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Vista on the Network

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Windows Vista is supposed to have included a number of new

networking features designed to make it faster, more robust, easier to manage

and safer. Now, how many of these functions and features would you encounter

readily and how do they affect the productivity of your users? In this article,

we'll look at these aspects with focus on both wired and wireless worlds. We

are looking at how

Vista


behaves on the network as well as how it presents the network and its resources

to you as a user or administrator.

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Direct

Hit!
Applies to:

System/network administrators

USP:

Learn about Vista's abilities to connect to both wired and wireless networks 
Links:

www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/

network/evaluate/new_network.mspx
 
Google keywords:

vista networking

Network profiles



One of the first things you'd notice when you fire up the network center

(or the network list applet) is that there seem to be more than one configured

network on your system, even if you have just one Ethernet adapter. Before we go

ahead to see what these are, let's get a couple of concepts cleared. In Win

XP, after you've browsed to a couple of file shares, you'll notice shortcuts

to them appear in your 'My Network Places' folder. Now, that happens with

Vista


too.

In addition to this,

Vista


saves connection/route information too to that resource. This is based on a

combination of your



network adapter (may be wired or wireless) MAC address and your gateway. The

connection shortcuts (Win XP) you are currently familiar with, help navigate

quickly to that resource. But these new ones let you manage your route to that

resource. If you are not somehow satisfied with the performance of the

connection, you could simply move it selectively to another connection or

gateway. This way, you can utilize your network connections more effectively.

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While it is easy to connect to WLANs, it does not let you connect simultaneously to more than one WLAN 

Some of these profiles are classified under the managed or



unmanaged categories, although as the system administrator, you can manage all

of them. When you use the Properties dialog from the context menu for a

connection, you get the option to manage the sessions on that network profile.

These sessions can be wired, wireless or a mix of both. Using the 'Move To'

option on the Manage dialog, you can assign a connection to another network

profile. Here, connections are listed by their NetBIOS or DNS name, the MAC

address of its gateway and the status of that connection. If a profile does not

have any active connections, its boxes would be blank and show 'Not

connected' against them.

This happens because of

Vista


's ability to isolate the routing tables on a per-session basis. This

isolation can also take care of keeping separate the routing tables for the

Intranet and WAN links from those meant for the Internet, thereby increasing

security.

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Wireless



The Win XP's ability to create and use multiple wireless



profiles remains in

Vista


too; but with a difference in the how and where it is. For instance, to get

there, you need to go again to the



Network




Center




and use the 'Manage wireless networks' option there. Initially of course,

the screen you get would have no networks listed, because you haven't added

any to your wireless profiles configuration. To configure them, use the wizard

that opens with the 'Add' button on the toolbar above. The wizard is fairly

simple and straightforward for a Windows user. The exciting thing about this

wizard is the ability to create a temporary connection to a network if you want

to quickly give someone a file (as when your visiting speakers are copying over

their presentations or demos to your file server)-for this you would use the

'Create ad hoc network' option from the wizard's first screen.  In

either case, you need to have the SSID and network security key handy. You can

right-click on a connection after you've created it and select 'Move up'

or 'Move down' to change its priority when more than one of them is

available. Connecting to or disconnecting from them later is a matter of

right-clicking on the connection and selecting the appropriate option.

There is already a download available for Win XP called

'VirtualWiFi' (http://research.microsoft.com/netres/projects/virtualwifi/)

that lets users of Win XP connect simultaneously to several wireless networks.

We expected a similar functionality in

Vista


, but it does not exist (yet).

A small issue we noticed with our wireless connections

especially is its penchant frequently disconnecting from even strong networks.

We presume that this happens because of the traffic it generates due to active

polling for 'Internet connectivity detection' on the wireless channel or

because this is still a beta. Because of this, when you open some networking

related virtual folders where wireless is a part, the system will hang

frequently while connections are broken and re-established. Several times to

finish configuration actions, we had to disable the wireless adapter, make the

changes and re-enable to get to the end.

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Use the network profiles feature to segregate your connections and keep the traffic between them different for better security

Network maps





Vista


includes a new control panel item called 'Network Map'. In order for this

to work, you need to have the 'Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper I/O

Driver' installed and enabled (done by default) on atleast one network adapter

on the

Vista


system.  It takes a while to draw the map, but when it eventually

finishes, you will see a graphical view of how the particular system is

connected on the network and in particular, how it reaches the Internet. It will

show devices it could not determine the role of (like a new router or gateway

that's been added somewhere without a particular role to play) as items it

could not classify, at the bottom of the window. Items it could not decipher to

be systems, switches/routers or gateway devices are shown as 'unknown'. You

can right-click on your system and on the Internet icon to perform actions (like

manage your PC or fire up IE to browse the Internet). You also get an 'Open'

option for devices in the list below the map-which has items that

Vista


could not determine the location of in the map. Selecting this (Open) allows

you to browse that device if possible.

Invisible improvements



As per what's documented on the Microsoft TechNet website, improvements

have been made to the way TCP/IP works. The stack has been rewritten for better

performance in high-latency and high-loss environments. It has the ability to

recognize spurious and duplicate packets and acknowledge them selectively,

thereby saving on bandwidth as well as decreasing required response times to

legitimate packets. Better detection of network errors, time outs and the

ability to check if a designated gateway is up or down (using ARP messages) is

also part of the new protocol package. We will carry an update later on how well

this works in a typical deployment scenario.

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Vista lets you create new VPN connections easily. But you can't locate the created connection later to connect to this resource

What's new in IPv6



As with improvements in the IPv4 layer, the IPv6 stack has also been

rewritten. Now, IPv6 is everywhere in Windows, and all the interfaces that let

you manage aspects of the network-where you could traditionally only manage

IPv4 information-you can now manage IPv6 information as well. The protocol is

also installed and enabled by default on the system, and setup to receive

automatic IP address allocation. 

Teredo, the technology that enables IPv6 communications

over IPv4 and NAT'ed connections is another component that's installed and

enabled by default in

Vista


. Up to now, IPv6 could only be configured using the NETSH CUI. With

Vista


, administrators get the ability to configure the protocol using GUI from the

same connection properties dialog box. IPv6 supports IPsec with full IKE and AES

encryption and IPv6 over PPP connections.  Also, the DHCP client in

Vista


supports IPv6 to acquire IPv6 addresses from a DHCP server.

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The Windows Firewall that's a part of Vista includes

support to filter IPv6 traffic as well.IPv6 interface IDs if assigned in

sequence can open up a potential gateway for attack once one or two IPv6 enabled

systems on your network have been compromised, since the attacker may be able to

guess other interface IDs on your network and compromise those systems as well.

The way out is to have non-sequential interface IDs across the LAN. This is

achieved by

Vista


, which will automatically generate a random ID when it is acquiring the address

from a DHCPv6 server, for the local IPv6 interfaces.

Better diagnostics



The current version of the 'Repair' option previously available on

network connection items comes labeled 'Diagnose'. Selecting this invokes a

diagnostic (at present users have no way of knowing what it is checking from the

displayed UI) that scans for what problems there might be. Conditions checked

include: IP address, gateway status, incorrect DNS settings, what required ports

are in use, status of media (Ethernet cables, etc) connections and if

sufficient memory is available.

Once the problem has been detected,

Vista


repairs what can be fixed. If it cannot find anything to fix (perhaps the

condition is beyond its abilities to correct), it throws up options to the user.

Sometimes, what is displayed can be buggy and confusingfor instance, two

identical options on the same dialog-this mostly happens in situations like

you have network access but Vista cannot determine why your Internet

functionality is down.

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Vista can map how your system is connected to the LAN and the Internet. Multiple routes out to the networks are also shown

VPN



Creating a VPN connection seems pretty straight forward. All you need to do

is open the Network Center and click on the Create New link on the left and

follow the steps after selecting 'Create a VPN Connection' from the first

screen. But, after that there seems to be no way at the present time to find

this connection you created and actually connect to it. In Win XP, one would

find the connection easily under the Network Connections folder. In

Vista


, this screen seems to list only LAN and WLAN connections. Therefore again,

we're forced to wait for an update to

Vista


to tell you more about

Vista


's usability with VPN connections.

Remote desktop



There are a few new features in

Vista


's Remote Desktop



connectivity. These are all useful for the enterprise user. First up, you cannot

save your connection credentials in the RDP session file. Therefore, no one who

got accidental access to an open



unattended system can fire up a remote desktop session and use remote resources.



Local devices such as disk drives, printers and serial

ports were already usable;

Vista


adds clipboard and smart cards. If you're using USB devices, those can be

selected and shared too.  One problem is you cannot logon to a system that

does not require authentication, since the program will keep prompting you for

credentials.

Now, even though you can share your clipboard with the

remote system, you will find that a number of times, you cannot copy or paste

files between the two systems. To resolve this, you need to also share the local

drive (with the remote system) that contains your temporary folder. This folder

is defined in the TEMP, TMP or USERPROFILE environment variables or is taken to

be %SYSTEMROOT%\Temp.

Now, you may not want to share out a sensitive drive, so it

is advisable to locate your temporary folder on a separate partition and share

that out instead. With all these levels of control, we missed the ability that

would let you share out only particular drives or folders with the remote

system, instead of the whole drive as happens.

Next time, we shall examine the ways in which

Vista


will let you manage applications and software and their updates on the system.

Sujay V Sarma

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