Windows Vista and Crashing CPE

[Marco Hogewoning]

Had almost the same a year ago, with a beta image of a vendor who probably wish to stay anonymous. In that case it was OS X that was the trigger.

The strange thing was there was nothing wrong when we connected the client before the IPv6 connection was setup to the modem. So plugging in the ethernet before the DSL there was nothing wrong. If we did it the other way and attached the laptop after the DSL link was up and the modem had done it's configuration (DHPCv6-PD). It took about 5 seconds for the modem to crash and reboot itself.

It was easily repeatable and some packet sniffing showed the last packet that was send out by the host was a multicast join. Packet dumps and report went to the vendor and the issue got resolved. Never got reported back on what exactly happened. The multicast was the most likely culprit, but in those first 3 seconds of connecting there is a lot going on, so it could have been some other packet as well.

I guess this is why people should test things before deploying them to customers.

Marco

On Oct 4, 2011, at 2:12 PM, David Freedman wrote:

> I experienced this first hand this weekend, Vista machines with IPv6 enabled when attached to a small office WLAN took turns at causing the router to crash ,
> 
> The perplexed end user told me that when a particular employee attached her laptop to the network "Nobody else could use it", the ISP sent out a tech who after spending much time puzzling
> over the problem, simply forbade her from attaching to the network.
> 
> There seems to be a report of this here:
> 
> http://keyliner.blogspot.com/2008/12/vista-unidentified-network-problem.html
> 
> The CPE in question was a TPNet(PL) branded ZTE box (ZXV10 W300 running W300_V2.0.0eDR0_PL) , her laptop was running Vista (not sure which service pack) with Atheros AR5007 chipset,
> though through some googling, I can see that similar incidents have occurred.
> 
> The fix was to temporarily disable V6 on the machine for now until the the ISP can provide an updated firmware image , after explaining to the office the cause of this, having never heard of IPv6 it failed leave them with a wonderful first impression.
> 
> Dave.
> 
> 
>