iTunes again

It must be a bad technology weekend for me. As I was trying to fix a myriad of problems Friday night - iTunes freezing, some games I have not running correctly (determined on Vista you have to run them in Administrator mode because when they were made everything was "administrator" mode). As I was trying to determine the problem, I made sure my home network was function correctly, and did some diagnostics on my server machine to make sure it was also working correctly. I somehow accidentally got the server RAID into a mode called "Initialization", and nearly had a heart attack, that it was erasing all 2.5 TB of accumulated server data, stuff that it's taken me years to build. Thankfully, after reading through the documentation, I found out there are two modes of "initialization" - one is the erase kind, and one goes through and re-verifies and re-writes all of the drives' data - and I was in the second one! It seems to me they shouldn't call that one "initialization" so as to keep people like me from freaking out.

I FINALLY did find an obscure post on Apple's forum about anti-virus causing issues with iTunes. The post reply actually said I must have a virus, which I don't, but in trying to verify that I don't have a virus, I force-updated the anti-virus software, and the problem went away. Further searching (once I started including anti-virus in the search criteria) found posts on other forums saying that iTunes uses all sorts of system-level calls that can be very sensitive to what anti-virus software does. Fortunately the problem is fixed now.

I do wonder how "normal" users fix problems like this - I know many people are now tech-savvy enough to do google searches and look at forums, but many are not - I'm sure some people would just give up with something like this! Or worse, take the computer in to some repair place and have them charges hundreds of dollars to "fix" it.

Speaking of bad tech, I also found out that Charter has decided that it's ok to change a fundamental DNS service so that if you try to access an address that doesn't exist, it "helpfully" returns a search page based on the incorrect thing you typed in. OK so maybe for some people that might be helpful, but it ALSO causes things like VPNs to no longer work correctly - I spent a few hours trying to figure out why all of a sudden my VPN that I use to do work remotely was no longer functioning correctly. And the only fix for this is to go in and manually alter DNS settings - now I KNOW most people wouldn't know how to do that!

Sigh.