Vista Bug Costs Users In Swedish Town Their Internet

Lund, Sweden refuses to work around a Vista bug, so people who live there must choose between Vista and internet access. It's nice to see the right people being held accountable for a change.

The only thing that could make this better

Is if the city offered free Ubuntu CDs as "Windows Upgrades."

Oh no, there's more.

Ubuntu is an upgrade from XP and Vista.

Keep that shoe on the other foot for just a little longer. Imagine them having "support scripts" that travel through a KDE interface instead of Outlook Express or IE. Imagine them requiring Ubunto to install your access. In short, imagine all of the "standardization" Windoze enjoys being flipped on you.

In the free software world, users can edit a few well annotated text files to get the job done if they are given the proper information. That task is harder in Windoze because you must dig through several GUIs that don't tell you what to ask for in advance or ever.

It's a shame that ACs can post with more points and more frequently than Twitter.

Re:Oh no, there's more.

Heh -- I was just talking to my dad, who bought a Vista laptop recently. I asked him his thoughts, and they went something like this:

"Well, I can't log into work because the VPN software isn't compatible with Vista. I can't do anything with it because it tells me I'm not the administrator. But I AM the administrator! It's MY COMPUTER! And it keeps telling me I'm not authorized to do things. It's also taking some time to get used to because they changed where things are and I have to go hunting around for things I used to be able to do."

"Dad, why don't you try out Ubuntu?"

"Nah - I don't want to spend all that time trying to figure out something new."

"Dad - you're already spending time trying to figure out something new, and it's broken to boot."

"Linux is too confusing. I'll just wait til they fix Vista."

Damn. I think people don't listen to themselves sometimes. They get it into their heads that something is going to be hard, and so they won't ever try it out, even when it wouldn't be any harder than what they're doing now. Maybe it's the "Devil You Know" aspect, but I somehow doubt it.

Re:The only thing that could make this better

Funny, out of the box XP SP2 doesn't support my NIC, graphics card (Well only in VGA mode) or my USB printer. My network and chipset driver is a 40MB download, my GPU driver, 50MB, and my printer drivers a pleasant 180MB. Oh and then I have to update DirectX, update Windows Messenger, update to IE7, update to WMP 11 and then get going on the 80 or so other updates (which comes in at almost 50-100 MiB I suspect) from Windows Update.

Out of box Ubuntu supports my network card and with a few simple clicks my printer and I can start installing my favourite software.

My point here isn't to start a flame war, but rather that the Window's experience isn't so wonderful out of the box when the last service pack was 3 years before your current hardware came out. When you consider this, there is something to be said for Ubuntu's 6 month cycle.

Oh and I've never used a wireless adapter in XP (~6) or Vista (1) that worked out the box.

Swedes are Evil, o.k.?

Do you really want Swedes on the Internet? I mean, aren't they like the Canada of Europe?

Re:The only thing that could make this better

You're working with some assumed knowledge - you know that Synaptic is the package manager (heck, you know what a package manager is!)

When I first tried Ubuntu it took me hours and hours to find that Synaptic existed - yes I know there's an interface in the Ubuntu GUI now, but there wasn't when I first used it.

What seems to make it harder is that the last time I tried to find the package manager in the man pages I didn't know it was called a package manager - and even with UNIX experience (and the subsequent knowledge of man -k) I didn't have the right context with which to find the right tool.

Bad analogy - if you don't know what a spade is called, you may not find it in the Sears online catalogue, because you're looking for "digging tool".

So...

Their internet is b0rked?

Re:So...

Their internet is b0rked?

No, it's b0rk-b0rk-b0rked!

Re:So...

Their internet is b0rked?

It was bitten by a m00se.

Re:So...

My company ran into this as well. We have 4000 wireless customers spread out on 20+ antennas (each with its own Cisco switch). We're a Microsoft partner so we contacted them about the problem right away.

As I understood it, the bug was this: Vista will only accept broadcast replies to DHCP requests. Any multicast response is discarded for security reasons (!?). So their solution was to put a DHCP server on every level of our network (for us, one for every 200 users) or switch to a network that relayed the broadcasted replies (ie: hubs). They also told us it wasn't a bug so they wouldn't issue a patch to correct it. There was a KB article on the issue but when we had users call MS support and ask them to walk them through applying it, we got a bunch of angry calls back to us saying MS refused to help them with it. We also talked to Cisco a bit to see if they had any idea what we could do to relay the broadcast but they never got us a solution.

So in the end, we told MS that we'd either need a better way to fix this or we'd just tell our users not to use Vista. They seemed okay with us telling users not to use it so we have. A few of our users still use Vista with a home router and that seems to work alright. Luckily, there aren't too many Vista users yet and when faced with the option of buying and configuring a router or buying and configuring Windows XP, they've decided on XP. So all in all, it wasn't that big of a deal.

Jem Tallon

Re:So...

I think you're missing the point.

I work for a networking company and a few months ago I fixed our BootP relay to be able to handle this.

If you read the DHCP RFC, you will discover that this broadcast packet is actually an optional part of the spec. Furthermore, it was designed for (at the time - circa 1993) LEGACY equipment that could not handle unicast responses.

Ie, I ask for an IP address, and because I'm a crappy old piece of hardware that can't handle it, I want the DHCP server to reply to me with a broadcast reply telling me my IP address. Normally such responce is unicast to your MAC address and everyone is happy.

Windows XP works fine and will accept a unicast reply. In Vista Microsoft had the brilliant idea that they should enable this flag by default - despite the fact that any modern computer should be able to handle a unicast reply - they could back in 1993 after all.

So yes, the fault is precisely with Microsoft for enabling an unnecessary and OPTIONAL part of the DHCP protocol by default, causing untold problems that could simply be avoided if they stuck to the XP way of doing things.

router

Wouldn't using a router to connect to the internet bypass the bug?

Re:router

The bug in Vista is that it sends somewhat broken DHCP requests that Lund Energi's DHCP server refuses to reply to. If you have a home router the DHCP server in the router would (propably) reply to the requests from Vista and other computers on your LAN. And the router sends correct DHCP requests to Lund Energi's server in order to get it's own public IP address.

In short, having a home router would solve the problem.

Re:router

That makes sense. I think that the city is doing the right thing. Not because I hate vista, but because MS pushes out non standard implementations on a regular basis. For them to be allowed to keep doing stuff like this or their screwed up web browser would be a bad thing. They have pretty regularly indicated that they aren't willing to think of their end users, and so stuff like this happens. It really isn't the fault of anybody but MS that the implementation was wrong. What makes things cludgy is when there needs to be a couple of dozen compatibility options enabled so that broken software can communicate.

Broken software being broken shouldn't be allowed on line wherever possible. I just wish we could keep the subset of windows users that haven't bothered to secure their computers completely offline. And if need be any other users.

Re:router

Broken software being broken shouldn't be allowed on line wherever possible.

That would violate the robustness principle summed up in RFC 1122: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

In this respect, both Microsoft and the city are in the wrong.

Re:router

No buddy, you got that dead wrong. Quoting from RFC 760:

    "In general, an implementation should be conservative
    in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That
    is, it should be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but should
    accept any datagram that it can interpret (e.g., not object to
    technical errors where the meaning is still clear)."

Re:router

This particular option is designed to aid old implementations of TCP which can't receive unicast packets until they have received an IP address (which they dont have yet because DHCP hasnt given them one)...
Vista has a new TCP stack, it would be incredibly stupid to implement such an ancient bug, especially when all earlier versions of windows worked correctly.
Infact, the vista TCP stack does support receiving of unicast packets, and yet microsoft still chose to use the broadcast flag without reason. That's why this ridiculous behaviour can be turned off with a simple registry entry. The broadcast flag is intended for TCP stacks which _CANNOT_ support unicast, it is absoloutely incorrect to use it as the default on a stack which can support it.
The broadcast flag is only intended for compatibility with very old TCP stacks (i cant think of any which requires it, and it makes sense that this legacy functionality was intended to be removed when you weren't using any of these legacy systems.
So, did this swedish ISP have any reason to believe that people would be connecting ancient TCP stacks to their network? If not, it makes sense that they wouldn't support this legacy flag.

Re:router

It's actually a stupid issue with pretty much all parties faulty. After reading tons of posts which all confuse it all, I did RTFKBA and RTFRFC. From the RFC and the KB article, the following facts can be found:

1. There is one flag in DHCP protocol, the "BROADCAST" flag. The "Clarifications to BOOTP (RFC 1542)" gives a nice description of it's purpose (referenced from DHCP RFC2131).

2. Normally the server sends DHCP replies as unicast packets to a specific node.

3. It is suggested there are TCP/IP implementations unable to receive such a unicast packet before they have been fully configured, in which case they should set "the flag" to request that the server sends it's reply as a broadcast instead. Server should honor such a request. I guess such an implementation would configure their local MAC (or equivalent?) at the same time with their IP level settings, which might be a sensible thing to do in a simplistic single family (IP-only) network stack, which was designed before anybody thought of "auto-configuration" things like DHCP.

4. For some unknown reason, Vista sends DHCP requests with "the flag" set by default, even if it doesn't have said inability to receive unicast packets before being fully configured.

5. A DHCP server should honor such a request, though from reading the discussion here, I futher conclude that for various reasons, maintainers of certain servers and/or networks are unwilling to support broadcast replies to DHCP requests. At least in case of centralized DHCP servers this seems a reasonable decision.

Now, it's likely that MSFT has some purpose for setting the broadcast flag (other than pissing people up). So far this purpose is more or less a mystery to me. One possible reason I can immediately think of would be allowing a DHCP server to detect the presence of another DHCP server by monitoring DHCP reply broadcasts that somebody else sent (that could be useful for certain types of "zero-config" networking maybe?). But then again they might have another reason? Who knows.. maybe they wanna start selling DHCP relays? Or maybe they want Vista users to get static IPs?

Anyway, it doesn't seem like anyone is breaking the letter of the standard, as the DHCP requests Vista's sending are technically valid (although the flag isn't set for the specific rationale it exists for), yet the servers/networks/whatever aren't really required to support the flag either (although they "should").

Re:router

A router just passes packets verbatim from one place to another verbatim

I dearly, dearly hope you are not in charge of any network apparatus anywheres.

Chris Mattern

Re:router

He works in marketing for Verbatim

Re:router

A hub just passes packets verbatim from one place to another verbatim...a router determines where the packet needs to go, determines what header/footer information needs to be changed, and rebuilds the packet for the next hop.

Fixed that for you.

Re:router

It was clearly a simple typo.

Re:router

The keys are like all next to each other!

"so people who live there must choose...

"..between Vista and internet access."

Fucking tricky one, eh?

Like choosing between an anal probe and a cream bun.

Re:"so people who live there must choose...

cream buns often follow anal probes.

Re:"so people who live there must choose...

To be fair: im sure there are more sex lovers in Sweden then there are Vista users worldwide, so your comparison is not very accurate.

I think you're labouring under the false assumption that the cream bun is for eating.

Re:Not their problem.

Actually, why should the provider CHANGE their config which works perfectly fine with OSes that follow standards? They were NOT the one deploying software, MS was, and MS failed to meet the standard.....and hence fucked these customers more than they have a few others.

Of course, not being able to get on the web does decrease the malware they get infected by.

Re:Not their problem.

"why should the provider CHANGE their config" Hmmmmm, to keep their CUSTOMERS, maybe?

No. If the provider changes their config that lets Microsoft customers remain Microsoft customers. Microsoft broke it, let Microsoft fix it. The provider's customers are free to use any other OS (including older Microsoft versions) while remaining provider customers.

Take an electric utility, for example, that runs house current at 220V (we're talking Europe). Should they drop that back to 120V just because a few customers bought an appliance from a company that couldn't manage to make it compliant with 220V, just to keep those customers? No, let the customers take it up with the appliance vendor. (Of course it's not an exact analogy, but at least it isn't a car analogy.)

Re:Not their problem.

Well, so what makes Microsoft so special that people MUST adapt to their breaking of standards? If the ISP accommodate Microsoft, shouldn't they also accommodate any other vendors who wrote buggy software? And when will it ends? I think the ISP is doing a fantastic job.

How's this funny again?

If this happened in my town--and if I were using Vista--I'd be pretty damn unhappy. Usually a story is funny because someone got what they deserved in a particularly humorous way, or because someone subjectively considered evil takes it in the pants. Here I see a bunch of people getting shafted by two corporations that don't want to play nice, and this perhaps for the crime of simply owning a new computer.

Re:How's this funny again?

It's funny because normally it's Linux users who are unable to connect to the internet because only Windows is supported (even when Linux behaves and Windows does not) - for example look at most wireless broadband services.

Now it's happening to someone else it's a big deal that should have been fixed? Well they can start by fixing all the stuff that has been broken longer that no one gave a shit about.

Tests?

The university I work for in Sweden began testing with Vista when it was the called Longhorn. We discovered some bugs with the communication between Vista and some of our servers (running Solaris) back in 2004. The bug repports were submited to MS back then and the thing was fixed on the next Longhorn beta "release". It seems it's easier for some not to test and cry out like a baby when it's too late.

Vista DHCP client and Linux