rgray, that is an excellent idea! I see absolutely no reason why she can't rebuild her own system. I have all of the documents and manuals neatly tucked away in the bookcase. She can learn what RTFM means while she's at it. Maybe she'll not only learn to be more protective of her own computer, but also be more respectful of other people's computers and not play games with AIM crashing idiots.

Well, she said she wanted to learn to program. I guess learning to install her own system is a good place to start. :D

Like I said, I knew you guys were smart! :p

Well, some interesting information here, I never expected to see such a response...

The biggest problem I see is that the Windows 95 box is virtually unsupported by MS. This is really not a microsoft problem, it is a marketing problem. (you can't get much support for MacOS 7.5 either!!)

the fact that your Daughter wants to learn more about her computer is in itself encouraging. We hope that she and here friends move towards application development rather than in the direction which will cause them to violate the emerging Homaland security Laws which will land them in Jail for applying that sort of knowledge on a grander scale a little bit of knowledge.

I believe they are playing with an old windows 95 vulnerability exploit which was refferred to as the "ping of death". Your firewall may or may not be able to block this sort of attack by limiting the size of incoming packets or blocking any outside source which has a high frequency of attempts on a specified port or address.

As mentioned above, these are all topics for another complete topic unto themselves.

At one level a computer is a computer. and the network connections and ports are all the same. This creates inter-operability. The main difference between manufacturers, is the configuration of the machines internal software and the exposure of the ports in the default configuration.

Modern routers, which you have, can be configured to disallow certain types of activity -- both incoming and outgoing traffic may be controlled.

Additionally, a good virus checker will check downloaded and other imported files for any signs of infections which may cause dataloss or compromise your family security.

all of these things are good to have and just to reiterate the underlying message of my previous post, "Be Careful!!"

Back to Nimda and Code red, these worms use a technique whereby they overload a component in the windows machine used for the Personal websharing . they send a particular string of large characters which overloads the component and while the machine is doing that it "forgets" where the signal came from and executes the final part as if it was performing an instruction which you gave it.

that instruction usually ends up being something which is beneficial to loading and executing the virus in your system.

Now, there are many variants which use these techniques. the original macos was not susceptable to these things because most ports were completely turned off. There were a handful of viruses which came from software typically traded on floppy disk or by BBS system in the old days. At this moment there are worms which will attack Unix machines, but the BSD core technology has a very good track record for repelling such attacks.

So mostly, you should set your firewalls and your configuration files to either ignore or fail to respond to typical attack patterns.

How to do that exactly is another long subject, and I suggest looking on the symantec website (SARC) http://www.symantec.com for virus advisories and recommendations for blocking such net-bound attacks.

Certainly we have no idea when or where the succesful MacOSX virus will appear, Norton antivirus just checks your email and documents for MSOffice Macro Viruses which may run within Microsoft products and damage your files or compromise your personal information in some way.