[2004] in WWW Security List Archive
A Netscape bug?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Benjamin Tomhave)
Tue May 7 21:27:40 1996
Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 17:59:30 -0500 (CDT)
From: Benjamin Tomhave <tomhavbe@martin.luther.edu>
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Hi All!
I've been hesitant to post this as I am not yet sure if the problem is
localized to my site, or if it has been happening elsewhere. I have sent
several messages to Netscape support and received no response. Due to an
increase in the occurrance of the problem, I am deciding to post here with
the hope that somebody else has encountered this problem as well. So,
without further delay, let me explain the nature of the problem.
I've made an effort to install Win32s 1.30c on all our machines that won't
be hurt by it more than helped. This includes all our pentiums which are
running a minimum of 8MB RAM. We are standardized with Windows for
Workgroups 3.11 on all our PCs. When the beta versions of Netscape 2
started coming out, I started seeing a weird "thing." At first, it was
only on one computer. Every time you open Netscape, a message window
opens with Netscape as the title, a yellow circle with an exclamation
point on the left, and an OK button in the middle. No text. No
explanation. Just a message window. You click on OK, and then Netscape
starts. I reinstalled Netscape. Then I reinstalled Win32s. Then I
reinstalled Windows. Then I reinstalled Win32s with a different copy.
None of these things worked. Despite further upgrades of Netscape,
eventually to v2.01, the message window continues to appear. A couple
weeks after I noticed this problem on one machine, another machine in the
same lab started doing the same thing. I tried to figure out what the
difference was between those 2 machines and the rest of the machines in
the lab. However, I could not find -any- descrepencies. I even went so
far as deleting all of Netscape, all of Windows, and all of Win32s, and
then reinstalling everything. The message window still appeared!! I have
run both McAfee and F-PROT virus scanners on these machines, and found
nothing. The machines all have BOOT-ROM's, and don't actually have a copy
of the OS local. Everything in imported into memory at boot-up. The
MS-DOS files are not present on the machines. When it comes to Winsock
packages, we are running a couple different things. However, this problem
has started occurring in 3-4 other labs on campus, including everything
from TCP/IP to a Novix gateway connection with dynamic socket allocation.
So, I'm a bit perplexed by this whole problem. I have pretty much done
everything short of formatting the hard drive. I have even tried
fdisk /mbr, thinking that there might be something in the MBR that would
be causing this problem.
If anybody has any hints, ideas, or has experienced the same problem, I'd
love to know about it. The more cases of this problem, the more likely
Netscape Corp. will listen.
Thanks!
-ben
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Benjamin Tomhave | Shell to DOS...Come in DOS...Do you Copy?
Luther College |
Decorah, IA 52101 | $ rm * .* "Hey, where'd everything go?
tomhavbe@martin.luther.edu |
|
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