July | 2010 | words

Monthly Archives: July 2010

Cygwin: No Output from Rsync

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Jeff Fitzsimons

I experienced a very strange situation where rsync simply stopped working. It wouldn’t even output anything for rsync --help or even plain rsync. which showed it to be in /usr/bin/rsync as expected. A closer look revealed something odd:

$ ls -lah /usr/bin/rs*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 fitzsimj None    0 2010-01-11 13:40 /usr/bin/rsync
-rwxr-xr-x 1 fitzsimj root 349K 2010-02-19 11:20 /usr/bin/rsync.exe

I had a mysterious, empty rsync file next to rsync.exe in my /usr/bin folder. Deleting the rsync file fixed my problem. I have no idea where this came from.

Posted in Cygwin, Technology | Leave a comment

Steam Connection Error (“you must first connect to the Internet”)

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Jeff Fitzsimons

I was able to download and install Valve’s Steam client on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, but when I tried to run the client I would instantly receive this error:

Steam.exe (main exception): To run Steam, you must first connect to the Internet

I tried changing port-forwarding rules in my router, and disabling the Windows firewall entirely. In the end, the problem turned out to be PeerBlock, which is used in P2P networking. PeerGuardian would cause the same problem, as would any software which performs network blocking functionality.

Rather than disable PeerBlock, I added Steam’s servers to PeerBlock’s allowed list. To do this, open PeerBlock and, as Valve servers appear on the list, right click them and select “Allow x.x.x.x permanently”:

Connections to Valve’s servers should appear in the TCP range of 27014 – 27050 and UDP 4380, and 27000 – 27030. It appears that their servers are identified as “VALVE CORPORATION” or “Limelight Networks”.

Posted in Network, Technology | 1 Comment