Zack Whittaker said:
Hmmm... it does sound strange. If you can, try a direct modem
connection (without using your router) - there are plenty of "free"
dialup, no subscription internet services out there to dial up to
local rate.
If you manage to connect and access all the sites - it then
determines that the router is the problem, and not any settings
within Vista
)
Clever eh?
P
Not clever at all, as the problem in question seems to be somewhere in
Vista's IP stack and circumventing it just masks the real problem
underneath. Your method of cleverness is comparable of telling someone
to shoot themselves to get rid of the flu
I don't have a DSL router on my home network as I have RJ-45 ethernet,
but I do NATting and stateful firewalling using a FreeBSD box running
PF as the firewall. If I connect the machine running Vista into my LAN
it can ping and traceroute other machines quite well - so physical and
link layer of the IP stack are working, right?
DNS functionality works as well (I do have a caching name server in my
LAN though
) so everything should be working right up to
application layer. SecureCRT can connect just fine to any host in the
internet using FTP, SSH or SFTP as protocols behind the firewall. But
then comes the problem: IE (or Opera), Mail or messenger do not
connect to any host on the internet, even if the IP stack works
correctly up to application layer with other software.
If I connect the box running Vista directly to the net, the problem
goes away. So the problem seems to be that part of the network stack,
or some applications can't cope with stateful inspection of packets
and NAT - Then considering that almost every corporate network is
behind stateful NAT firewall these days, makes Vista a bit
problematic - of course the inability to connect to internet (or even
intranet in these circumstances) can be seen as added bonus by the
management
From the symptoms I'd think there's well meaning attempt to match the
packets in Vistas IP stack and trying to ascertain their legality in
there, and the stateful inspection isn't playing with it nicely, as it
tampers with the packet headers (and yes, it *should* tamper with
them. Sadly Vista's IP stack misses a checkbox where you could turn
that feature off
(Actually I've read from somewhere - shame I can't
remember the exact reference, that this is a known bug and will be
corrected for RC1)
-Reko