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Windows 98 Professional Reference

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- 28 -
Setting Up Windows 98 for the Internet



With its closely integrated browser, Windows 98 is made for the Internet--if you don't plan to get online, you miss out on a lot of the new features of the operating system. This chapter discusses the following:

The Connection Tab

Setting up an Internet connection can be done from a single location with Windows 98: the Connection tab on the Internet Properties dialog box (see Figure 28.1) You can access this dialog box from IE4's View menu, or by clicking the Internet applet in the Control Panel.

Figure 28.1

Set up and edit Internet connections from the Connection Manager.

Setting Up an Internet Connection

Windows 98 offers two methods of connecting to the Internet. If you use the Internet Connection Wizard, it attempts to find a dial-up service for you, choosing from a list of locally available services. If you want to set up the connection manually, click the Settings button to add a new connection.

Using the Connection Wizard

To create a new connection, click the Connect button on the top of the Connection tab in the Internet Control Panel applet to begin the Internet Connection Wizard, as shown in Figure 28.2.

Choose the option for setting up a new Internet connection and click Next. In the next stage, Windows 98 attempts to connect to a referral service (it's at an 800 number) to find the ISPs in your area.


TIP: Insert your Windows 98 installation CD in the drive--you'll need it for this stage.


When you've got your installation CD near at hand, click OK to continue.

Figure 28.2

Create new connections with the Internet Connection Wizard.


Manual Connection Setup

To set up a new connection, click on the Settings button in the Connection Manager to open the Dial-Up Settings dialog box (see Figure 28.3).

Figure 28.3

Edit an existing account's properties or create a new one.

Click the Add button to open the Make New Connection Wizard and create a new account. You'll need to provide the following information:


TIP: You can also access the Make New Connection Wizard by clicking the Make New Connection applet in the Dial-Up Networking folder.


When you've provided all this information and clicked Finish, the connection will be added to your Dial-Up Networking folder, accessible from within My Computer. Before you exit, you'll have the chance to add further information to your new connection (see Figure 28.4).

Figure 28.4

Providing logon information for a new connection.

The number of attempts to make and the time to wait between attempts are fairly self-explanatory: If the first attempt to dial in fails (perhaps because of a busy signal), then the number is retried until the dial-in succeeds or the number of times to retry has been exceeded. The user name, password, and domain all refer not to your local network but to the settings for your Internet account.

The connection settings are intended to help you budget your online time. By default, if you don't use your Internet connection (that is, there are no keystrokes or mouse clicks passed to Internet applications) for twenty minutes, then the connection will be disconnected. Channel and link subscriptions, discussed in Chapter 27, "Internet Browsers in Windows 98," are not automatically updated at the specified times unless you're already logged on.


NOTE: You can choose to automatically log on to update subscriptions only if you're using Dial-Up Networking (DUN) to connect to the Internet. For example, I have cable modem access that has its own connection program, so telling DUN to log on doesn't permit me to connect with the cable modem.


The final option, asking IE4 to prompt you for password information before dialing, is useful when other people have access to your computer and you want to be sure that they can't use your account without your permission.

The Properties... button in the Dial-Up Settings dialog box (see Figure 28.5) provides access to other options that you may not need to change, but should be familiar with (see Table 28.1).

Figure 28.5

Connection Properties.

Table 28.1 Advanced Dial-Up Networking Settings

Property Name Location in Connection Properties
Change the telephone number and area code to call Area code, telephone number, country code General tab
Choose a script to run at logon (sometimes necessary for a SLIP connection) Scripting Scripting tab
Choose network protocols allowed access to the connection Allowed Network Protocols Server Types tab
Combine physical data channels to increase bandwidth Use additional devices Multilink tab
Force the user of that connection to use the specified telephone number Use area code and dial-up properties (disable this feature) General tab
Pick a transport protocol (SLIP or PPP) Type of Dial-Up Server Server Types tab
Set connection parameters (software compression, session logging) Advanced Options Server Types tab
Set connection security information (data encryption, software encryption, and userlogon) Advanced Options Server Types tab
Set options for running a logon script Step through script; start terminal screen minimized Scripting tab
Specify a new modem to use for that connection Specify button General tab

TIP: The General tab in the Properties dialog box also provides access to modem settings and protocol information.


Internet Service Providers

Connecting to the Internet is technically simpler than it used to be, but the dazzling array of service providers and types of access can make it difficult to choose one. Although space in this chapter prevents us from doing an exhaustive analysis of every type of Internet access available, this section describes some of the features of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from which most single users will choose.

Basic Internet Access

In most of the United States, you have access to some kind of generic dial-in service, whether from a national name such as AT&T or a local operation such as Jeff and Akbar's Internet Connections and Tofu Hut. Whatever the size, the essential structure is much the same: You dial in to the Internet server(s) and those servers are connected to a backbone of the Internet.

For a monthly fee, you'll pay for a telephone number and passworded account that gives you access to the Internet, an email account, and sometimes a few megabytes of storage space on a web server so you can have your own web page if you want it. Rates vary, as do line charges--some carriers offer a flat-rate unlimited service, and others charge by the hour.

The speed of these providers varies with their hardware (in some areas, 56Kbps modem connections are available, but other areas still offer only 28.8Kbps or even less--33.6 access is common), but you can't ever get faster service than your provider has modems.

Today, online services such as America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and The Microsoft Network function in much the same manner as the national general Internet Providers. Their email services are no longer limited to their networks (as once used to be the case, leading people to accumulate long lists of email addresses with different providers so that they could communicate with each other). These services do have some extra features that add value to the Internet connection; for example, CompuServe maintains forums similar to newsgroups in content and level of variety, but moderated so that spamming--offtopic advertisements on the group and unsolicited mailings--are not a problem for those who care to join in the conversation.

ISDN

Analog modems have reached some pretty stellar speeds these days, but even as recently as the mid-'90s they were about half as fast as they are today. In the mid-1990s, some telephone companies began offering a digital service called ISDN, which offered a service called Basic Rate ISDN--two 64Kbps lines that could be used either singly to provide simultaneous upstream and downstream access to the network, or in combination to provide a 128Kbps pipe that could only transmit data one way at a time.

ISDN isn't as simple a procedure as getting an analog connection, and the startup costs were higher. Instead of going to the local computer store, buying a modem, and getting an account with the local provider, you had to call the telephone company, make sure that ISDN was available in the area, get access to a digital line, and have people come out to set up the hardware (a network card and ISDN bridge) and software. Not a cheap proposition--costs varied across the United States--and not always a simple one, particularly when the service was first offered. When the Washington DC-area consulting company I worked for at that time decided to get ISDN access, the ISDN expert from the company took the shrink-wrap off the toolkit required to install the hardware, and it took the better part of two days to get it set up properly.

After it was set up, however, ISDN definitely had its place: It was much faster than the available analog modems, and made some data-heavy uses for the Internet--such as browsing the Web--much more approachable. These days, however, it seems possible that the niche occupied by ISDN might be filled by a fairly new technology: cable modems.

Cable Modems

Cable modem access is now available from cable television providers in many parts of the United States. The name is a bit of a misnomer--it's not exactly a modem, but an RG-58 Ethernet connection to the cable company that offers you LAN-speed access to the Internet.


NOTE: That's the theory, anyway. For example, actual line speeds for my cable modem provider are closer to 100Kbps, not the 10Mbps physically possible with the cable type. As with any Internet access, access speed is partially determined by the size of the pipeline your cable provider has.


The cable company installs an additional Ethernet card in your computer and attaches it to your existing cable hookup (or a new hookup, if necessary), with the network connection leading out of the building.

The speed of the connection varies, depending on whether you're uploading information or downloading it. If you have the same line speed for both types of communications, it's called a two-way connection. If you're using your existing modem for sending information to the Net and only using the cable connection to download, then that's a one-way connection. For most people's purposes, the one-way connection is adequate because the bulk of connect time is spent downloading information to your computer, as in reading web pages or visiting FTP sites. Few individual users upload much more data than email or web page additions. And because the technology uses an existing physical infrastructure, in the places where the cabling is already available the connection is not that much more expensive than access through an ordinary ISP.

ISP Tips

No matter what type of access you're shopping for, call around and compare services before signing up with an ISP. Get details about the following:

Using Internet Proxies

One of the troubles with accessing the Internet is that in doing so you're joining a network, and network membership means that other people have access to your computer--and your data. Because Windows 98 does not offer any local access protection, it's a little more vulnerable to attack than more secure operating systems such as Windows NT, which can set permissions as far down as the file level even on unshared files.

To increase security, therefore, particularly for those working on a LAN, you can connect to the Internet with an intermediary called a proxy server. People on the Internet will still be able to get to the proxy server (although the nature of this access will be limited) but they won't be able to connect to the rest of the network without explicit permission.

To set up IE4 to use a proxy server, turn to the Connection Manager tab in the Internet Options dialog box (see Figure 28.6) and check the Access the Internet using a proxy server box.

Figure 28.6

The Internet Options dialog box.

If you supplied an address in the Connection Manager's main dialog box, it will be entered here in all the options (except for Sockets) and the option to use the same proxy server for all addresses will be enabled. Deselect the option and fill in the addresses for the proxies you want to use with the following syntax:

http://<address>:<port>

In this syntax, address is the fully qualified domain name of the server and port is the port number to use.


NOTE: You can use either the fully qualified domain name of the server or its IP address, but if you use the latter be sure not to include leading zeroes.


In the Connection tab, you have the option of specifying whether to use proxy servers for local intranet content. The Advanced settings let you carry this further, supplying the names of servers you can connect to without using a proxy. Type the names of these servers (for example, server.com) into the Exceptions box, separating all entries with a semicolon.

Figure 28.7

Advanced Proxy Settings.

Understanding Java and ActiveX

Accessing web content is a largely static affair. You log on, you point your browser to an URL, and you see the content of the current page on your screen. The page is downloaded to a local cache so that you can return to it quickly if you want, but nothing actually happens on your computer other than rendering of the images that make up the page.

Unless Java or ActiveX applets are included in the page, that is.

Simply put, Java and ActiveX are simple programming languages. Java is an object-oriented language originally developed by Sun Microsystems, intended to run on any platform. Most programming languages are platform-specific, meaning that if you want to run the same application on more than one platform you must compile one version of the application for each platform. When selling software, this isn't a problem--you just note the supported platform on the box. But when making an application available to all comers, it's inconvenient to have to tell people, "Click here if you're running Windows, here if you're running Berkeley UNIX, here if you're running Mac System 7," and so on, to lead them to the proper version of the application. Instead, Java applets bring with them a virtual machine that supplies an environment in which they can run without regard to the operating system of the computer to which they're downloaded.


NOTE:: Java is indeed supposed to be fully platform independent, but not all Java applications are. Microsoft's new Java controls in J++ enable some extra functionality not found in the ordinary Java language, but which depend on functions found in Windows. That is, applications written with the extra features will not provide those extra features unless the user is running Windows.


ActiveX is similar in concept to Java, but not identical. Rather than being a platform- independent language that can run on a variety of different machines, ActiveX is a set of controls that make applications written in a variety of languages--C++, Delphi, J++, and Visual Basic--network accessible. Essentially, ActiveX provides a means of enabling disparate objects to communicate with each other.

In a network computing environment, users with ActiveX support would be able to access information on a server database or run applications on that server via their browser. The only limitation to this is that ActiveX is Windows-specific--you can access ActiveX functionality only when using Windows. (Microsoft has stated its commitment to port ActiveX to the Macintosh and UNIX, but this hasn't yet happened.)

Implications for Browsing

Not all Java and ActiveX applications are downloaded to the system to be run separately. Some applications are part of a web page and can be used to display multimedia content without downloading .WAV files to the user's machine, make some kinds of forms, or generally provide dynamic content on web pages. Without access to Java and ActiveX controls, your web content is apt to be more static. Some of these applets are necessary for running certain browser applications, as well--for example, to access the channel functionality of Netscape, you need to run a Java applet.

Implications for Internet Security

Any time you let an unknown application run on your computer, you're exposing yourself to malicious programming, and Java and ActiveX programs are no exception. Java applications typically run in their virtual machine, independent of the rest of the computer (this is known as a sandbox) but when ActiveX applications are downloaded to the machine, they're run like any other .EXE file.

Breaches of Internet security can conceivably be broken down into four categories:

Java's virtual machine design is secure against the first two problems, but not as well defended against the latter two. A bug in Java can make it possible for a malicious application to crash the Java virtual machine, and there's little that can be done to prevent an application from doing what it's supposed to be doing, and if that includes printing obscene messages, that's the end of it. Another problem is that Java is not implemented in precisely the same way on all browsers. A hole discovered in February 1997 allowed malicious Java applets running under Netscape to report a server's IP address even if running behind a firewall, but could supply more complete information when running under Internet Explorer.


NOTE: In March 1998, IE4 was made officially "decaffeinated" by its lack of officially recognized support of Java.


The open nature of ActiveX controls makes them far less secure than Java applets; because they run as ordinary executable files, they're open to pretty much any of these four security concerns. Plug-ins exist to let someone remotely shut down your computer via ActiveX controls, or edit data on your hard disk.


NOTE: Viruses, you will recall, are just .EXE files. You can't tell the function of an executable file from its name.


ActiveX security is handled from a few different angles. First, Microsoft provides a code-signing program called Authenticode, which programmers can use to identify themselves (name, email address, and other information). Based on this information, users can choose to run or cancel the ActiveX control. This isn't exactly a secure option, however; all this program can tell you is that someone signed the code. Whether that signature is valid, or whether the signature will do you any good after the damage from a malicious application has been done, is another question entirely. That is, after your hard disk has been maliciously formatted, you can write a nasty email to the putative author of the control to complain about it, but that's about it.

So what can you do about Java and ActiveX security? Security experts tend to agree that the best defense against malicious applications is to deny them access. This limits the functionality of some web pages, but will make your system more secure. To set up this security, turn to the Security tab of the Internet Properties dialog box, accessible from IE4's View menu. Choose the Custom option, and then click Settings to hand-tune the security settings for Java and ActiveX controls (see Figure 28.8).

Figure 28.8

Security settings for Java and ActiveX browser functionality.

The level of security that you choose is the baseline for operations on the computer. If you specify a certain level of access to your system and a Java or ActiveX applet needs more access, then the applet will have to ask before gaining the increased access.

The details of the security settings and their implications are discussed in Chapter 30, "Internet Security," but the basic message here is that by default, Internet security with IE4 is at the user's discretion--you're prompted to confirm downloading applets to your system, but they're not disabled. To keep functionality, you may want to do this, but in terms of security it's better to disable Java and especially ActiveX support.

Problems and Solutions

Connecting to the Internet is not always a trouble-free process. The following sections identify some common problems, possible diagnoses, and how you can resolve the problems.

Cannot Connect to ISP

If the connection you've set up for your ISP doesn't work, start by isolating the problem. Is the line busy? Hang up and wait a few minutes before trying again. (Weekends, especially Sunday nights, seem to be prime busy-signal times for overloaded ISPs.) If the provider can't connect you, then check the following:

If you're supplying all necessary information and are sure that it's accurate, try rebooting and reattempting the connection. If that doesn't work, contact technical support for the ISP and ask if there's a physical problem in the area.

Summer storms, for example, can lead to connection problems. Your computers might be protected from power surges caused by electrical storms, but your telephone lines probably aren't. Also, heavy rain can adversely affect telephone lines, causing excessive noise on them and preventing a reliable connection from being made (even if your voice service still works; data is more persnickety about noise than voice is). Sometimes, you can get help from the telephone company if that's the case, but in extreme cases all you can do is wait out the storm.

A final problem with logging on can be due to a downed logon server, which you should find out about when you're told that the system is not responding. (Give the connection a couple of tries before assuming that this is the problem--connection glitches can result in the same message.) Technical support should be able to tell you whether the logon server is malfunctioning.

Cannot Connect to Email or Web

If you can log on to the Internet but can't access email or the Web, the problem likely lies in your connection to the relevant server. Make sure that you've specified the right IP address for email servers (more on this in Chapter 31, "Mail Management in Windows 98"). If the connection seems to hang, try disconnecting from the Internet altogether, rebooting, and attempting the connection again.

If you attempt to log on to your POP-3 server at the same time that mail is being deposited in your mailbox, you may get an error message telling you that your mailbox is locked by another application. If this happens, you'll have to manually supply your email password (which may not be the same as your Internet connection password) to log on. Until the other server has released your mailbox, however, you won't be able to log on to the mail server and download your messages.

HTML Documents Are Not Opening with Desired Browser

Some of us have more than one browser installed. If you attempt to connect to a link in an email message or open a web page saved to disk and the wrong browser opens, all that means is that you need to make sure that you've got the proper default browser selected and the file associations are set for the proper browser.


NOTE: You can't always tell what application is associated with a file by the icon used to display the file. It's possible to have a file associated with one application (say, Netscape) and using the icon of another (say, IE4).


To edit file associations for HTML and other web-related files, open Explorer (not IE4, but Explorer) and choose Folder Options from the View menu. The Folder Options dialog box will open; click on the File Types tab (see Figure 28.9).

Figure 28.9

Editing file associations.

As you can see from the dialog box, file types are based on file extension: Change a file's extension to associate it with a new application. In this case, however, you'll need to change the application association with a certain extension. Scroll down in the list until you find the registered file type that you want to edit. For example, to use IE4 instead of Netscape to open Netscape Hypertext documents, select that option in the list. When you've found the file type whose association you want to change, highlight it in the list and click the Edit button shown in Figure 28.10.

Figure 28.10

Editing file types.

Some files, such as HTML files, allow you to associate different applications with different actions--for example, you might use the browser to view a file, but Notepad to open it for editing. In the Actions box, highlight the action for which you want to change the association and click the Edit button. In the Editing Action for Type dialog box that appears (see Figure 28.11), browse for the application that you want to use to perform that action. When you've got it, click OK.

Figure 28.11

The Editing Action for Type dialog box.

Conclusion

Setting up a connection to the Internet from Windows 98 isn't difficult, but it takes a little care and some planning. Know the speed of connection you want, how much you're willing to pay for it, and how often you want access to it, and your job is mostly done. After a connection is established, it tends to keep working; in my experience, Internet connections go down because of physical problems that interrupt access, not because of any arcane protocol errors.


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