Vista stinks. There, I said it. Add me to the growing (and long) list of people dissatisfied by Microsoft’s latest excuse of an operating system. Maybe ‘operating system’ is a misnomer. It should probably be classed as a Bungling System instead. In it’s latest escapades, it ran amuck in our network, and caused all sorts of havok. We currently have two 5-megabit pipes feeding the internet to our campus. We’ve tried several different things to load balance these connections and finally struck upon something that is supposed to work. In fact, it does work, because we’ve done it on a non-production box. The first phase of this was to setup a central server as firewall/content filter/router. This machine would then use an iptables rule to forward all traffic to one of two ‘passthrough’ gateways. Well, before we got that far, we set it up just to forward all traffic to a single ‘passthrough’ gateway. All looked good, we were testing things pretty well in our office with a couple macs, and a few linux boxes.

The next day, we started receiving complaints about sporadic connection issues. We did the math, and figured out it was because of the switch we had done. The odd thing was that we had experienced no issues whatsoever in our office, or the computer lab. After several more complaints, we realized that it was only computers running Windows Vista that were having any issues. We did more testing, with several different variations on the firewall, and still nothing changed. Everyone could browse fine, except the poor folks on Vista. It’s now five days later, and we decided to see if it was something specific on these machines, or just Vista in general. So I installed Vista on one of my machines, and started to use it. Then, all of a sudden, I got the same thing. On the network, everything was fine. But I couldn’t get any traffic to (or through) the gateway. After several hours, it had come and gone multiple times, but I couldn’t find a fix anywhere. Finally, we were forced to move the routers back into their original places, and put things back to the way they were a week ago. Everything was beautiful. Everyone had internet access again. A pox on Vista and their family too.