HOWTO: Fixing Longhorn Networking

I had read about network connections being broken under Longhorn, from builds 4051 through the current WinHEC 4074, but hadn't yet experienced the fun learning experience (spoken slowly through clenched teeth) that it would afford me further down the road. These are my experiences; I hope that they help someone else out as well.

I wanted to get to Longhorn remotely via terminal services, so I installed both Terminal Services, as well as the web server component that allows access from http://[ip]/tsweb .

I had a friend test out the connection, he said it was cool, so I had thought it was in the bag. Fast forward through headaches by the name of Magic Packet and VPN... finally success -- I can VPN remotely, and send a packet from within my network to the broadcast address. Only... I can't seem to get to the machine, even just to ping it. I get home, and the machine is turned on all right, and waiting at the login screen, but when I log in, there's no network connection... router's fine; even the machine works when I boot into XP instead of Longhorn.
Fastforward days ahead, many headaches, and I'll spare you the litany of “please work now” and various degrees of anguish, and head to the miracle cure.

I'm not a network guy; I just play one at home.

Sure, I can set up a fairly secure network at home, keeping my machines fairly happy with their little cable-modem tether, but as far as going into routing tables, I had a few things to learn, and still do. However it was checking the differences between the routing tables that led me to my solution. First off, I checked the properties of my LAN connection in network properties; good ip from the DHCP, and I can get to my router by going to my 192.168.0.1 address, but as far as going any further -- forget it. Manually setting IP, and DNS didn't help either. I could resolve the name, but not any hits from a "ping www.google.com". There's not a default gateway...instinctively, I know this is the problem -- 100% positive; but how to manually set the gateway?

Enter "route print". Here's the bad table;



It looks ok, but no gateway declared. I'll save you the why and how, but what I did was compare my working xp table w/ the nonworking Longhorn one, and was going to go 1-by-1 and make them match, but the first add was the one that did the trick. First off, the interface (the last number in this command) is the number of the LAN card when you type "route print". The command to fix it?

route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 metric 20 if 3

Note that 192.168.0.1 needs to be changed to whatever the router address is. Then you should be golden. Here's what your router table should look like afterwards:



Enjoy being back connected!

No Comments