It's happened again, maybe...

Some of you may remember an earlier thread of mine called 'Unwanted Visitors'. In this I described a major computer screw up that happened while running Second Life.

I ended up barred from running SL on that computer because it was such a hassle to reformat (longish story) so I've been playing it very successfully on the computer in my flat.

Today I had a computer screw up that was like a mild version of the "Unwanted Visitors.." problem. The error messages were the same, but the damage not as extensive. It didn't f**k the computer, but it did tamper with it. I was unable to run SL, or look at my network connections and it was slow.

A format has naturally solved the problem. But it does make me wonder if there is some nasty thing out there using the ports SL does or something. It seems odd that the same problem could happen twice on two very different set ups.

One love,

Jinny x

Dunno if it's related, but see this thread ...

/120/07/13511/1.html

I doubt very much if its the Sasser thing, I have all the relevant updates, plus assorted scanners and firewalls. Also the original episode was before Sasser.

I've just had another mysterious crash, and now I'm having login problems, which I saw a thread about.

If you're having problems with SL crashing, try these suggestions.

I found the link to that on another thread and so did what I could before I posted my own thread. It's a very helpful thing indeed.

Thank you!

It's happened again!!!!!

The common factors here are: running SL for long periods of time (like a couple of hours) without a restart, and the program that gets shagged each time is my Sygate Personal Firewall.

Is it possible there is an interaction between these two programs that is corrupting files?

Another possibility does seem to be some kind of malicious attack through the SL ports. One friend of mine, who is very suspicious of SL, has wondered if there is a possibilty that the SL scripting language could be used in a malicious manner. I said I didn't think this was possible, but I really don't know enough about the language to know that. Someone please reassure me it isn't ).

I favour the possibility of a conflict between my firewall and SL. So recommendations for a good, free firewall would be gratefully accepted! I've used the basic ZoneAlarm in the past and didn't like it.

Thanks
Jinny x

No, LSL is limited to tiny (16k) virtual machines on the SL servers. At no time is arbitrary code executed on the client.

The only contact it can have with the outside world is by creating or changing objects within SL, or by sending emails.

There aren't currently any documented malicious attacks that use the ports SL does, though of course, you could have been infected with a trojan somehow. Use Trend Micro's House Call to check.

SL uses a lot of UDP data connections. If your personal firewall is set up to log these, the size of the log file could be bogging things down. The next time this happens, try uninstalling Sygate.