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Vista Bug Costs Users In Swedish Town Their Internet
Lund, Sweden refuses to work around a Vista bug, so people who live there must choose between Vista and internet access. It's nice to see the right people being held accountable for a change.
The university I work for in Sweden began testing with Vista when it was the called Longhorn. We discovered some bugs with the communication between Vista and some of our servers (running Solaris) back in 2004. The bug repports were submited to MS back then and the thing was fixed on the next Longhorn beta "release". It seems it's easier for some not to test and cry out like a baby when it's too late.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'm using a couple of Vista boxes on my local LAN with a home brewed CentOS router running ISC dhcpd 3.0.5. No problems with obtaining an IP address at all. Sounds like the flaming is misguided this time for a change. Perhaps Lund is using an ancient version of dhcpd?
Bad news guys; Microsoft isn't the one with a bug causing the problem. Poor implementation yes, bug no.
For some bizarre reason Vista expects the address returned from the DHCP server to be broadcast, instead of sent via unicast packet. This is permitted in the specs and supporting the broadcast flag on the server is suggested. ("SHOULD", not "MUST" in the spec.).
When researching this I found 2 network types which required this, Infinibad and 1394 (Firewire). It looks to me like Microsoft picked the one which would (theoretically atleast) work on all network types, instead of only on a few.
Of course, this is a typical bad decision as it means that responses from a DHCP server with a lot of Vista clients will flood the network with broadcast responses, but hey, they arent know for making good decisions.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
Do you think MS is not able to follow the standards?
If you were paying attention, you'd know that MS did follow the standards. The problem started when MS implemented an option component of the DHCP standard and didn't design in a fallback to the mandatory components (not conservative in what you send.) The problem was then complete when the Linux-side DHCP server refused to respond to packets with the optional flag set instead of doing its best to respond in the way it understood (not liberal in what you accept.)
Had either side followed this golden rule in network protocol implementation then things would have simply worked.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It is very interesting how the ISP is blamed here. He could, he should, yada yada. M$ delivered a broken configurations and the ISP has to fix this. Generally not wrong. However, as Linux user I wonder a bit, why he should do this? I have enough examples where ISP refuse to support Linux. If it works, fine. If not, problem of the user. I never heard similar ISP blaming comments about this in any forum. More likely: "Oh yeah, Linux is the outsider, only 0.00001% of all user use it, heh heh heh."
And how often do I hear about the superiority of Windoze. When some WiFi card does not work under Linux: Linux is not fit for the general desktop. If some WiFi card does not work under Vista: The stupid manufacturer was not able to deliver proper drivers on time.
I begin to think the only reason that Windoze works at all is because everybody bends over for M$ and paves their path.
Sorry, but even if those voices, which say the ISP could have acted on behalf of their customers, are right, and they are, I still deem them hypocrites.
Heh -- I was just talking to my dad, who bought a Vista laptop recently. I asked him his thoughts, and they went something like this:
"Well, I can't log into work because the VPN software isn't compatible with Vista. I can't do anything with it because it tells me I'm not the administrator. But I AM the administrator! It's MY COMPUTER! And it keeps telling me I'm not authorized to do things. It's also taking some time to get used to because they changed where things are and I have to go hunting around for things I used to be able to do."
"Dad, why don't you try out Ubuntu?"
"Nah - I don't want to spend all that time trying to figure out something new."
"Dad - you're already spending time trying to figure out something new, and it's broken to boot."
"Linux is too confusing. I'll just wait til they fix Vista."
Damn. I think people don't listen to themselves sometimes. They get it into their heads that something is going to be hard, and so they won't ever try it out, even when it wouldn't be any harder than what they're doing now. Maybe it's the "Devil You Know" aspect, but I somehow doubt it.