The short and curlies of vista networking

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 3:14 PM, Glen Barber wrote:
>> A broadcast of 255.255.255.255 is misconfigured (not saying it's not
>> gonna work, I'm saying for your network, it's not configured right).
>> you need broadcast-address 192.168.2.255
>
> That is not 100% correct.  By default, dhclient will send an initial
> DHCPREQUST to 0.0.0.0 (meaning "this network").  The request is picked
> up from the DHCP server broadcasting on 255.255.255.255.

The inconsistency between these two points might actually lead the OP  
to a solution.  Evidently Vista does something different with the DHCP  
broadcast flag, see:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

If you specify a network and netmask in the subnet statement, you  
shouldn't need to override the broadcast address it computes, which  
for the config posted ought to be "192.168.2.255".  Using the all-ones  
broadcast address should not be done by normal members of the  
network-- only for things which need to go beyond the network subnet/ 
topology (ie, the DHCP server itself might choose to send to  
255.255.255.255 to make sure that anything else on the local collision  
domain sees it, even if the local network is split into multiple  
logical subnets).

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck