Computing desk
< April 24	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 26 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 25[edit]

Computer[edit]

Are old computers more likely to be found in rural/remote areas? 58.165.23.195 (talk) 01:35, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this is really getting into an original research area, but here's my take. Simple statistics would indicate, that the more populated an area is, the more computers there are. Hence, more - "old computers". Just a thought. — Ched : ? 05:05, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Adding to Ched's logic, rural and remote areas would have had the occasional computer for office, accounting or other business use. But for Internet, they'd not have had any (many places still have none) because they are lacking internet services....facilities ranging from none through dial-up through exorbitantly expensive satellite service would tend to reduce the total number of computers in use. As the service becomes available, NEW machines would be purchased to use on them. If an area is sufficiently rural/remote, even in First World countries, even their electricity supply may be home-generated or non-existent.KoolerStill (talk) 09:54, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So, by combining the first two answers, I'd predict both more old computers, total, and more per capita, in populated areas which have had the support infrastructure in place for computers for many years. StuRat (talk) 21:32, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing 58 was referring to neither of these instead percentage of computers (in use) that can be defined as 'old' even if it was poorly phrased. My gut feeling is that it is more likely working/in use computers in rural/remote areas will be old but this is just an educated guess and depends what sort of areas your comparing it to. For example a upper class sub/urban neighbourhood is going to have a far lesser percentage of computers that are old then sub/urban slums. It will also depend on how you define a computer. I inserted in use because it makes sense to only consider them IMHO but still, do you count a computer that is turned on once a year? BTW, I don't see any reason to presume new machines are going to be purchased. Old computers are commonly sold at a low price or given away to people without computers. People without much experience are also more likely to be unaware whether what they're purchasing is worth it. Sure this Pentium II 450mhz with 64 mb of RAM is worth $250... And if there's far less available you sometimes have to take what is available which is not necessarily new. There is probably also a greater willingness to re-use old computers as I expect rural communities tend to have less of a disposable society attitude. And of course rural communities tend to have a more sedate/laid back attitude so might not tend to be so concerned that their computer is a bit slow and so are less likely to upgrade. They probably are less likely to have reason to upgrade to. E.g. children (or adults) might be less able to convince their parents (or themselves) they need the superduper new computer for Crysis or whatever fab new game (which they may never have even heard of and potentially may not have time to play even if they have). Indeed there will generally be less demanding apps, e.g. video, photo editing, (both not extremely demanding but more then office work), video editing. And with slower internet connections the fact that Flash and other complex websites take a while to load is not necessarily going to be affected much by computer speed and the comp is also less likely to end up with a lot of junk which slows it down. There will probably be less 'peer pressure' too. Nil Einne (talk) 11:18, 27 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

weird web traffic[edit]

my webpage has gotten some very weird traffic today. basically a LOT of different domains all hitting weird random (buried) pages. no referrers. the domains range from being in the US, Japan, Benin(!!), UAE, Korea, China, Hong Kong, UK, and Australia. All hits happened within a few seconds of the others. All identify with the user-agent of "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) ". This is strange, no? Could this be some sort of botnet? (I've no idea why they'd want my page, there's nothing interesting on it). Or what? (it is not slashdotting or something similar; each IP hits one and only one page, and does so within a second of another having hit a page, sometimes the same page. in my experience slashdotting has more variety in user-agents and people browse around a little more.) Any thoughts as to what I'm seeing here? --98.217.14.211 (talk) 04:25, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Could it be an attempted distributed denial-of-service attack? If your website is on a shared server, an attack is probably directed at your web host's server and not your particular website. In other words, there may be another website on the server that's the motivation for the attack, but all websites on the server are being attacked in an attempt to bring the sever down. --Bavi H (talk) 05:01, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, that might make sense. My site is on a shared server, so the 14 hits for my files (all of which were of relatively large PDFs) might have been that. Interesting. (Seems fine now.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:12, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) As much as I hate to answer a question with another question, I have to in this case. How long have you been monitoring your web logs? It's not unusual really for bots (especially search engine bots) to suddenly show up and tick your pages. Some search engines (yep, there are still a lot out there besides google) will send bots around every 3 months or so to see what's out there. I'm guessing that that's what you're seeing here, but I don't know for sure. ;) — Ched : ? 05:03, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I've monitored it for years, it doesn't look like search bots. The funny bit is that the servers are totally random looking, and not the standard bots at all. What's weird is the geographical distribution. (I had never even heard of Benin before this, to be honest.) If they were all from the same server or server bloc, that would make sense, but given the random country distribution it looks like some sort of botnet. Anyway, they all accessed weird, random PDFs on the server. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:12, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A distributed denial of service attack on your host like Bavi H says sounds the most likely, I would expect it to last longer though, perhaps they were trying to gauge the hosts bandwidth for some reason like a future attack. I certainly wouldn't refer to my websites as uninteresting though others might differ :) Dmcq (talk) 07:30, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And another question-with-another-question response: how could they be hitting random buried pages? Some other agent must have already crawled your site or perhaps some agent has gained access to your directory information. I kinda suspect a compromise - check your access settings for FTP, strengthen your admin password, etc. If it's a truly buried page (i.e. unlinked from any other page) no-one should be able to find it than you. Franamax (talk) 09:23, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Further paranoia: yes, sounds like a botnet and if so, probably probing your web server responses for possible exploits (not the pages themselves, the HTTP response header could reveal clues about the webserver version you're using and how it's configured). And when you mention the user-agent field, is it just the text you quoted, or is there more? Most IE user-agent strings I've seen have a bunch of version information following what you've quoted. Possibly your logging software is stripping out the version information. And of course, I can access your site with whatever user-agent I want, it's pretty easy to specify (if you know how). Franamax (talk) 09:50, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I should have clarified, they aren't darknet buried, but they are pages-within-pages. What I meant was, they aren't hitting the main page and drilling down, they're hitting a page that is five times already down the hierarchy, and kind of random pages at that (PDFs of random things—not the sort of thing that would be linked to from another site). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:12, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It might be a Doomjuice virus. This creates a spambot net, which could be active enough to almost be a DoS attack. Run both a virus and malware scanner (the one from www.malwarebytes.com is a good free one). Doomjuice is fairly easily found and removed.

Or it might be AVG anti-virus "link scanners" at work.In Versin 8 there was a toolbar that would check out all links on a search results page BEFORE the user clicked any of them, to be able to report on the safety or otherwise if they did click. This might account for the large number of strange locations the log is showing. There is an esoteric way of blocking these, using the Apache URL redirection tool. This site has some of the code needed : http://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/logs-avg/ -- it takes some learning, but is also useful for other purposes, such as fixing broken links.KoolerStill (talk) 09:52, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(Just to say, if it is a virus, it's not on MY end of things, it's on the end of those who are creating the traffic. So there's nothing much I can do about that, obviously.) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:28, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the responses! I'll keep an eye on it. It seems to have stopped not long after it started... we'll see if there's some future thing being heralded! --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:12, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

DNS sub-domain entries[edit]

Given a subdomain, xyz.abc.com, I'd like to discover all the A records for the abc.com domain (with the simplifying assumption that everything in abc.com is contained within one SOA). So I want to query the DNS server responsible for abc.com and discover that it has subdomains xyz., www., and qrs.abc.com. How can I do that?

If I still had a Solaris or Linux system, I'm pretty sure I could set up my named to do a zone transfer, then just look at the cache file - but they took my toys away, and I'm stuck with Win XP Pro. Also, I really don't want to set up any MS implementations of a DNS server, because, well, you know...

Is there a way I can do a zone transfer with telnet or nslookup? Any alternatives? If my terminology is garbled, please forgive and thanks! Franamax (talk) 09:36, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming the DNS server allows it, you can do a zone transfer by starting nslookup then doing:

set type=any 
ls -d example.com > somefile.txt

This is according to [1] — Matt Eason ^{(Talk  Contribs)} 10:02, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Playstation[edit]

I'm trying to install a Playstation 2 with a connection to an LG plasma television. 1) When we attach the system to the TV directly we get black and white images. 2) When he connect through the DVD player we get color on the screen, but interference of the "no disc" screen of the DVD player.

How do we get the system connected AND get color? - 82.173.183.1 (talk) 15:58, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. Are you using the regular PlayStation composite video connector, or the component one? Try jiggling the video connector at the point where it connects to the PS2. Mine is "weak" and I often have video problems until I (seem to) bend the connector at just the right angle. Another thing to try would be borrowing a different video cable from a friend (preferably the cable with component connectors, since you have a newfangled, fancy TV.) Tempshill (talk) 16:22, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The point where I insert is the compenent input plug. What is the composite video connector? I got the three separate thingies. - 82.173.183.1 (talk) 16:50, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The red-white-yellow is common PS2 connector. Red and White are audio (no video on them at all). Yellow is video. There is another one that has Red and White paired off and another Red, Green, and Blue connector. In that one, the red and white pair is still audio. The Red, Green, Blue group is the video. If you have one yellow video on the tv, use the yellow connector from the PS2. If you have a red/green/blue connector on the TV, use the red/green/blue connector from the PS2. -- kainaw ™ 22:43, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I should have asked first. How is the input connector on your TV labeled? And by "three separate thingies", are you talking about the red, white, and yellow cables on the PS2 cable? Assuming you have the regular PS2 composite video cabling (red-white-yellow), the yellow plug should go into a connector on your TV labeled "Composite In" or "Video In". Tempshill (talk) 04:00, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The cable is red-white-yellow and it's connected to the "Composite In" section. - Mgm|^(talk) 11:36, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that's the most common PS2 video connector, and you have it hooked up to the correct input. Did you try jiggling the cable connector at the point where it enters the PS2? If that doesn't work, then my next suggestion would be to borrow and try a different video cable - preferably a "component" video cable, which, as Kainaw said above, has red, green, and blue video cables along with the red and white audio cables. Tempshill (talk) 15:09, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you are in the Netherlands. Did you set both pieces of equipment to PAL? F (talk) 13:28, 28 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

High quality media player for website[edit]

Hello.

I am designing a website and I need a media player (like Adobe Flash Player) for high quality movies, that can play on ALL computers (or as many as possible)?

It is not suppose to be like Youtube. Its meant for another purpose. So still - A good platform independent or cross platform media player for very high quality movies.

Anyone knows one??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.243.235.218 (talk) 16:19, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Flowplayer? Tempshill (talk) 16:23, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

TeamViewer[edit]

When setting up TeamViewer is there any special requirements? Do I have to know any of the computers ip addresses or ports, or does it somehow just know how to connect to the other computer across the internet by the id number? thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shadowclouds6635 (talk • contribs) 17:01, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It just knows. Both ends have to have it installed. When you open each end, it gives a code number and freshly generated password, which you have to pass on to the other party (via email or some other means), then both enter in the received codes into another dialog, to establish the connection. The codes are the private and public keys to an encryption system which makes it a fully secure connection at all times, using 256 bit encoding. A permanent connection can also be configured, allowing access to a remote which is unmanned (it must be powered up, of course). KoolerStill (talk) 18:10, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It must make some sort of connection to a TeamViewer server which would store both computers id and ip; it can't "just know" by the codes alone —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 18:26, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The encryption is partly to make the data hidden even from their routers and servers. Clearly, those must have the ID and IP information, from when the session is started. I used "it knows" in the same sense as Shadowclouds did - that it is automatic, and the user does not need to know, in order to be able to set it up. All the users need to know is to download and install, then click the icon to start it.KoolerStill (talk) 18:38, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]