Nope none of that Viktor – two independent machines – even checked the XP license today as someone at microsoft indicated, that I may have the same serial number running on the two machines. Even checked for conflicts in IPs etc….. everything is fine. Mycrofth’s theory seems most compelling so far ….. the Agent is self distrusting when it recognizes a second instance of itself running on the LAN – even though they should run independently.

I have switched the agent off on the second machine as I cannot assign any more time to the task. I figured that there is absolutely no sense in running two agents at different times as it boils down to having one agent running all the time – the PC#1 is a Pentium 4 and it cooks roasts those hamburgers a lot quicker than the PC#2 – and AMD 1800MHz engine.

….Once I have some time I will get someone in to have a look at the network, run the tests, document them and then post them for some help. Maybe a peer to peer network doesn’t like two agents running on it at the same time….. I don’t know.

Thanks for spending time trying to figure this bummer out…… no better name for it sorry Admins!

Viktors - I understand what you are saying. I donot use a UPS. Both PCs are connected to the mains directly. If this was a power issue it would affect windows and other applications and not just the agent itself. . . I push power realted issues down the list - worth checking for peace of mind, but nothing else at the moment. The other thng is that agent resets itself internally. It continues running, but just starts another task - downloads new data and starts crunching the data. The application (Agent) does not reload. This implies that the agent:

1. is under the impression that it has completed the data upload and requests for new data - some sort of status on task status changes or is changed by another application

2. looses track of its local status (all the data) and thinks that it is loading for the firsttime and therefore dwonloads new data (files deleted, corrupted or something else)

3. has an internal bug that makes it unstable when running in my environment ... AMD, graphics card, memory, netwoek ... don't know

4. none of the above

What is realy amazing me, is that I am the only one of 100'000 PCs running the Agent reporting this issue. . . unless other people have just given up

Have a good one!

RobStab
I have a similar configuration to yours. I use an XP machine as my Internet Connection Sharing Server. DSL=>XP =>out another Ethernet card to a router that other machines connect to. I forced a nonstandard IP number set in the ICS(#1) to connect to the router and a nonstandard group of IP numbers for the router to dispense using DHCP. Then all other machines obtain their IP numbers dynamically from the router..and they are all non-standard (the group that are normally used for internal networks).

I run the network setup wizard on all new machines and make sure that they obtain the IP addresses automatically from the router. Oddly enough they do not seem to find the DNS automatically and I have forced those to a known good set of DNS servers.

Everything works like a charm.

Now I go back to what I think Viktors said about the awareness of one WCG instance of the other. That sounds like the root of the problem to me.

Perhaps I do not understand your network settings. I like others here am no network expert and usually have marathon battles with network software till I finally get it working.... So what I am saying could be wrong or superfluous. That having been said, I would try to make sure that your #1 machine knows it is the ICS host and that it understands that the second card is for the internal network. (Actually machine one thinks the router is a PC - rather than a router). That way he always communicates with that "PC" using a set IP number. The fact that there are actually several PCs on the other side of the router is of no consequence to him...he merely passes data through as if it were all from one PC (actually the router). In this way, all the traffic coming from all the other PCs pass thorough the #1 PC with him really knowing what is in there... On the inbound side (PC1 inbound from Internet) once incoming data get past the firewall, he just passes the data to the IP# for the router and the NAT function in the router send it to the correct PC (to whom he has assigned the IP numbers to). I think I just broke about a hundred grammar rules and gave myself a headache.

So... Mine works using ICS on my "#1" machine. Wired like yours. The rest of the machines are ICS users and obtain their IP addrs from the router.

If you have a network software configuration different than this, which I presume you do, I would bet the problem is in that configuration...which allows processes on the #1 machine to be aware of processes on another. In my configuration, this is not possible.

If I have confused you, I appologize.

If I have helped great.

If you have questions, remember I just bullied my way through this whole thing using tenacity as my primary weapon; so I don't know much but I will try to explain mine more if you ask.

Great!! And I have had another embarassing lesson in isolating the problem.
mycrofth

Very interesting. So there was not a connection but rather happenstance where the agent on the first machine finished and it just happened that the #2 machine failed simultaneously. Things like that send you down the wrong path.

As to the configuration. I wired things that way due to the convenience. Notice that there is but one firewall machine. The others all communicate with each other and share things without the usual firewall headaches. Of course, it does not keep bad programs on the inside machines from phoning home..except on the "#1" machine but it does protect them all from intrusions. Actually I like this setup much better than the alternative...which is to connect the router to the internet and then have the other machines all have firewalls. Hum I just thought of another possibility ... this one is going to give me a headache.

As to the overheating P4 Laptop, I have one that I keep running at about 50% (using Toshiba utilities) just to avoid that problem. Sorry I can't help there.