BSOD when starting P2P

[JPreston]

Hi All

I recently rebuilt my PC and all works absolutely fine when playing games, encoding video, surfing etc...everything other than the following:

Soulseek (P2P) - consistently produces BSOD a few seconds after starting a search.
Azureus (BitTorrent) - BSOD after 10 - 30 minutes of use.
Grabit (Newsreader) - runs quite happily but get the occasional BSOD.

Unfortunately, the BSOD is of the variety that restarts the computer less than a second after it displays and I haven't been able to extract any detail from yet

I have a Gigabyte nforce4 mobo and cable broadband, connected into the nforce LAN socket and firewalled with the nforce hardware accelerated 'active armour' program.

Any ideas what could be causing this? I thought I'd canvas opinions before reinstalling drivers, active armour etc, in case anyone can point to where I should start

[arthurleung]

Disable active armour. NF4's network function is so flawed that active armour basically doesn't work.

[Napolean_D]

I've heard that the nvidia knows when your downloading illegal material

I've also heard that nvidia firewall etc, is complete pap. Uninstall it.


P.S Only one of the above statements is true

[JPreston]

I've heard that the nvidia knows when your downloading illegal material

...

LOL...well yes anyway it does indeed seem to be active armour, since disabling it I've happily downloaded lots of linux distributions and...er...other non-copyright stuff without issue. Ta for the advice!

I thought of maybe updating active armour, but unless the release note reads "version 4.88 - Active Armour no longer crashes your PC as soon as internet traffic is detected" I may as well stick with zonealarm instead

[8bit]

get yourself a router with a hardware firewall built in. having your only firewall on the machine you're trying to protect is madness.

[arthurleung]

get yourself a router with a hardware firewall built in. having your only firewall on the machine you're trying to protect is madness.

Well, the only problem is, P2P traffic can easily overload your router's firewall. What I do is put the P2P box on DMZ and let it take all the hits. Alternative way is to just open a few ports into the P2P machine, but some p2p software use random port for transmission so this might not work.

[JPreston]

Well, the only problem is, P2P traffic can easily overload your router's firewall....

I was thinking of getting a router and building a HTPC for the TV, didn't think there would be a problem with P2P over it. In what sense does it overload, and can you recommend one above any other? I have a lowly 2Mb cable connection.

I see that sygate firewall has been discontinued so what is a good firewall to use that allows me to open/close specific ports as well as allow/deny applications? Good suggestions there about security, but basically I regard my entire home network (i.e. my single PC) as being in a DMZ (lol), using my work PC for banking etc.

[8bit]

I was thinking of getting a router and building a HTPC for the TV, didn't think there would be a problem with P2P over it. In what sense does it overload, and can you recommend one above any other? I have a lowly 2Mb cable connection.

It overloads because of the tiny amount of memory the router has for ARP resolution (changing IP addresses into physical MAC addresses basically). Some routers suffer more from this than others; my old D-Link DSL-504 (standard 4-port router with ADSL modem) never had a problem but my newer DSL-604T does need rebooting after about 3 days of constant eMule running over it.

Careful tuning of the P2P app in question can help alleviate the problem but the means to do this are not always provided in the app. I understand Linksys routers are less prone to ARP cache overflowing, in general I'd recommend using an older model of router if possible as the manufacturers seem to have been cutting corners recently to get manufacturing costs down.

I see that sygate firewall has been discontinued so what is a good firewall to use that allows me to open/close specific ports as well as allow/deny applications? Good suggestions there about security, but basically I regard my entire home network (i.e. my single PC) as being in a DMZ (lol), using my work PC for banking etc.

I still use Sygate (in addition to the hardware firewall in the router) and personally will continue to do so, if you've still got an installer file for it I'd just use that. The XP internal firewall is better than nothing and can be configured on a port-by-port or port range basis for any given protocol. There is Zone Alarm as well, my parents use it but I find it a bit of a resource hog personally.

If you've got an old PC lying around you could stick one of the dedicated home gateway/firewall Linux distributions on it and use that to connect to the internet. Then use a crossover network cable to connect the Linux machine to your PC. I've never done it this way myself but if you ask in the software forum here someone will be able to tell you what ones are good.

EDIT: my usual quota of typos and spelling mistakes corrected