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Workarounds for Vista's Networking Problems?
tridium asks: "I recently moved into a new place where the landlord left a Linksys WRT54G v2 router for us to use. The three laptops in the house running XP connected to it fine, but my desktop, running Vista RC1 build 5600, had to be hardwired. The Internet worked fine for a bit, but I noticed some websites weren't loading up (Google, Gmail, and several others), and IM clients weren't working. Vista's self-diagnosis said it couldn't communicate with the DNS server, so I researched and it seems the new TCP stack in Vista is wreaking havoc with my router. I upgraded the firmware from Linksys, tried manually setting IP settings, modified the registry to disable TCP window stacking, but nothing helped. Linksys support was also useless in fixing the problem. I'm at a loss and any help, short of downgrading to XP, would be greatly appreciated." Other people have experienced problems getting Vista to work with off-the-shelf routers. A thread from September identifies the new window scaling feature as a potential culprit, while another article says that Vista and SPI-enabled routers don't play well together. Whether the problem is related is unknown, but another thread offers some troubleshooting tips for anyone else who may be experiencing this problem. Has anyone figured out how to disable (or at least work around) some of the more troubling aspects of Vista's new TCP 'features'?
Have you tried installing the Debian or Fedora Service Packs?
Sean
Vista RC1 build 5600?
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
This sort of story makes me a bit ill. I know this is Slashdot and all, but can we please have SOME sort of filter for "my lonely pre-release copy of Vista dosen't work on my home network" stories?
Wait a month and buy the real version of Vista instead of using an old, unfinished release candidate.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
vista rc1.5 build 5612.5.6.10
lose != loose
I don't know for sure, but if I remember correctly dd-wrt works well on your router. Maybe if nothing else works reflash your router with dd-wrt?
Microsoft technical support?
I can't help with changes in Vista itself, but if nothing works, think about running an old pc as dns server which in turn forwards requests to the dns servers of your provider.
You may even want it to run a proxy like Squid, that way Squid is requesting dns and not your own pc.
home
The instructions at this url worked for me: http://www.tech-recipes.com/modules.php?name=Forum s&file=viewtopic&t=2602#7746
Such is the life of a beta tester...
Oh, wait, you mean you were trying to use release canidate software it in a production environment (even if it is a home PC)? You found things didn't work correctly. Well, I'm sure you submitted your results through the appropriate channels at Microsoft, right?
Read the fine print next time; it's for testers and developers, not for getting a free OS for a year that works correctly in a production environment.
The article describes two separate issues: TCP window scaling, and SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection). These have very little to do with each other, excepting the fact that they're both networking features in Windows Vista.
From what I gather from a quick Google, the problem with TCP window scaling is actually one with crap routers that don't support the feature and misbehave upon encountering it. Furthermore, TCP window scaling is not new to Windows Vista. It was merely disabled by default in previous versions of Windows. The fix is extremely simple, see this article for information.
The second issue, with SPI, seems to indeed be a Vista bug, but I can find no evidence whatsoever that it exists in Vista RTM, or even RC1/RC2. It's seriously not "stuff that matters" anymore. Prerelease versions always have bugs! If you don't like it, wait for the RTM (or as is usually the case with Microsoft, the first service pack)!
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
None of the links explain what the problem is with Window Scaling. Presumably Microsoft are doing something non-standard as Linux also sets Window Scaling for TCP, and we have not seen reports of this causing problems
W...T...F...?
If this place were even approximately "News for Nerds", Our Illustrious Editor would have realized that calling TCP Window Scaling "new" rises to the same level as referring to the recently-inaugurated Clinton administration. Literally: RFC 1323 dates to 1992.
I love the scare quotes around "features" at the end of the summary to. God forfend that that evil Micro$oft CORRECTLY implement a TCP standard.
Sigh. Look folks. In this case, MS isn't at fault. It's craptacular consumer-grade network gear which cuts corners on standards compliance. I acknowlege freely that MS is an evil monopolistic corporation bent on world domination, but in this case that's beside the point.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The problem is that most consumer-level hardware is only tested with the most common TCP settings, so, changing the TCP receive window (RWIN) or maximum transfer unit (MTU) often reveals hidden bugs in their TCP/IP implementations.
Even the subtle changes in timing of the packets may trigger previously undiscovered bugs.
In my case, the web interface of the Acorp LAN420 ADSL router was 'freezing' 75% of the times when accessed from Vista(RTM). Upgrading to the latest firmware solved this problem.
If everything else fails, you can try disabling RWIN scaling by running this as administator:
netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
(to see the list of available options, just run 'netsh interface tcp set global')
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
Both Vista RC1 and RC2 both had problems nwith the WRT54G series routers if you had your IPv6 stack enabled. These problems are resolved in the release version.
The editors must sit around and watch a retarded monkey for guidance as to which submissions are accepted or rejected. If the monkey picks his ass the submission is accepted and if he picks his nose it is rejected. Go ahead mod me down, this article is a joke. I had to look at my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st.
This relates to a question I posed on Amiga.org:
t opic_id=35273&forum=22#forumpost417060
/dev/udp, etc.)
Amiga.org - Forum
http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?
"Is pluggable TCP/IP stacks feasible in mainstream operating systems?
On Amiga we have been graced with AmiTCP, Termite TCP, Miami, Genesis, and probably other TCP/IP stacks about which I do not know. IIRC, these mutated from an original stack produced by Commodore (AS225?) and all offer some compatibility to what appears to be ubiquitous among Amiga, the bsdsocket.library.
So I read about how Gibson Research decried the raw socket access introduced by the new Windows XP TCP/IP implentation (which has not caused the end of the world, best as I can tell,) and Windows Vista introduces another TCP/IP stack. All of these harken back to winsock.dll and winsock2.dll.
Then there's the TCP/IP stack within the Linux kernel, and found in most Unix implementations such as Solaris (/dev/tcp,
We run into so many issues with vendors' TCP/IP stacks (like Windows XP SP2's half-open connection limitation,) why do third party vendors not create third-party TCP/IP stacks? Or do they?
Regardless of the thought process behind the curiosity, could we speculate on the viability? Would it be a potential segregation of the mainstream OS world, or could one vendor's better implementation take over?
I see potential for the server market where many system builders, administrators, and maintainers would like to tweak system performance and security as much as possible. Would TCP/IP outside of the operating system allow for such an approach? And would it be too much of a potential black-eye for OS vendors to ever allow?"
The poster is posting on slashdot. He/she knows about linux. Probably XP and mac too.
I have freaks! I did something right...
There are four computers in your home. Three are running Windows XP, one is running Windows Vista. The computers running WinXP are fine, but your computer running WinVista is having problems, and you conclude that your router is broken and pester Linksys with your operating system issues?
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I was able to use my laptop last week, running Vista (RTM), just fine via wifi and wired modes on a more recent version of that same wireless router.
...tho really, asking for help on a microsoft beta (about which not a lot is known, except that it comes from MS and they're the devil as far as slashdotters can tell) from a bunch of slashdot-types (who, if they're anything like me, hate not knowing a useful answer) without supplying a lot of background info is an almost-certain recipe for abuse. :-) My advice: try flashing the router with the latest bits, then if that doesn't work, go get a supported OS.
You may be able to flash the router with updated bits, and that might help. Also note: my laptop did just fine (i.e., "just worked") via wifi all the way from beta 2, tho I recall having some issues connecting to a WPE2-encrypted station. I don't know if it was a software issue or a user issue, tho.
Out of curiousity, were you able to connect without encryption? If you're using encryption, what kind? What errors are you seeing? Are you getting an IP addy? Those would be useful things to supply when asking for networking help.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
Linksys wrt54g's originally used linux based firmwares until cisco bought them and then started selling linux based wrt54gs's at a premium... Well there are a few community made firmwares like DD-WRT (www.dd-wrt.com) and openWRT which offer much more features and will allow you to turn on SPI if it's still a problem.
What it should tell you is that dumb routers that don't correctly support TCP/IP aren't good products.
If you would like to keep scalable TCP windows, you might try flashing your Linksys with DD-WRT or one of the other Linux-based firmwares. One or more of them is bound to have support for it.
My Powerbook -- well, the screen is dead for the moment, but it has been a router killer for some time now. I haven't been able to figure out whether it's OS X, the VPN, the SSH, or what, but everywhere I go with this thing, routers die and have to be reset (pull the plug). Sometimes it doesn't happen for days, sometimes it happens every hour or so, sometimes I open the thing up from sleep, get all connected to the wireless, and watch it kill the router.
I'm hoping that Vista will convince these router manufacturers to get their act together. Even if it is somehow OS X's fault, or my fault, I shouldn't be able to DOS a router that easily.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I play games you insensitive clod!
That's what play station is for, silly. You expect something with a top selling title called "Office" to help you play? A fool and his money ...
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
Just give Bill Gates $150 and it will work, yeah right. According to the fine summary, this problem was not resolved as of September (link has Windows Vista build 5728), do you think it's fixed now? Will spending your money magically make it work?
This sort of story makes me a bit ill.
Me too, but for entirely different reasons. I think I'm going to stop reading now - I already know that I'm never going to use XP or Vista. The problems M$ creates for their own users with their little anti-competitive tricks are not fun for long. Let me translate a part of the second article for you:
Because Windoze is too weak to hook up to a real network, we have a spiffy protection scheme. It's so spiffy, that it screws up Windoze spyware and that makes Bill angry, so your life will be hard. The solution is to turn off the extra security, but that's un-possible.
Then we get clowns like you ... "just buy teh boxed version, retard!" Stupid, upon broken because of previous stupid in an endless loop.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
As others have stated - get the newer RC, or wait for the full release.
I have an IBM (pre Lenevo by a few weeeks) G41 laptop and the wireless works perfectly with my WRT54G R3.0.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Why use a software product that is incompatible with other mainstream hardware and software?
The obvious solution is to dump Vista. Is there any great reason to have it at this point other than you're looking to waste a tremendous amount of time beta-testing compatibility issues for Microsoft without pay?
Install the latest firmware. And no, you didn't. And no, this isn't a Vista problem.
The WRT54G is no longer being maintained by Linksys. But fortunately... (and it's amazing nobody on Slashdot knows this... but then again they don't truly seem to know ANYTHING useful, ever) the firmware is based on Lunix. Thus, it's open source... and thus... other people can, and have, modified it. And maintained it!
The WRT54G firmware is still being maintained, but has branched a bit. I personally use HyperWRT+Thibor. It's closest to the stock firmware, and I don't feel like getting experimental with it. YMMV.
I've run into this problem with RC1, and occasionally standard XP machines wouldn't connect to Win update.
My solution? Change the MTU on the router to 1492. Problem solved.
--droog
Well, that certainly curbed my curiosity and answers all of the World's problems. Thanks for your amazing insight.
Now piss off.
You can't.
Nothing.
Have you tried applying Linux twice daily?
Well, I don't know about network limits, if any. Vista Home Basic lacks Aero, the 3D display manager, and Media Center, a MythTV knockoff; both of which are present in Home Premium. Above that is Ultimate, which also has the features of the business systems, plus some unspecified downloadable addons.
dd-wrt works great here on my wrt-54gs router, and all the extra features are quite welcome. And Vista gets along with it just fine.
Windows will let you add protocols to the system, and bind and unbind them from adapters as you see fit. Someone is perfectly free to write a replacement TCP stack. However as a practical matter it's unlikely to happen because the Windows TCP stack works great for most people. Yes, the /. crowd like to bitch, but then it's full of pedantic geeks that dislike Windows so they would. There's very little incentive to replace it. For the few things that need more than it provides (like Nmap), WinPcap seems to be what's popular.
(Increasingly off topic, sorry)
I have seen this a lot recently, and it seems strange, is MS redefining what an RC is?
An RC is a Release Candidate - it is not by definition a public beta, it is something the project team thinks is good enough to release to manufacturing. Yes, the reason to ship it to people willing to test it is that 2 million testers are better than a hundred (no, I have no idea how many testers MS had on Vista, I would assume more than 100, and I have no idea how many people downloaded the RC, and how many of those installed it, and how many of *those* actually tried using it for more than 1/2 hour).
If a particular build only satisfies it's main use cases then it should not be an RC - unless you are going to release it in a "main cases only the rest may be broken but this is software so we can probably fix it later" state. That state isn't necessarily a bad one to release in, of course, but that state is one where it is generally better to start to go into final QA, and final UAT, rather than to decide to release to manufacturing.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest...
The best is the enemy of the good
I think you're absolutely right. Someone should mod your comment up...
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Linux is not a substitute for Vista. Windows XP is, for now unless more and more people switch to Vista.
As long as people keep switching to the next MS version of windows MS will continue to have control.
If people stick with XP, then Linux and everyone else will have a chance.
http://slashdot.org/~TheLink/journal/158520
You are correct, however Linux has problems because many commercial hardware developers are assholes. MS Windows has problems because the people who make it are assholes.
Would you rather have an OS where the actual people who make it (not script kiddie fanboys) are not trying to screw you, or do you want assholes who deliberately make their software incompatible with everything else and try to squeeze every penny out of you. MS doesn't even care if their programs work, just as long as they get a sale. I bet if they thought could get away with it, they'd try selling a defective CD as an OS. Anyone remember MS Windows ME? That is the kind of crap they put out when they don't think they have any competition.
I don't think Linux is all that great--especially as a desktop OS, but it is much better than a MS operating system. Linux, GNU's libc, the X11 windowing system were modeled after Unix philosophies. Unix was made for servers, mainframes and terminals cared for by admins, not home users running single desktop machines. And if you need an OS for a server or mainframe, I wouldn't choose Linux either. It is certainly not the best in that department from what I've seen. IBM and other companies have made it better in the server department, but it is hardly perfect.
Not to mention MS is the entire reason we don't have any real choices for desktop OSes. The anti-trust lawsuits where just the tip of the iceburg. Why would anyone want to support them? They are a parasitic entity who doesn't have any legitimate place in the computing world.
When did Slashdot become the Vista Technical Support Forum? If XP works, and Vista doesn't, and we all know Vista is still effectively in beta, then the answer (as most people have said) is don't use Vista. The thing is, you don't need to ask someone this. It's obvious. It's kinda like this:
Ask Slashdot:
I'm hungry, what should I do?
Mind you the number one answer will likely be:
"Switch to Linux."
But hey, you asked in the first place...
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Sailed the ocean blue! Sorry every time I hear/see 1492 that pops into my head.
No sig for you!!
Here's my #1 Windows networking complaint, which still doesn't seem to be fixed in Vista (and I'd love a workaround for). You have a C, D and E drive locally. You map a network files drive F with 'net use' or the GUI.
You then plug in a USB hard drive. Windows assigns the drive F, and you can't access it unless you change its drive letter in Computer Management.
Why? It's not like it doesn't know there is something using that letter...
Work-around? Start mapping network drives from Z, backwards. I agree, the windows handling of this is retarded, but then so is the whole concept of drive letters in the first place...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Uh. there was a time Windows didn't come with a TCP/IP stack. And this extended to the period when Windows DID come with a TCP/IP stack. Heck, even TODAY you can get 3rd party TCP/IP stacks.
If you used Windows 3.x, you've probably used it - Trumpet Winsock. Looks like it's still around and even updated for 9x and NT.
So there's your third party TCP/IP stack. In fact, before Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack (i.e., Win 3.x) in Windows, they released the Winsock specification, thus ensuring that people who wrote winsock.dll would be compatible with applications using winsock.dll. Win9x came with winsock.dll and wsock32.dll, both of which have been upgraded to Win98's Winsock2 spec.
So yes, there are 3rd party TCP/IP stacks around.
I remember using Trumpet. I just had a look at v5, but it seems to just be a dialer for Win9x and NT. I'm looking around on Google and just don't see and third-party stacks for Windows XP.
sigh
Just when I thought his story couldn't get any sadder, it does. How many voices does a man need to cry for help?
/says a prayer
/changes relationship to "foe"
This sig intentionally left blank.
Actually, he has a point, not trolling. All manner of routers have all sorts of issues with things like connection tracking tables filling up, etc, etc. But yet, here comes someone who is determined to believe the OS is to blame, insightful, and someone who dares to posit the opposite, troll.
Wow, that's rich. When you're proved wrong, the only thing you can do is drop to the floor and dribble foam. And you wonder why people call you on your bullshit.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo