Scott Hanselman

Microsoft patch causing network outages/DNS issues?

September 04, 2007 Comment on this post [18] Posted in Musings
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Something has changed in the last week and I'm not sure what it is. I'm getting every some DNS lookups failing on my Vista machine. I'm getting reports from readers running XP that are seeing it too. One person saying:

"Microsoft released a patch recently that increased packet sizes and it is causing network/DNS issues. "

Can anyone speak to this? I haven't got details yet, but I'm running Network Monitor and haven't caught one yet.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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September 04, 2007 11:39
I have the problem too. Usually a ipconfig /flushdns (with elevated privilegues) helps... But you need to do that very often... I hope this gets fixed asap! It has started with the last patches applied.
September 04, 2007 14:49
Same problem for me, which started this weekend. Using the Network Diagnostics wizard I was first prompted to restart the router (thanks Vista) and the problem went away for a while... I chose to 'Send Information' to Microsoft. On a subsequent failure, I was prompted that my router doesn't support some of the TCP features (sorry, don't have the exact message to hand from the event log) and that Vista could disable them. Clicked OK and the problem stopped being so frequent...

Since then I've updated the router (Netgear DT834GT IIRC) to the latest firmware and didn't see the problem again.

We shall see. But yes, it's very annoying...
September 04, 2007 17:11
Yup, that's what did it. I'm from Microsoft, we screwed the pooch on this one (again).
September 04, 2007 17:39
now if netgear.com would just work... damnit!
September 04, 2007 18:10
I have the latest version for my DG834G (Netgear router) installed... What can I do now? Any advices?
September 04, 2007 19:07
I've been having this problem recently and i thought it was signs that my router was dying. Resetting my router would fix it temporarily. I thought it was my router because i could connect to ANY other computer on my network, but couldn't ping the default gateway (router ip address).

i was understandably upset and had understandably colorful language.
September 04, 2007 19:49
I too noticed this, immediately after the last major patching I did to my XP SP2 box. For a while, I wasn't sure if my ISP was having DNS problems or the patch had done something, but did find that changing to use OpenDNS instead of my ISP DNS seemed to help. Who knows for sure. At the very least, if the patch did something, it certainly doesn't seem to affect OpenDNS's servers as much as my ISP's DNS servers.
September 04, 2007 20:09
Can anyone help try to specify the actual patch numbers/KB numbers that might be associated with this observed behavior?
September 04, 2007 22:30
I don't know about networking/DNS issues but I know that since I installed the patches from last week, my Dell Latitude Vista box has been bluescreening and blackscreening (first time I've seen the Black Screen of Death) at least once a day. I'm gonna try removing all of last week's patches and hopefully that brings things back to normal.
September 05, 2007 0:42
We are seeing some strange issues as well. We run DNS and email (via BIND on linux machines) for serveral clients and many have called with "strange" behavior involving "temporary lookup failures."

Anyone else able to confirm or deny problems or ways to work around them?
September 05, 2007 1:02
I have had the same issues, i.e. lookup issues. I have two Vista machines with this problem and the laptop that has not had any patches applied since mid-July is running fine.

I initially thought this was related to an outage at the ISP (the entire area went down suddenly last Friday), because it all started last Friday. However, my unpatched laptop running Vista, along with two other XP machines not patched in the last several weeks are running fine and have no Internet issues.

Finally, as someone noted above - I receive better behavior if I change the DNS to opendns. I am not sure why that would be, but perhaps that can help someone who reads this.

It would be nice to know what patch it is/ kb so that we can all uninstall it.

Ben
September 05, 2007 4:29
I blew out my LinkSys firmware 6 months ago and went to dd-wrt. I took the same updates as you guys I presume, but I haven't seen any major outages.
September 05, 2007 5:50
I had a similar problem for a few hours last weekend too. My case, when i ping some sites, it can resolve the name but TTL expired, so can't browse. One of them are youtube.com. It happen out of the blue. At first i thought that my router hung again, due to heavy downloading, so i reset my router and the switch. It didn't help. Google works fine. After a few hours, every seems to be back to normal. Right before the problem occur, i didn't do any windows update. Maybe one or 2 days earlier i did. Doesn't seems related to me. Seems more like an ISP problem, or one of the international trunk line is down, again. Or maybe DOS attack.
September 05, 2007 20:27
I actually know of one case of a large business that applied patches starting this Tuesday when people came back from the weekend. The network access for said people have been on and off ever since. They are really scrambling. At least some of the machines that have not been patched due to being off site/ vpning are having no such issues. Not good.
September 06, 2007 22:16
Looks like we might be affected by this. Has anyone got any more details on what patch might be causing it?
September 06, 2007 22:18
I can't get a straight answer from anyone so far.
September 19, 2007 22:00
Any updates to this? Related to the secret updates to the updater? Please update when you know... ;)
October 16, 2007 20:07
Yes, I've been seeing all sorts of strange 'hangs' and delays starting ie and other prgms since applying the latest set (oct-2007a) of critical updates. I've found that if I go to my pc-cillin and tell it to halt network communication and then turn it back on that'll jar it enough to un-hang the app and it'll come up.
Also, I'm seeing that there is a constant, low-level stream of network access .. the in/out lights in the system tray icon just stay lit most of the time and that REALLY bothers me.

At first I thought the pc had succumbed to some sort of attack and had done every type of scan I could do or find to try to isolate and eliminate whatever virus,malware,rootkit or whatever... until I did the updates on a laptop pc and immediately began having the same troubles on it too.!

I've tried using a system-restore point but, the updates don't come out. I've tried to figure out which one is the culprit and tried uninstalling several of the updates to no good effect either. Right now I'm so angry with MS for doing this that I can't see straight and still have no idea how to remedy this !@&##$ Mess.

I sure hope that someone figures this one out soon so we can all get back to some semblance of normal ops on our systems.

~Myr
.end.trans.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.