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I've taken the liberty of combining together a number of different submissions we've received. First off, Network Magic recently came out with a new version of their software (tour on link). It's Windows-based primarily, but having tested it out on Mac/Linux/Windows-mixed network, it's worth checking out. Another individual pointed out that SourceForge Enterprise is now a 15 seat free download; you can also grab the ISO in Torrent form. (SourceForge is made by the other arm of the company that owns Slashdot, VA Software). Lastly, a couple of folks seem to have rediscovered the joy of Audioscrobbler and sharing the stuff via last.fm. Fun stuff.
bleargh!
trac is much better. way cleaner and simpler interface, and _excelent_ integration with subversion.
also, it's free.
http://trac.edgewall.com/
factor 966971: 966971
http://www.zmanda.com/downloads.html
Amanda: Open Source Backup Software
"Another individual pointed out that SourceForge Enterprise is now a 15 seat free download; you can also grab the ISO in Torrent form. (SourceForge is made by the other arm of the company that owns Slashdot, VA Software)"
Two more and you'll be an octopus.
Just out of curiousity, is this story a paid advertisement for specific software?
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Here's something I never got: why isn't sourceforge free and open source itself? It seems like it should be.
Philosophy.
o/t: Is this a porly concieved Slashvertisement???
Um...and just WHY would anyone be interested in downloading any of this non-free garbage? Especially Sourceforge. That was one shameful decision. One shouldn't even consider using it over free projects like Savane, GForge, or as someone already mentioned, Trac.
This is Slashdot, after all, did we forget?
Okay, sorry, Last.fm is kind of free, but still they need to restore the ability to play an mp3 stream with the player of your choice, not just their clunky custom software.
In theory you're right. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they're different.
I currently have three computers all running XP, all in the same workgroup and they can only access each other by IP address. It's a PITA to share files and printers. I'm very computer literate and could probably do some research to figure out what's going wrong. Iit's not exactly on the top of my list, and it might be worth the price for network magic to solve the problem for me.
However, I don't understand why they use a subscription model. If you don't pay $30 every year, their service cuts off. When I'm dealing with a company that may not be around in a year, I want a flat price.
Seriously, you guys should give Hamachi a try. You can build LAN's over the internet with it in a reasonably secure manner. Great for multiplayer games. Also comes in a yummy Linux flavour.
Windows XP has horrible networking. If you are on Domain, you get to offload the pain to a domain admin (unless you ARE the domain admin...) but for workgroups, the suffering is all yours.
Right now I have a network with the following characteristics:
The current situation is this:
Machine A can see Machine B, and can look at, upload to, and download from B's folders.
Machine B CANNOT see Machine A at all.
Machine B can see Machine C.
Machine A can see Machine C.
Machine C cannot see ANY machine.
Another form:
A-->B
B-->C
A-->C
So to get a file from A to B or from B to A is easy, go to A, copy to or from B.
Getting a file to C is also easy, just go to A or B and put the file on or take the file off of C.
So technically I can "do" any possible transfer.
Damned if it isn't STUPID and MESSED UP though.
Oh and don't even go to printer sharing. The original idea was to have A act as a print server for B and C. Of course nobody can actually see A, so that didn't really go over that well.
Mind you I have NEVER seen a Windows network setup as eloquently as a *nix network. On *nix, I just go to any machine and lo and behold, I can see every other machine on the network, use any printer, and if I login to multiple machines at the same time (most often using SSH) any changes I make to a file in my home directory on machine A is almost instantly transferred to ALL other machines that I am logged on to. This is incredibly convenient for testing network client/server apps.
Windows, in comparison, has this entire synch on login/logoff thing going on, and the login process can take upwards of 2-3 minutes per machine! (Depending on the stupidity of how the domain was setup, some domains work better than others...)
Now when it comes to network printing, Windows domains have got *nix beat.
"Well what you do on *nix is you memorize the printers magic number, no, there is no searching GUI listing of printers setup, then you drop to the command line and pipe the file you want to print to the printer."
Okay....
Yes, I have seen *nix networks setup better than that, but I have encountered that level of stupidity too many times. Thankfully I have never needed to print a file with graphics in it (or any file that is not in plain text) on such a network!
In conclusion, we, Computer Scientists, are complete and utter idiots who cannot program a decent system for the life of us.
Something so simple, so very very simple....
What the heck is wrong with us? It should NOT be complicated. I have had times where, when on a LAN, it was faster to BURN A CDR than to try and get networking up and running. Some times networking works, some times it doesn't. When it does, great, when it doesn't, oh well.
Computers should not be non-deterministic.
I really love those situations when two identical machines in identical states have the same operations applied to them in the same order, and two different results end up happening. That is cute folks, really cute[1].
[1]By cute I mean "Somebody should be pounded in the head with a sledgehammer".
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Audioscrobbler started off as a school project, but after a while, they went commercial, and are now last.fm.
Last fm is a standalone player that implements the Audioscrobbler functionality. Audioscrobbler is STILL available in plugin form for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player.
Perhaps the submitter is a dolt but at least he read the fucking page.
(Last fm == Standalone player) && (Audioscrobbler == plugin)
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Er, I'm confused. Could you explain that with an analogy involving tubes?
Indeed. There are two things I would like to see added to Windows XP's wireless networking tools, and "Network Magic" seems to do neither:
1) Have a separate TCP/IP configuration for each network (I hear this will be added in Vista. Blah.)
2) Manually choose which AP I wish to connect to, if there are more than one around.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Just bought a new wireless router from D-Link and it came with Network Magic in the box. Nowhere, not anywhere, did it say the product was not neccessary for the network. Instructions were seamless in their incorporation of Network Magic. As I'm installing, it pops up with the "free trial" offer. I immediately uninstalled it and am fine using Windows XP on 3 PCs and a storage device. No problemo...except for the sneaky marketing.
Microsoft likes to advertise how "simple" it is to setup a Windows XP network.
If I need to spend that much time learning, then it isn't simple.
Anyways, I have spent oodles of time setting up networks, in my experience, when dealing with Windows, domains are a more reliable solution. This is not TOO surprising, given that Microsoft sells domain systems for money, while workgroups are just a convinenence feature for users who are not willing to fork over the cash for a DC.
Windows Firewall is set to allow Windows Filesharing to pass through on all machines, naturally enough. The protocol is whatever the little checkbox for "Enable Windows File Sharing" uses. Not NetBEUI anymore thankfully.
Every machine is a laptop, so whatever Intel felt like. Not really configurable!
No, it is a 10mb/s HUB. When I said hub I meant HUB. The damn thing costs $40 new TODAY, and I have no clue why. (I bought it back in 1997 or so)
I want to get a nice router, wireless preferabbly. My Machine C is operating as a Wireless Router for the network right now, and THAT works perfectly. Go figure. Windows makes it PRETTY easy (but not inntuitive, since some amount of stupidity is required...) to turn a machine into a wireless router. (Linux, in comparison, loses out HORRIBLY here. Windows has a checkbox you select that makes a machine into a wireless router, linux has 2 or 3 packages you download, install, and edit text based configuration files for...)
And yes, all my machines are set to disable WiFi when their NIC is plugged in. (well except for machine C of course, which just doesn't connect to anything since all the other machines, when their NICs are plugged in, just do not connect to it!)
Yah, I had to fix that once. Drove me freaking nuts trying to diagnoise it. Very weird issue.
Except that, as stated above, I have a hub. Hubs barely above electrical repeaters in level of complexity.
I have the world's second most simple network layout. 3 machines, plugged into HUB.
Unless one of the machines is horribly mangling Ethernet frames, I have a software issue.
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I currently have three computers all running XP, all in the same workgroup and they can only access each other by IP address.
... what you do instead on a small network is add entries to the LMHOSTS file (for NetBIOS resolution) for each computername and IP address, which can be found in %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc
This is because NetBIOS browsing is (ahem) t3h suXX0r. It's never been dependable. If you want to browse by NetBIOS name (computername), you need to resolve that to an IP address. A WINS server can handle that for you. If you want to browse by hostname (FQDN), you'll need to resolve that to an IP address. An internal DNS server can handle that for you. But network browse lists on Windows machines are next to useless.
What's even worse is that neither WINS server nor DNS server are available in WinXP. So
Once that's done, when you try to lookup a NetBIOS name to IP address, the machine will check the LMHOSTS file before broadcasting. If it finds an entry, resolved, done and done.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I hope I didn't come across with any attitude in my reply, so I apologize if it came off that way. Having a degree in Computer Engineering, I am (unfortunately) very aware that even the simplest electronic/electric circuit can go bad - especially from age and use. Since most physics models choose to ignore it, wear-and-tear does not violate any law of physics that I know of.
What I was trying to show in my orig post is that I have a system that is in some ways similar to yours (multi-XP), and in other ways more complex (plus assorteds), and that it "just works" without special effort. I have actually had a hub go bad and seen the very same problems you're describing. The hub was about 5 years old and had been in near constant use since first plugged in. Logic tells me that if the software worked before the problem and the settings remained unchanged, then something must have changed outside of the software. After swapping NIC's and cables with no success replacing the hub fixed the problem. YMMV - just telling you what fixed a problem I had that was similar to yours.