Posts by DMR

As others have alluded to, you have spyware/adware/malware on your system. One of those components is almost certainly responsible for the pop-ups. Anti-virus programs don't detect these intruders, so you'll need to install utilities specifically designed for the job.

Ad Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy are two excellent utilities for detecting and removing these types of offensive programs. Both are free to download and very easy to use. I highly suggest installing both programs and running them consecutively; one program will often catch something that the other missed.

Linkage:

Ad Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

SpyBot S&D: http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php

Well What do you know,
Gave it one more shot using fsck on each partision and its all cleared up.

Glad you got it sorted out without having to reinstall. :cool:

Although you say that you've checked for hackers, viruses, etc., it sounds possible that the problem could very well originate from some piece of spyware/adware. Have you run Ad Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy to make sure there's no malware on the system? If not, I'd highly recommend you do so. Both programs are free downloads; pop the programs' names into a Google search to find download sites.

As far as the ntfs.sys error, that sounds like corruption caused by the crash. You might have to reinstall, but I'm not sure...

I tried typing in that address (192.168.0.1) and i got a login and password thing. Since its my network i thought that i could just hit OK and id get in but it says i need to put in a login and password.

When you type in the router's address, you're accessing the router's internal Web-based setup program. The user/password dialog is a login message from the router itself; it is not a login prompt from your Windows network.

Different makes of routers have different default user/password combinations, which you will find in the router's manual. Linksys, for example, often uses a blank username and a default password of "admin".

Have you done any low-level troubleshooting on this? For example, after going through the network setup, have you verified that you can at least ping between machines using their IP address and hostname? Have you tried viewing and/or mounting network shares from the command line using the "net view" and "net use" commands?

Considering the fact that NICs are very cheap, I'd definitely try that next (especially since you say the problem is getting worse over time). Since you seem to have ruled out all other hardware, the NIC is about all that's left. With everything else you say you've done, if the problem still occurs with a new NIC, you're almost certainly looking at a software prblem/conflict.

Running the fsck command is pretty straightforward; you can run it on one partition/filesystem at a time, or have fsck automatically walk its way through all filesystems listed in /etc/fstab. The latter should happen if you simply issue the command itself (with no options/arguments). To specify a partition, just do, for example:

fdisk /dev/hda1

Read the fsck man page for a full description.

You might also want to boot into rescue mode from your installation CD and run fsck from there; it might be a bit safer.

The problem could easily be hardware-related, but since you say the computer is in another country, troubleshooting will be rather difficult.

Possible hardware causes could be:

- Faulty power supply (as already mentioned)
- Bad RAM
- Faulty video/network/etc. card
- Faulty motherboard
- Ventilation/thermal problem

If you want to start eliminating software causes, I'd start turning off all unneccessary running programs and processes/services one at a time. Also run a spyware/adware removal program like SpyBot or Ad Aware.

If you get the system as pared down as possible but it still freezes, it's most likely hardware.

I would have not even have noticed this but Zone Alarm is the one that notified me of this.

That sounds a bit fishy. What was the exact wording of the message/error that ZoneAlarm gave you?

Although this link deals with the issue from the other way around (that is, getting your system to boot into the GUI when it normally boots to the text/command prompt level), it should give you some insight into how to configure your system to boot into the mode (runlevel) you desire.

...besides, I wanted a valid reason to use "" in a message...

lol. :D

My reading on this indicates that there's a 4 GB range, but it's signed (for seeking within a file), so the limit is 1/2 the range, hence 2 GB total.

As I said, after trying to weed out the conflicting information on max vfat/FAT32 filesizes, I'm tending to agree- because the int appears to be signed, that means a 2G filesize limit on a 32-bit platform.

Could you elaborate on your explanation of "for seeking within a file" as it relates to the need for the filesize to be signed? (I'm not a programmer by any means, so I'd appreciate the illumination).

:)

So the file-size-limit should be (if I'm correct) at 4GB (or 2^32) since it does not make any sens to use a signed integer to represent the file-size (it can't be negative ;) )[BlueICE]

Actually, you might have found the problem right there. Although I haven't been able to nail down exactly where this occurs (I'd assume somewhere in the vfat implementation, but I can't be sure), I've seen allusions to the fact that that filesize is represented as a signed int. If so, on 32-bit architecture, that would yield a max filesize of 2^31; in other words- 2GB.

I don't know if this relates to our issue here, but when troubleshooting massive filesytem corruption on Macs (HFS/HFS+ filesystems), I've actually seen files report their sizes as negative numbers.

On a windows machine using FAT32, the file size cannot exceed 2 gigs.

Er, IIRC- the FAT32 filesize limit is 4G minus 1 Byte.

Knowing exactly what services and ports are involved would help us better assess the potential security issues.

Hmm, here's a thought:

Is the error being issued from the server being accessed, or from a particular remote client machine which is accessing the server? If you get the errors when connecting from any client, the problem may be on the server side.
Is the server local, or is it hosted off-site?

Win98 itself shouldn't even use config.sys, so as cscgal said, the message is a little strange. Again, I'd look for legacy (16-bit; DOS/Win 3.1) applications; a utility like the System Info program that comes with Norton Systemworks can give you a very detailed summary of what 16-bit and 32-bit components are running on your machines.

Hey waystar, DMR, and alc ... all from justlinux.com .

You missed one- Steve (mahdi) registered also. OMG- three moderators posting on another site when we should be slaving away at JL... our site admin is not going to be a happy puppy!

:evil: :cheesy:

As cscgal said, the order in which the operating systems should be installed is by age (oldest version first). Your Win ME/98 installs won't recognize XP, and might not even like installing to/running from any drive other the Primary Master.

In terms of your mention of Redhat, the usual drill is to install (again, by age) any Windows versions first. When you run the Redhat installer, it will detect those operating systems and configure its own bootloader (Grub, by default) to handle the booting of all the operating systems.

You can't really do anything about it other than format and start over, along with an fdisk /mbr before you reinstall 98.

Restoring the MBR by running "fdisk /mbr" from a Win 98/DOS rescue disk might do the trick by itself; worth a try before you go for a full reformat.

so did you try increasing, the THE VALUE OF THE FILES COMMAND IN YOUR CONFIG.SYS FILE

Yup, you can bump the "FILES=" entry in config.sys, but man- it sounds like you're running some really old applications; I'd upgrade if possible.

Also, it would help to know:

-What browser (including version) are you using when the error occurs?

-Does it happen only for specific sites? All the time? Randomly?

-What other applications are you running at the time the error occurs?

i uninstall it but it keeps coming back.

Ezula seems to bury pieces of itself pretty deeply into your system. When you say "uninstall", exactly what method did you use? Personally, I use both AdAware and SpyBot to regularly scan and clean any Win machines I deal with (I mainly use Linux myself, so I'm immune to most/all of the spyware BS :cheesy: ).

In general, many spyware/adware programs install registry entries, obscure files/folders in your system directories, etc. which will reinstall the software at some point (usually the next bootup or logon). I've often had to manually weed through the registry and directory heirarchy pretty extensively to manually remove all traces of the programs. It can take a lot of research and detective work, and I wouldn't suggest that anyone who isn't comfortable with registry hacking undertake the endeavor.

In terms of blocking these programs from entering your system, some can stopped with a firewall program such as Zone Alarm, but others work in such a way as to appear as valid network activity/information and therefore pass right through firewalls.

i do most of the things i need to do in linux like install stuff and move files and folders and stuff like that in console but when im jst using linux for other things like surfing i use x but i voted for console. :)

Ditto.

You will probably want to check out the Sourceforge site for the ACX100 drivers
http://acx100.sourceforge.net/

Looks like the 650+ has been varified to work with this driver

Steve- WTF are you doing here?? 1st me, then Alex, and now you. What? Have we left Dale to man the ship by himself? Good god man- he'll drink all the liquor!

:D :D

I'll throw my hat in-- Woo Woo!

Hey, Who told you that you could clock out? Get back to work!

;)

Two further Samba references, although parts of them might be out of date:

O'Reilly's Using Samba

Samba/SWAT configuration help. Swat (Samba Web Administration Tool) is a popular GUI front-end for Samba configuration. Webmin, although not limited to Samba configuration, is another popular GUI config tool.
*Note: When reading documentation concerning Samba/SWAT, watch out for references to inetd. In most cases, that material applies only to older distros, as inetd is deprecated, and has been replaced by xinetd (which has an entirely different config structure).

Also, for a Linux equivalent to Windows' "Network Neighborhood/ My Network Places" network browsers, check out LinNeighborhood.

Hi waystar- looks like more than a few of us from JL came over to check this out. :)

It's normal for one of pins (#9, I think) to be missing on a standard VGA/SVGA subminiature 15-pin D connector. Can you test the card in another machine? If you can, do so. Also make absolutely sure that you're using the right driver(s) for the card.

As knute said, we need to know the exact model of the Realtek card; there are a few out there, and they don't all use the 8139too module. A good start would be to open a terminal window and issue the following command (case-sensitive, and the first letter is a lower-case "L"):

lspci -vv |grep Eth

Post the results, and we can take it from there.

If you want, take a look through these troubleshooting steps. They apply only to static addressing, so if you're supposed to be using DHCP, let us know.

As others have said, Linux has it's own choices of bootloaders to allow you to boot multiple operating systems; the 2 most popular loaders being lilo (LInux LOader) and Grub (GRand Unified Bootloader). What has happened in your case is that because you disconnected your Win drive while installing Linux, the install program couldn't detect the drive, and therefore couldn't set up whichever bootloader it was installing to enable booting both OSes.

The reason that the system still boots directly into Windows is that the Windows bootloader information still resides in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your Primary Master Drive ("C:" in Windows terminology, "hda" in Linux). Had you left the Windows drive attached when you installed Linux, the installer would have detected the Win install, configured its bootloader for both OSes, and written the information necessary to dual-boot into the MBR. You probably could have worked around the message alluding to deleting "C:", but as a Newbie I don't blame you for playing it safe.

Since you have a boot disk (and the install CDs) , you can try booting into Linux that way and reconfiguring your bootloader, but there might be a problem with that: because the drive on which you installed Linux was the only drive in the system at the time, Linux probably identified it as hda (Primary Master) and built its config files around that assumption. Now that the drive is back at its original hdb (Primary Slave) position, all of you …