Saturday, January 31, 2009

Google search returns all links as "harmful"

i'm a heavy user of google search. a while ago, i noticed that all the links returned by the search engine were sub-labeled with "This site may harm your computer". clicking on the link will guide you to the google advisory page and you can't go to the site you wanted! it seems that google's server is incorrectly returning the results... maintenance or something going on???
tried searching for the key "Google", and guess what!? it was also tagged as harmful (see pix).

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Weird ethernet issue

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
work resumed last monday after 3 weeks of holidays! sad to say, i was bedridden for around 1 week during christmas due to cough and colds. sigh...

yesterday, i was trying to print out a testcase to our network printer but i kept on getting a network location not found error! i can see a shared folder but not its contents. tried restarting the system (win xp sp3) for several times but to no effect. i checked the event logs but nothing strange in the trace either. then i thought that it could be the network issue as the DNS & DHCP server had just been re-imported into a new virtual host. so i plugged my laptop into a different network segment but still to no avail.
next, i decided to removed my laptop from the current windows domain, restarted it and logged in with the local admin account. then tried re-joining the same domain once again after renewing the ip address but still the result! grrrr... wtf! if i can't make this laptop join the domain, it would be a lot of trouble for me at work! so i tried updating the ethernet card's driver, but still the same issue. i was getting hopeless and decided to run a windows repair using the installer cd. it took me around an hour to run the repair re-installation. tried joining the domain after the repair but still that damn "network location not found" error message dialog kept on popping up! last resort was to reinstall the system but i don't want to as it will surely take me several days to complete the application installation and tune-ups. i was searching for ghost backups if i had (i couldn't remember if i had taken one either.) unfortunately, i found no ghost snapshot images among my backup hdds.
before resorting to re-installing the OS, it came to me to try uninstalling the ethernet device and have the system re-discover that new device. that's what i did now and the system properly detected a new device and asked for the device driver installation. i set the location of the driver and installed it. after that, i tried re-joining the domain, 10secs... 20 secs... of waiting; the error message did not appeared! 25secs... at last my laptop was able to join the domain!!! whew. that was a very simple solution at all! i should have done this before trying other things then!!!
really didn't kwow what caused this problem. i had tried looking for traces but got no clue at all... anyway, now that i know; it would be easier then next time!
btw, i saw several posts on forums having the same issue. it seems that most people resorted to reverting the previous snapshots or re-installing the entire OS. i hope that this will also serve as a reference to you if ever you'll encounter the same symptoms of trouble...