Re: Does Vista Firewall support more than 1 active network at a ti

rgbigel

The behaviour I see on my machines is even more perverse, and I do hope that
someone from the Vista developers see this post (and maybe do something about
it).
Your post does explain some about the underlying causes of problems when
more than one network is used with a single-state firewall. Unfortunately I
can not see any remedy so far. Find below the list of my sufferings and the
configuration used; maybe there is still something you can give me advice on,
if not, the story may be good for a sarcastic smile:
-- Two machines with Vista (Ultimate)
-- two physical network adapters, one 100Mbit to router/WAN (router accepts
UPNP), the other 1000Mbit LAN local only (no internet sharing; all IPs with
fixed addresses andforced to IP4)
-- 2 or more virtual LAN adapters (obviously not actively connected at times)
-- OneCare is used as firewall, i.e. the windows firewall is not used.
Here's what I see happening:
- the system not accept the WAN as public and the LAN as private (I have to
make both public to share files and get internet connection)
- there appears no way to assign the virtual adapters to a seperate group of
adapters, they will always join the 1000Mbit LAN
- not only after rebooting, but also after hibernation or suspend modes,
the second adapter, which is the 1000Mbit LAN, is always set to public
(probably because of the virtual adapters being in the group and no
connections being possible then)
- this means that after resuming operation, the network is generally
impaired in one of several strange ways.
-- case 1: (which to my complete amazement even happens if I disable the
firewall completely,) i can not reach the internet via IE. I do see the
control page of the router on the WAN line. I can get network files via LAN!
I can ping external systems, but I can not pathping them.
-- case 2: occasionally the system will set up different routing priorities,
resulting in all file accesses on the network to use the 100Mbit WAN (via
router). When this happens, I can access the internet, but obviously file
access is extremely slow. I must close down the networks and restart them --
which ususally puts me into case 1.
I should think that my configuration is not really uncommon, but working
with Vista is very far from comfortable. Can you imagine how often I get the
UAC prompt when I try to fix things after resuming my systems?

> That means that the Vista machine would switch to the Public profile while
> dialed in to the ISP, yes. It would come back to Private upon
> disconnecting.
::: I have seen the switch to Public, but NEVER the switch to Private:::

Rolf