On Friday I was working from home. As I wanted to use the laptop, I thought I'd try and set up a proxy on the Win98 box. This turned out to be more troublesome than it was worth.
HTTP traffic was fine, put FTP traffic never got through. This was rather important in order for me to use synaptic and cpan/cpanplus. I tried around 10 different products and all seem to have a very complex way of handling anything but HTTP traffic. A friend advised me that Win98 has something called "Internet Connection Sharing", which I'd not been aware of. To be honest I wish I'd still never heard of it. Like the others it didn't handle FTP and there was no clear way of setting it up correctly. So I uninstalled it. I now have probably the most flakey Win98 system I've ever had the misfortune to use. If I try and do anything too complex, like opening a browser and opening a text editor, it locks up, crashes outright, or loads a BSoD.
I found a Lite version of WinProxy and managed to get the machine to stay up long enough to install it. It works fine. HTTP, FTP, DNS, SOCKS and everything. Except I can now ONLY use the Win98 machine as a proxy gateway. I'm hoping I can get a Win98 disk to repair it. Thankfully I have a Linux box (running Suse 9.1) so I have at least got something I can connect to the outside world with.
I don't seem to be having much success with OSs of late :(
An added concern, and one that strikes me as being more than a coincidence, is that I didn't seem to get any mail yesterday bar about 4 spam emails. I'm on a plethora of Perl and Linux lists and not one sent a message it would seem. I'm was extremely dubious, and initially thought it was something to do with one of the proxies I tried, accessing my mail account and downloading everything. So I sent a message through my work account, which got through without a problem, and is still there on the POP box. So now I'm confused. There is at least one list that sent messages yesterday and today and none of them got through. Has the domain missbarbell.co.uk finally been blacklisted on every ISP except my own? Being a bank holiday weekend, I guess some lists are just quiet, but to see my inbox reduce down to virtually nothing from several hundred in a day was definitely out of the ordinary.
Perhaps the good thing to come out of this, is that I may just finally get around to setting up my other Linux boxes properly and never use the Win98 box again. Except to reinstall with Linux of course :)
