Cannot renew ip address xp...

Quite nasty a problem, happened to WinXP time to time. Last time, the VNC client stopped responding with a "socket error". Then everything went down, one after the other. Geez virus, or something similar animal... The always-cure reboot finalized the problem. XP said that the network card had limited connectivity, and tried to renew the IP address when I clicked on repair (had also tried ipconfig /release & renew without results) and it just told me it was unable to renew the IP address (which begun with 169.***.***.***).

The forums and groups did not give any usable tips, then finally I found this article: How to determine and recover from Winsock2 corruption.

The article is from Microsoft. I applied the suggested brutal-looking solution of typing netsh winsock reset at the command prompt. The article suggested that some of the winsock-sensitive apps would require a reinstall, but it looked a good compromise to reinstalling the whole Windows (having been customized for more than a year.)

After the reboot, it came back. Some of the applications looked dizzy a bit, but they recovered finally. Now I am happy again. Ah yes... the root of the problem must have been winsock2 corruption :)

Shared calendar

I fed up with the fact that my calendar content is distributed between several Exchange and web based calendar services, and maintaining the sync between them is quite a time consuming task. So, I set up a centralized calendar service by using WebDAV, iCalendar and Mozilla Calendar. My method was:

1. As I run a private Debian Linux/Apache 1.3 web server, I chose the mod_dav method. Downloaded the mod_dav sources. In order to compile, the apache-dev package must have been present:


apt-get install apache-dev

Then, the


configure --with-apxs

command worked.

2. Followed the info in the INSTALL file. The httpd.conf addition that worked for me was:

LoadModule dav_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libdav.so
AddModule mod_dav.c
DAVLockDB /tmp/DAVLock

...

mod_alias.c />.....
Alias /dav /home/httpd/dav

/dav /> AuthType Basic
AuthName "WebDAV"
AuthUserFile /> DAV on
AllowOverride None
Options None
GET HEAD OPTIONS /> Require user /> /> />.....

3. Then, set up the Mozilla Calendar by the info here.

Voila, I have a centrally stored calendar. I will set up "several" clients bound to the stored calendar file, one for my office, and a web interface for remote access when travelling. My calendar integrity is ensured, and I won't not miss a birthday any more :)