I have been using Winstep for almost a year and immediately fell in love with it's flexibility. Ever since day 1 I have wondered about, but been unable to understand why WORKSHELF continually attempts to call home ( sometimes as much as 1000 times in an 8-9 hour session ). I have the Auto Update Feature turned off. My firewall indicates that a large percentage of the outgoing requests are for DATA. A similar situation used to occur with NEXTSTART, but after turning off the auto update feature the problem stopped. I have the auto update feature on WINSTEP turned on but do not see frequent attempts for WINSTEP to access the web in my Firewall Logs. These numerous attempts to phone home, when not de-activated caused frequent temporary slow downs in my browser ( Firefox ). Is there some legitimate reason why WORKSHELF is making my Firewall work so hard?

Grumpy

Are you running the latest version of Winstep Xtreme?

Anyway, Winstep applications only access the web for the following reasons:

NextSTART:

Does not access the web at all.

WorkShelf:

Clock Synchronization with Internet Time Servers (Clock Module)
Retrieval of Weather info (Weather Module)
Retrieval of # pending messages on Email account (Email Module)
Retrieval of 'fortune cookies' stored on online database (Wanda module)
Reverse DNS when displaying the Active Connections dialog (Net Module)
On application uninstall to display the Uninstall Survey form.

WsUpdate:

This small applet is called by both NextSTART and WorkShelf when checking for updates and is the one actually doing the connection, since 7.4, I think. That's why I asked you which Winstep Xtreme version you're running.

What address and port does your Firewall tell you WorkShelf is trying to access?

Hi Jorge,

I installed Winstep 7.9 about a week ago and noticed no change with this problem. I was previously using 6.11. The Destination IP is 192.168.2.1:53 - and I do not understand what the ":53" is on the tail end.

Of course, after your explanation, it now makes sense to me. I don't want to criticize your [b]fantastic[/b] work, but I have not actively used any of the modules which accompany Workshelf. Is there any way to deactivate these modules? If I could do that then I would allow my firewall to accept the Nextstart & Workshelf update requests, which would allow me to get incremental updates more frequently.

Grumpy

192.168.2.1 is NOT on the web, it is inside your Local Area Network (LAN) since that address belongs to the private address range.

Port 53 is usually used to comunicate with Domain Name Servers (DNS). DNS servers take care of resolving human readable 'host names' into numeric IP addresses.

Not sure what is happening in there, though, since I have no idea how your LAN is configured - could be WorkShelf trying to resolve the Internet time server host names for the clock module.

To de-activate the modules, simply close ALL desktop modules and delete any in-shelf/in-dock modules you don't want to use.

You don't need to allow NextSTART or WorkShelf to go through your firewall since new version checks are performed through a small applet called WsUpdate.exe - that is what you have to allow. Then again, there is no reason to block WorkShelf, since it doesn't do anything behind your back - i.e.; it does not 'phone home'.

All the modules appeared on the shelf by default. I deleted all of them from the shelf and V I O L A ! - NO MORE PROBLEM. As usual, in retrospect this was a very easy problem to solve and I must say a great learning experience for me. I am a little embarrassed that I was not able to figure it out myself, but this is how most of my learning experiences about computers have continued to advance through the years.

Thank you,

(not so) Grumpygeezer (now)