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.

Comments

It isn't Microsoft with the bug...

[topham]

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.

Re:Vista DHCP client and Linux

[AndyCR]

Either MS broke Vista or the TCP/IP stack is less functional than before. Ding, we have a winner. Vista's networking stack is indeed less functional than XP's. Why? Simple. XP's was borrowed from BSD; Vista's is Microsoft's own, untested stack. See http://www.twit.tv/sn51 for details.