Author Topic: Vista networking  (Read 2839 times)

Vista networking
« on: 01 April, 2008, 04:22:16 pm »
Anybody develled into the depths of the new M$ resource drain yet?

After my main machine went bang, I've splashed out on a new quad core mobo, 2Gb of fast corsair ram and a half terabyte HDD, together with a new GeForce card (none of my old stuff was PCI express) and various re-used bits from my old machine.  The hardware side sorted, I decided to give Vista Ultimate a go and promptly upgraded from XP where things were flying along nicely.

After a few days of poking I now have it more or less as I would like except for an odd problem with networking.  The new mobo has two onboard GBit NIC ports.  To start off, I just plugged an RJ45 plug into one of these and DHCP magic from my router took care of the rest.  Then periodically, I would get outages which could be resolved by moving the RJ45 end from one NIC to the other.  I've also tried putting cables into both ports and bridging connections.  Now for some reason, whichever permutation I try, I have a comms outage and with DHCP I get an address from the emergency private addressing range (a while since I studied windows networking so forget what the proper name for this is).

I suspect the large number of automatic updates may have been at the route of this, so have tried system restore to various restore points with no success.  I've also tried providing a fixed IP address in the IP v4 settings, but again this was to no avail.  Both NICs also have an IP v6 protocol installed by default, but I haven't messed with this as I don't know anything about it.

I have a workaround in place for the time being (I fitted a Wifi card), but for the sake of curiosity would like to know what I've done wrong.  This may be a bit specific for here, but worth a go...

Thanks,

AC
'Accumulating kilometres in the roughest road conditions'...

Lonewolff

Re: Vista networking
« Reply #1 on: 01 April, 2008, 04:41:09 pm »
For a start bridging the connections will only work is the switch at the other side is a managed one and you can bridge the ports at that end too so thats probably why bridging the 2 ports didn't work. As for your initial issue of loosing connectivity every once and a while and having to replug the cable it could do with a bit more investigation. I would use one nic and then when it drops out run ipconfig to see if it still has an ip, if not do ipconfig /refresh and it should get a new one. If this is the case then there is probably something weird going on with DHCP. I have a few vista machines on my home network (all up to date) and none of them have this issue. Neither do the vista machines on the network which I manage in work.

Andy


Re: Vista networking
« Reply #2 on: 01 April, 2008, 04:51:22 pm »
Vista DHCP is a bit odd. Do a google search and all will be explained. I would use a fixed IP if you can also disable the IPV6 stuff you don't need it.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.