Ncf flaky/unpredictable when resuming from hibernate/standby onlaptops

Question

I have noticed on my own laptop, and some of my customers are complaining about the same thing... many times when you resume from either hibernate or standby, the client firewall, either does not allow any traffic, or only some of the allowed applications.
It is simply a matter of unloading and reloading ncf to fix this, but the end-users do not like this, and each time they run into it, usually results in a call to the IT staff.
Is this a known bug? Is there any solution for it?
Thanks.

Answer 1

i don't know if novell has acknowledged this as a real bug or not but i
used to see this happen. it was consistent if the IP address changed
when you came out of hibernate... say you're at a hotel and it's using
DHCP to hand out IP#s for high-speed. in the AM, you check your email
and hibernate for the drive to the jobsite. Once there, you
de-hibernate and the jobsite uses DHCP as well. You grab a new IP#
from the DHCP server when the NIC comes back to life and NCF goes off
the deep end. As a consultant, I ran into this alot and wrote a couple
simple BATs to work around it:
to stop:
net stop "novell client firewall service"
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1000 >NUL
to start:
net start "novell client firewall service"
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1000 >NUL
"C:\Program Files\NovellClientFirewall\NCF.EXE" /waitservice
You run the stop right before you hibernate and then the start right
after. The downside was the minimal exposure window. All that said, I
haven't had it happen in maybe 4-5 months so you might want to check
the auto update and see if the clients are running the latest version.
Cheers!
Richard Beels
http://www.dsi-consulting.com
Collaboration without complication