June 21, 2005

Safety Backfires

Sunday Our Publisher called us in a panic. Something's wrong with my laptop! There's no space left on my hard drive, and I've deleted everything I can! I wasn't in the mood for a house call, so Mr Laptop came over for a visit.

Experience has led me to be a little skeptical about people's description of their computer problems, but Our Publisher is a pretty geeky guy, and it turned out that his description was accurate. He had less than 200MB free on a 40GB hard drive. This was just BAD. I investigated the usual suspects, C:/Windows/Temp, C:/Documents and Settings/UserName/Local Settings/Temp, My Documents/My Music and My Documents/My Pictures, but nothing looked odd. I tried to install my favorite disk space usage utility but it failed to install, so we downloaded FolderSizes and took advantage of the free trial.

The program installed without any fuss, and told us that the Windows folder was consuming 20 GB of disk space. Hmmm....something was frelled for sure. Even on my constantly modified system, loaded down with the remnants of many failed and tested software goodies, the Windows folder only uses 4 GB. Foldersizes told us that the real culprit was the Internet Logs folder. A little googling turned up a number of references to Zone Alarm, a personal firewall product I have used and advocated for years but which has been getting on my nerves lately. Zone Alarm logs intrusions by default and keeps 30 days worth of logs. We found over 4,000 Zone Alarm log files in the Internet Folder, most of them created in the past 3 days, most of them over the span of a few hours, seconds apart. Ouch!

A few things made this seem very odd. Our Publisher connects to the internet via a wireless network secured via Mac address. In other words, only computers that have explicitly been allowed access can use the connection. This meant that whatever was causing Zone Alarm to go mad was happening inside his network, and there are only two computers on that that network, Our Publisher's and His Partner's, which we spent New Year's Eve reformatting. (A sacrifice indicative of true friendship IMHO). Our Publisher reported that Zone Alarm on his partner's machine had been requesting access to the Internet for a program he hadn't recognized, and also that Real Player on his laptop was constantly asking if it could update itself.

I made one mistake-in my zeal to rid the laptop of 18.5 GB of log files so that we could go "Oooooh...Aaah...that's better" I opted to delete the files without analyzing any of them, so we don't know what happened. We are monitoring the situation to see if we see any future mad log growth.

Final Thoughts: A few

1) Our Publisher is running the Windows built in firewall, Norton Internet Security, and Zone Alarm. This is unnecessary and over kill. We need to decide which programs to keep. This reminds me of a visit I paid to a friend in the far distant country of New Jersey recently. She had a laptop which would not boot, and had been advised by CompUSA that the motherboard was dead. I played with it and found it would not boot because someone had improperly installed a wireless card driver. I was able to boot once I removed the card, upon which no less than 5 anti-spyware programs launched. The laptop barely crawled under the weight of unnecessary software. I chided her, but she was truly afraid of "Internet Attacks" and probably has reinstalled the software I removed.

2) Why did we have to download a program to view folder sizes? Why isn't this in the operating system? What programmer thought Eh, folder sizes, not important? when designing the Windows UI? Raymond Chen probably knows.

Posted by Trigger Tech at June 21, 2005 9:53 AM Permalink

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