After spending few hours trying to connect, changing all the settings in the router, restarting the router like hell, I was about to reinstall the OS on that laptop. But as I never worked on Vista, I thought google-ing a bit might reveal similar experiences. And yes, I was so right… one of the first results was stating:

This issue occurs because of a difference in design between Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). Specifically, in Windows XP SP2, the BROADCAST flag in DHCP discovery packets is set to 0 (disabled). In Windows Vista, the BROADCAST flag in DHCP discovery packets is not disabled. Therefore, some routers and some non-Microsoft DHCP servers cannot process the DHCP discovery packets.

The simplest thing you have to do is disabling Broadcast on your wi-fi card, by setting the REG_DWORD key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}\ DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag to 0, where GUID is your wi-fi card ID.

Other options plus the description of the whole story is available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us

… and yes, the problem is solved in Windows 7.

Good luck!

• call DevCon to install Microsoft Loopback Adapter (you need to download DevCon and save it in the same folder as the script)
• set the IP address and mask for the recently installed loopback adapter
• dinamically read from Windows folder the hosts file
• dinamically read the hostname
• add a new entry to the hosts file with the supplied IP address and hostname
• ping the hostname and check if the supplied IP address is responded
• MOST IMPORTANT: everything is dynamic and automatic. You don’t need to edit the script before each install. Just run it!

You can download this script here:

Silent Install
* you will need to run the .bat file and make sure that you have devcon.exe in the same folder

I am thinking that maybe some users would want to modify the IP address, mask or set another hostname, they would want to set their own parameters. This is the reason why I created another version of the script which wait for user input for IP, Mask and Hostname, but having the default values filled in like this:

You can download this script here:

Interactive Install
* you will need to run the .bat file and make sure that you have devcon.exe in the same folder

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Normally in this file you will find just an entry:

You just need to add a new entry to this file with Loopback’s IP Address and your hostname like this:

The final check will be to ping your hostname and check if the loopback is responding.

In the next article you will find a script that will do everything automatically:

• installing the Microsoft Loopback Adapter
• setting the IP
• adding the entry in hosts file
• pinging the hostname and checking the result.

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• do not set the gateway because you can screw you internet connection
• do not set DNS because you really don’t need it
• do not set 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.1 or addresses from the same class as your internet connection address

The addresses that I’m using most of the time are 10.10.10.10 and 192.168.100.100, both with 255.255.255.0 as mask.

Let’s see how can we set the IP address from the command line.

Solution 1
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Netsh.exe is a tool installed with Windows 2000, XP and 2003 Server. The name comes from Network Shell I guess…
In order to set an IP address for the adapter called “Local Area Connection 4″ you need to run this command:

This solution has a big disadvantage: it is not fully automated. You need first to check the name of the connection and then run netsh with that name. Depending on how many adapter you have installed, the last digit differs. So we need to another solution that will query the adapters and selects the loopback.

Solution 2
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A better solution is to create a script that query all the network adapters and selects the loopback adapter. I assume that there is no reason to have more than 1 loopback adapter installed.
The script is the following:

You can download the script here

Solution 3 – RECOMMENDED
====================
My preferred solution is to use an interactive script, the same like Solution 2, but the IP Address and mask are entered interactive by the user. The nice thing here is that we can set default values, so if the user is undecided, he can choose the default values.
The script is the following:

When you will run the script it will open the following screen:


You can download the script here

If you have any issues, comments, suggestions, feel free to post a comment.

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