Network novice could use some help

[phisig32]

First, thank you for taking the time to read this, I will be brief.

Short story, I work in a school with old computers, so I brought a rebuilt one in from home. The two tech people that work in the whole district have not returned a phone call in two weeks so I decided to try and get connected to the network and servers myself.

After a couple of hours I can now log on and connect to the server through my cpu and login name. I was able to find my printer and set that up as well. Two small problems are left.

Windows XP Pro Sp2

1. IE6 works and I can acess any website. FF2 can acess a few specific websites related to the school and nothing else. I get an error message that says the site is taking too long to respond, check to see if you are behind a firewall or if you typed the name correctly. Under my normal log in name (not connected to the server) I added firefox to the firewall acepted programs, but that did not fix anything. Under FF2 I was using auto detect connection settings and the switched it with the proxy address and same port listed with IE6 but that didn't help either. I can not turn the firewall off when connected to the network/server. If I just log onto the cpu and not the network I can not access the internet.

2. AVG 7.5 can not update, I did not really try and fix this one yet. I added some avg services to the allowable list but may have missed the right one.

Thanks for any help you can give

 

[blue68f100]

Sounds like FF is going through a proxy server. Select direct connect to internet.

Your school can also block other browsers if they desire. But this is rare.

AVG can not update tells me you may be missing DNS or gateway info.

Run ipconfig /all from a dos cmd window.

 

[phisig32]

Switched FF to direct connect, didn't help.

I ran ip config but am not sure what to look for or how to change things from there. Should I be logged onto the cpu or to the server?

 

[fredweston]

The school is probably running an ISA server or something that blocks everything by default. My guess as to why IE works is that since it's a part of Windows, the ISA server is "aware" of it and lets it through. Either that or the connection settings for IE are being passed down to your computer through group policy and that's why it works.

Having worked in a school environment I can say with 99% certainty that the IT people will not be happy to learn that you've hooked your computer up to their network. They probably have policies about that, you might want to find out what they are before you bug them any more. You might end up getting yourself in trouble.

 

[phisig32]

The IT guy told me about a month ago that there was no official policy about it, so thats why I decided to try it.

I had him install FF on my class computer because I liked it so I know it can work.

Oh well I've done what I can do. I guess I'm just stuck with IE6 and out of date virus definitions, everything else works

 

[fredweston]

You could always download the definitions manually. Most all antivirus vendors offer them as a download from their website.