Ralf’s Blog

Suddenly my brand-new, only a couple of days old Windows 7 installation had an odd problem: After a system boot or restart, networking would be broken in a way that hosts in the Internet could not be reached.

I investigated the problem and noticed that my Ethernet adapter had two default gateways assigned, while the first was 0.0.0.0:

C:\Users\rabe>ipconfig /all

[...]

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

[...]

   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
                                       192.168.2.1

I googled for this problem and found some hint that pointed toward’s Apple’s Bonjour service. Supposedly it sometimes starts up before networking is fully up, and in consequence assigns the invalid default gateway. The advice given there to solve the problem was to completely disable this service.

While I currently don’t need this service, I didn’t want to use this “brutal” approach, so what I did was switch the service to start up as Automatic (Delayed Start) as opposed to Automatic (which causes the service to start as early as possible).

And this indeed did the trick — I don’t have these annoying networking problems anymore.

I just tried to upload some hundreds of vacation photos from Windows Vista to our gallery which I’m hosting on my own root server. It turned out that this would be a not-so-simple task…

Previously, using Windows XP, this would be as simple as

1. invoking the “Web Publishing Wizard” from the “Folder Tasks” pane,
2. clicking “Publish this folder to the web”,
3. optionally selecting a target size for resizing (a copy of!) the photos before you upload them, and finally
4. clicking “Finish” to start the upload.

Not so anymore with Vista!

(more…)