Re: Is there an easy way to monitor for Internet failures?

James,

Your belt and suspenders approach would get you in trouble here. Our
network consultant likes to occasionally renumber the IP addresses on our
servers. Drives me batshirt crazy. When I try to object he goes over my
head and ties up the boss time until he acquiesces if for no other reason
than to get him out of there and allow him to move on. Your host table
entries would leave you out in the cold.

Although I appreciate what you are doing with your dummy host table
entries (0.0.0.0) I would think that many of the 'adware' type stuff would
have already bitten you. Weather Bug was an app I used to have on my
laptop that had serious adware stuff. We use Websense to block this
stuff. It pretty much killed Websense. It also stopped most of the ads
on one particular midrange publication because they were more concerned
about being able to report hit counts than customers seeing their sponsors
ads. Websense blocked their hit count site. In summary, Websense keeps
up on this faster than you could. I will say it occasionally freaks out
and I have to reboot to get to sites like IBM. And it's on my company
supplied webtop so low into it that I get blocked even off premises. Like
the time I was doing router analysis with tech support from my local ISP
and I was told to boot into safe mode to do a particular test and websense
blocked it all.


Rob Berendt