared to work OK as iTunes was able to connect to the Appstore. That’s OK occassionally but not how the PC is supposed to run so I had a look at some of OneCare’s settings, specifically its firewall. What I found was that the ‘location’ for the PC was not ‘Home or Work’ which I expected but ‘Public Computer’ and a whole load of network activity functionality had a status of suspended. Not sure if that alone was causing iTunes problems. I had a look at the allowed programs, according to OneCare, and the Bonjour was set to ‘Allow’. When I clicked on the ‘Change location’ control a windows displayed two network connections. The first was my lan connection which I expected and had a zone of ‘Home or Work’ and the second connection was described as ‘Unidentified network Multiple connections’ and this one had a zone of ‘Public place’. So it seems that the initially displayed zone will be set to ‘Public place’ if any of the underlying network connections are set to ‘Public place’.

Having set the zone to ‘Home or Work’ for the second network connection, and hoping that was the cause of the iTunes connection problem, I rebooted the PC and tried iTunes again. Again it would not connect unless I disabled the firewall. I had a look at the zone OneCare displayed and it was back to ‘Public place’. The question was what were these other network connections?

In Control Panel I started ‘Network and Sharing Center’ and clicked on the Manage network connections link and it displayed three local area connections. The first connection I knew about but the second and third connections turned out to be for VMware and were described as ‘VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1′ and the third was described the same except appended with ‘8′.

Were these the cause of the problems? I disabled both of the VMware network connections and rebooted the PC. Would iTunes have trouble with the Bonjour service now or would iTunes work OK. Nope, iTunes still wouldn’t connect, the Bonjour service says it was started but I had a feeling OneCare’s probably the culprit here.

I then disabled OneCare’s firewall, re-enabled the two VMware network connections and turned on the Windows Firewall. This is the firewall that comes as part of XP or Vista. This time iTunes connected OK. The problem with iTunes not connecting when the OneCare firewall is running happens most days but not all the time. Still annoying though.

OneCare’s shelf life is coming to an end now that Microsoft are bring out a new free anti-virus application and are no longer supporting OneCare so that’s it for me with their firewall.

I thought that OneCare might be a decent all in one bit of security software. I was wrong.

On my desktop Vista PC it works OK most of the time. Hmm.. good point, how do I know it’s actually doing anything, maybe I’ve been lucky and just haven’t been anywhere near any security problems. Anyway the OneCare icon in the tray stays green most of the time which means it’s happy with itself.

Well it was till yesterday when it was suddenly red and displayed me a message that it’s virus definitions were out of date. I thought it was responsible for updating its own virus definitions. Also, when I double clicked on the icon to see why it was red it seemed that it had turned off its own Windows Defender.

On my other two PC’s, which also have OneCare installed, both of their icons are permanently red and when I check on those it says that it hasn’t been able to install some of its own updates.

One of the PC’s is running Vista and the other XP. No doubt an operating system function is getting in the way and stopping the install. Consistent on both operating systems. The message does say to contact the vendor. Pity it didn’t display a Microsoft help-desk phone number.

Quote of the day

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

I heard this morning on Leo Laporte’s Windows Weekly podcast that there are issues with Windows One Care.

An attempt by Microsoft to provide some kind of security software that I have paid for. More fool me. Currently on my Vista PC when it’s started One Care pops up and tells me it has amended my security settings as I am no longer connected to a network. This is the peer-to-peer network that I tried to get Vista to connect to and which resolutely fails. Obviously Vista thinks it was connected to the network or maybe even has nearly connected to the network. If the Vista pc hasn’t been turned on for a couple of weeks then One Care worryingly has reduced its perceived security level, to orange from green, as it finds that the virus checking files are a bit old and possibly out of date. So you get a nag window for that.

On my laptop which is also running Vista and doesn’t get switched on from one week to the next. One Care, on start up, usually loses its own spyware software telling me that I have no spyware software running despite One Care supposedly being just that. It’s all a bit wobbly.

What’s worrying is that when I paid for it online the only option was to use a credit card. How do I cancel that. Am I to be automatically debited for it for ever? Maybe there’s a Microsoft phone number I can use to cancell it. Yeah, like hell.

Quote of the day

‘The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague’ Bill Cosby (1937-)