Upgrade (3)
I thought it was time to be a good Net citizen and
run the Windows Update on my main Windows machine at home (the one with
the fastest CPU, basically). Windows 2000 SP4 has been out long enough,
I thought, to be stable, and so I proceeded to install that.
No problem, until I rebooted and found that my
net applications (active desktop, Yahoo! Messenger, Feedreader) were
all hosed. As is my habit, I dropped down to DOS and Cygwin and determined
that although TCP/IP was up (I could ping on my intranet by IP), name
resolution was down (nslookup and lynx would hang). I futzed around with
the settings on the Local Area Connection, in the process finding that the
name resolution on my wife's computer was completely out of date, but nothing
helped.
Then, I noticed the "dog that did not bark." In the
past, Service Pack updates would always lead to alerts from McAfee firewall
that each application which was requesting access to the network had been
updated since the last time such access had been granted. I was not getting
any of these popups at all. So I took a closer look at the firewall settings
and discovered that disabling the firewall software completely fixed DNS
and NetBIOS name resolution. Even though I am behind a hardware firewall,
this hardly seemed to be a good way to run, so I went to the McAfee
website (the only one I've
encountered which requires that I go back into IE instead of Mozilla
Firebird) and reinstalled the firewall software on top of itself. After
this measure and one more round of Windows Update, things appear to be
back to normal
I did some searching when in the thick of things
and did not found anything about SP4 breaking Firewall on 2000. So here I
am on record, essentially warning the world about the "brown acid."