The short and curlies of vista networking

[Mel Flynn]

On Thursday 18 June 2009 14:30:21 Chuck Swiger wrote:
> 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).

This is part of a "tried fix". I noticed while I was in Switzerland the 
Swisscom adsl+wireless router gave me a all ones broadcast thus I figured what 
the hell, might as well try that. So I had configured my bridge with this 
broadcast address.

I deleted the broadcast argument from ifconfig now and matched dhcpd.conf 
accordingly, but no changes in behavior.
-- 
Mel