SBS 2008 and Vista Can Lose Network on Reboot
Have you had either your Windows Vista computer or your SBS (Small Business Server) 2008 box lose their internet connection after you reboot? This recently happened to me after I installed SBS 2008 at a client’s location. It is easy to diagnose and the fix is relatively simple if you understand how to edit the registry on your computer.
Step 1: The Diagnosis:
- Click on the “START” button and in the small box at the bottom, type “CMD” without the quotes.
- A black box will appear with a blinking cursor. Type “ipconfig /all” and hit “Enter”.
- You will see a lot of text that may look completely foreign to you.
- Look the the row that says “Default Gateway”, if it is blank, then continue on to the “The Fix” section. If the “Default Gateway” is not blank, there is another problem and the fix below will not help you.
Step 2: The Fix:
- Close out of the black box by typing “Exit” and hitting “Enter”.
- Click on the “START” button and in the small box at the bottom, type “regedt32″ without the quotes.
- The registry Editor will appear and you need to navigate to HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Tcpip/Parameters/Interfaces/
- Here you’ll need to select the CLSID of your networkadapter where you change the settings. You’ll probably recognize it by looking at the value IPAddress that will have the IP of this adapter.
- Open the value “DefaultGateway” by double-clicking it.
- You will see a list of all the gateways that disappeared! ( in your case it may only be one) Very likely, the first line will be empty. I’m not sure, how this little flaw can make such a big problem.
- Manually remove this first empty line, click OK and reboot your system everything should be working fine again.
Thanks to Ilja Herlein at http://www.netsetman.com/support/viewtopic.php?pid=832#p832 for the direction on how to fix this issue. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me!
Tim
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