Vista "Internet Connection Sharing"

2009-01-19T18:28:29Z

The house I live in currently has two floors. The location of our wireless router is at one corner of the bottom floor, the bedroom I sleep in is at the opposite corner of the second floor. Reception from A to B is almost nil.

Tonight I tried to do some Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) in Windows Vista. Unfortunately, when I click on the box that says 'Enable ICS' it sits for a minute or two then says "Internet Connection Sharing could not be enabled because an error occurred." Well, that's the approximate wording, but you get the idea. It won't tell me why it failed.

I dug up the Windows Event Viewer and found the actual error in the system log: unable to configure IPv6 stack! Well, great, I'm not wanting to use IPv6 so maybe I can just disable it. But after much trial and error, it seems that I cannot figure out how to do so in Vista. I disabled the various protocols on the network adapter, disabled "6to4 mapping", disabled various routing things, rebooted a few times, and have continued to fail completely.

I finally gave up on getting it to work, ran a 50 foot network cable across the floor through the living room and main walkway. Certainly not a good option, but I suppose in the end that's easier than dealing with Windows. Oh well.

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Mark Smith's Journal

Vista "Internet Connection Sharing"