firewall keeps comming on every day at work

[vhelp]

at work, on my laptop's wifi, i keep getting an "unknown pc or device detected" popup message alert under mcafee, and in the dialog, it shows the message,

"This PC or device has connected to your network"

IP address: 10.0.x.x

i get this every day, several times or more but with different IP numbers, where the last two digis "x" are different.

there doesn't appear to be anything i can turn off in mcafee, it doesn't give me a deny function, so i have to assume that the devide has connected.
should i be concirned or happy ?
or, what can i do to stop this ?

[jman98]

I can only make a guess, so take that for what it's worth. If someone else comes along and is sure that it's something else, you might want to listen to them.

My guess is that your wifi signal is weak and you are dropping off wifi and then very quickly re-establishing the connection, but your network is set up so that if you drop off even for a second, you get a new IP address when you re-connect. If I'm right I wouldn't worry about it. If I'm right and you have the ability to plug a network cable in rather than use wifi ( and yes, I realize you may not) that should stop it. If I'm right and you can't plug in, you can't stop it unless you get a stronger connection that doesn't drop off all the time. You can ask your IT folks why the connection is so weak wherever you work if I'm right about the problem. Could be that they don't know about it. But I have to warn you that if you work for a small company, my experience as an IT worker is that smaller companies often have poor IT staff because they usually don't pay well and don't hire enough of them, so it's very possible that I've found your problem and nobody in IT at your company has enough knowledge to fix it. Or they'd have to buy equipment to fix it and they can't spend the money, etc. You might get a better signal at a different location. They might be able to help you that much.

[vhelp]

well, it could be true what you say, but it could also be the way my mcafee virus suite is handling this situation you mentioned, while other virus software don't provide the same level of alerts. i've had a different version of mcafee virus suite on my netbook computer and never had this kind of issue. both of these wifi's have the usual 54 Mbps rating, however, when they are connected to my work place wifi, the rating is 65.0 Mbps. but we do have hi/low wifi strength here, even though we had out whole faciliy re-wired for wifi effeiciency. unfortunately, we also have a lot of hackers trying to get in and such, so IT is constantly working on software and hardware updates in sessions or other timelines.

thank you for the explanation, i will keep it in mind.

[budwzr]

That's probably your ISP. 10.x.x.x is the external IP address your ISP provides for access to DNS server.

[Hoser Rob]

I suspect jman is quite possibly right, but I'll add this.

I know some people who do user support for students at the local unversity, which requires all of them use laptops. They all recommend microsoft security essentials (and the windows firewallo it uses) because:

- none of those AV programs really work anyway. They all will let some malware in. I.e. saying AV program x is better than y because x blocks 97% and y blocks 96% is meaningless.
- more importantly in this case, MSE is the only AV program that has never caused any problems accessing the network there.