kallistii | (no subject)

As the in-house tech support here at Willowdale (The house owned by Willow in Ottawa) I get called upon when things don't go right with the computers in the house. Willow had a problem with Comodo Firewall...it barfed half way through an update...and suddenly, he couldn't connect to the net. He tried a few obvious things, like uninstalling Comodo and then when he heard me come upstairs, enlisted my help. I tried many different things...and still I couldn't get it to work...they ethernet adapter was fine, since I could boot the system into Linux and access things...I tried deleting the driver and making it reinstall it, nope. Make windows reset "winsock"...fck, I though we had gotten rid of that piece of crap software ages ago! I also tried going to a previous restore point...and that is another problem for another day, since restore point barfed as well..Needless to say, I tried a bunch of things, and then consult the Oracle of the Net (Google), and recieved a few other thing try...more Nopes.

Then I go in and look the configuration for the driver, as a distant memory came to me about weird protocols and such sometimes causing problems...and sure enough, there was a driver for Comodo firewall there...I disabled it, and rebooted...and up came the Net! For some reason, when Comodo is uninstalled, it doesn't remove the shim into the ethernet driver...

It seems that for Comodo to do what I am guessing is stateful packet inspection, it creates a virtual network with a virtual ethernet adapter which becomes the default network connection, then it runs all the packets through it's virtual network, then plugs it back into the normal ethernet adapter to go of into the Interwebs. Nice, but CPU intensive!

When Willow wakes up in the morning (he crashed after about an hour of me fiddling) he will be back on the Net!