I can into a problem today that was actually reported to me last spring by my friend Carl. The problem is, using Windows Vista, with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled, after running for a while, the Internet connection goes dead.
Actually, the whole network connection seems to be dead. However, it’s obviously not an Internet outage, because existing connections remain open (i.e., I was still able to chat on AIM). Also, pinging and DNS lookups work, but opening up new TCP connections seems to be impossible. At first, there seems to be no way to fix it except to reboot the machine, but after reading for a while, I see that restarting the Internet Connection Sharing service will also fix it. (So will just disabling ICS.)
I did a bit of searching and found several posts on various forums where people were posting about the same problem. It seems to be a pretty glaring bug in Vista ICS. I didn’t encounter it until now because I only turned on ICS a couple of days ago. I’m not sure why the real solution is not very easy to find, but after digging through all of these forums, this particular thread lead me to the answer. Here it is (Microsoft KB article). At least, I hope that’s it, I haven’t encountered the network anomaly since I installed that hotfix.
Note that this is one of those hotfixes that you must request the update from Microsoft, it is not publicly available. Because of the frustrating nature of this bug, I am going to post links that I found earlier to download the hotfix. These may not work, they are only valid as of the time of this writing. Here’s one for the 32-bit version and one for the 64-bit version. You can also use this form to request the hotfix directly.
I hope this helps someone!
(Note: Since a hotfix is already available, I expect that this issue will be resolved in Vista SP1.)
Tags: Networking, Windows Vista