Users are able to reach the SpamCop site and parse/report small emails, but when trying to submit a large spam through the website form they get a time-out error after clicking the "parse" button. This is a problem experienced by users with firewalls. It may be a personal hardware/software firewall you have employed or, there may be a firewall on your ISP's network "protecting" you that you are not necessarily aware of.

Microsoft has confirmed that there is a software flaw in Internet Explorer with Content Advisor enabled. This will be resolved with a future patch from Microsoft; however, there are two immediate options for solving this issue: Go to Tools in your Internet Explorer browser and click on Internet Options. The Options window will open. If you do not wish to disable the Content Advisor, another option is to use another, more secure browser called Mozilla Firefox.

Ping is a network utility that sends one or more packets of data to a server and records how long it takes for the server to acknowledge receipt of the packet(s). It is useful to test whether or not a server is having problems. Unfortunately, since some server administrators disable ping for security or other reasons, ping results are not always indicative of the health of a server.

Answer: PING tells you that a unit is alive and you can also get the speed of connection with the time it takes to receive the packets you sent. If you feel that the LAN is slow and the result of PING numbers in seconds instead of milliseconds there is something wrong in the LAN.

Ping' (actually its full name is 'ICMP Echo request') is a simple command that may be issued from the DOS Command Prompt (Start/Programs/Command Prompt). Ping tells you if you can contact an IP address. Basically it sends a small message to another computer which causes the receiver to echo back the same message (the message pings forward and back). Ping is the simplest and most useful diagnostic tool to become familiar with and well worth spending a few minutes experimentation.

You can either use firewalled mode (Network preferences) or you can forward your incoming port (OpenNap preferences) to your firewalled machine.

FirstSpot®'s idle timeout handling is both efficient and accurate. It will only timeout users if they are idle (i.e. no network traffic) for a specific amount of time. Also, there are no "keep alive" packets sent from browser to FirstSpot® (which will degrade network performance).

You can always ping your own computer by using the address "127.0.0.1". As a shortcut you can use "localhost" as a host name. You might also consider adding the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" to your Hosts file.

If the computer you run iroffer (or any other IRC client) on does not use a public IP address (the one the IRC server sees), DCC commands sent to the IRC server must be translated. This is done on most modern NAT/masquerade devices. The device will intercept DCC commands and modify them on route to and from the IRC server. You will need to check the documentation of the nat device you are using to see if it supports IRC DCC translation.

You should ping your first hop apprx fifty times. (To get your first hop do a tracert to anywhere and note the first address like 10.xx.xx.xx The pings to your first hop should normally be under 30ms with an occasional ping in the 60-70ms range. Disregard the first ping. If you see high pings or a high spike and are running Win9x/ME hold down Ctrl/Alt/Del and "End Task" on all programs except for Explorer and Systray. Then try the ping to your first hop again.

When you watch a story we don't provide a direct link to the movie files on our server. We instead provide a "Click To Play" link that is unique to you, but is only available for a short period of time (roughly 60 seconds). If you do not actually click the "Click To Play" graphic to start watching your chosen story before the link expires you will get the "Click To Play" Timeout error.

We have had reports that a number of Enhanced Internet Banking customers have experienced a "Page unavailable" time out error after submitting a Pay Anyone payment. It has been identified that these customers are using a D-Link ADSL Modem Router. The different models which have been identified are: DSL-502T, DSL-504T and DSL-G604T. To correct the issue please arrange for the firmware to be updated to the latest version.

URLConnection doesn't have a method for this, but you can do it by using multiple threads. Create a timer thread that would just track time and close the connection after your specified timeout period. Check the URLConnection to see if it's got any data flowing through it (calling URLConnection.connected() is probably a sufficient test). The URLConnection should be in a separate thread. That approach will be inefficient for a large number of streams.