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Software Network Networking The Internet Windows

Windows 10 Update Broke DHCP, Knocked Users Off the Internet (arstechnica.com) 256

Posted by msmash from the windows-updates dept.
Microsoft has quietly fixed a software update it released last week, which effectively prevented Windows 10 users from connecting to the Internet or joining a local network. From a report on ArsTechnica: It's unclear exactly which automatic update caused the problem or exactly when it was released -- current (unconfirmed) signs point to KB3201845 released on December 9 -- but whatever it was appeared to break DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), preventing Windows 10 from automatically acquiring an IP address from the network. There's also little detail on how many people were affected or why, but multiple cases have been confirmed across Europe by many ISPs. A Microsoft spokesperson has meanwhile confirmed that "some customers" had been experiencing "difficulties" getting online, but that's about it for public statements at present. However, a moderator on the company's forums has said the fix was included in a patch released on Tuesday called KB3206632.
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Windows 10 Update Broke DHCP, Knocked Users Off the Internet More

Windows 10 Update Broke DHCP, Knocked Users Off the Internet

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  • Satnav (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:28PM (#53484203)

    Having fun in Satnav's involuntary public beta testing program?

    • Re:Satnav (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:28PM (#53485231)

      I have to wonder about this specific bug. They fucked up DHCP? Doing what to it? The DHCP stack isn't something that needs regular tweaking; it's not like there are new features being introduced to DHCP all the time. The protocol is mature and relatively static, and the DHCP client in Windows has been robust for years. Even XP's DHCP client was rock solid, fully IPv6 aware, etc. There's nothing to be making changes to in that codebase. Just as I wouldn't expect CALC.EXE to get updated (and suddenly quit working) unless there's some major new discovery in mathematics that redefines how a calculator should operate, I wouldn't expect the DHCP client to be getting buggered when there haven't been any breakthroughs in IP lease assignment.

      So what the hell they were mucking around with - adding more spying? Everybody gets a persistent route to FBI HQ in their config?

      • Re:Satnav (Score:5, Interesting)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:15PM (#53485711)

        You don't need to touch a specific part of a stack to ruin something. Calc.exe would be equally screwed if you did something that broke the Win32API.

        Likewise the change could have been completely unrelated to DHCP. Did anyone confirm if the rest of the network stack was okay or did they just conclude that Microsoft broke a very specific part of DHCP?

        I once broke DHCP on my linux machine with a typo in an iptables script. That annoyed my especially since it was one of those bugs that was fine until the next reboot and the machine was headless.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          Saw this on a customer's machine just yesterday. 'ipconfig /all' showed the wireless adapter's ip as 169.254.n.n but the gateway and DNS address was valid. That would indicate to me that the DHCP request was valid, but whatever came back as an IP address was faulty.

      • Re:Satnav (Score:5, Informative)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:28PM (#53485839) Journal
        Reports mention that the failure to acquire an address is, at least sometimes, tied to the "Connected Devices Platform Service" crashing. Apparently this service is "used for Connected Devices and Universal Glass scenarios", which really clears things up.

        Nobody seems to have much to say on what exactly the 'connected devices platform' is; but it sounds like the problem isn't with the DHCP client itself; but with some questionably sensible abstraction layer failing at automagic above it, in the service of some windows-everywhere-in-the-connected-home fever dream.

        Sort of like the time they broke all those webcams [arstechnica.com], not by monkeying with UVC support; but by quietly inserting a poorly thought out frameserver without telling anyone because being able to log in with your face is obviously more important than Directshow working as expected.

      • Thanks to the power of the proprietor, you'll never know the answer to your questions even if Microsoft claims to tell you what happened. Without software freedom, you won't be able to get source code diffs that would let you recompile and verify the binaries Microsoft distributes. One of many reasons only the proprietor can trust their proprietary software.

    • Re:Satnav (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:54PM (#53486065) Journal

      Having fun in Satnav's involuntary public beta testing program?

      No worries, I'll just disable automatic updates until they sort it out.

      Wait, I can't do that anymore? Oh.

      Okay then, I'll just not install the optional KB3206632 update.

      Wait, the only option is the December Rollup Update package? I can't disable single updates anymore? Oh.

      Okay then, I'll just look for my Windows 7 installation DVD and abandon this Windows 10 shit.

      Wait, they forced the same update model onto Windows 7 users? Oh.

      Okay then, so Microsoft changed their update model to take away all customer control, fired most of their QA department, and now releases update after update with bugs and problems?

      Well, fuck Microsoft.

      • Re: Satnav (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jxander ( 2605655 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @05:09PM (#53486191)

        Linux on the metal. Windows in a VM.

        Took a little tweaking (you can google it) and it works perfectly for the vast majority of applications. I only found a slight degradation in the latest and greatest AAA vidya games. And even then, it's around a 10% loss in frame rate, or turning the graphics down from Ultra to Very High.

  • I tried to get the patch (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:28PM (#53484205)

    But I couldn't get online.

    • Re:I tried to get the patch (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:37PM (#53484299)

      Yeah. Seems to me an awful lot of affected people ought to bill Microsoft for having a tech guy come set things right for them. Even accidentally breaking the means of acquiring repairs is a special sort of evil.

      I know it's not exactly difficult to manually assign an IP, but only if you know what you're doing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        you get what you paid for...

        • Windows 10 Home is a whopping $119.99 and even the people who got the free upgrade have paid a lot of money for the previous operating system.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I know it's not exactly difficult to manually assign an IP, but only if you know what you're doing.

        I thought you said they were Win10 users.

      • Re:I tried to get the patch (Score:5, Funny)

        by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:08PM (#53484603) Journal

        I know it's not exactly difficult to manually assign an IP, but only if you know what you're doing.

        I know what ya mean- for some reason my grandma just never got the hang of configuring DHCP or assigning static IPs.

        I tried to email with instructions her but she never responded.

      • bill Microsoft for having a tech guy come

        I have to ask, do people actually do this?

  • They should just download a new fix from internet to make it work again. Yawn.

  • Networking.....Windows Update? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by segedunum ( 883035 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:31PM (#53484253)
    Always on updates................ How do people get the update fixing the update when you've broken their fucking network you dumbasses?

    • Re:Networking.....Windows Update? (Score:5, Funny)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @01:38PM (#53484303) Homepage Journal

      Always on updates................ How do people get the update fixing the update when you've broken their fucking network you dumbasses?

      Simple. You buy and install a server that can feed a pxe environment through bootp, and install the patches that way...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      System restore to before the update.

      The hard part is not getting the update that's easy.

      The hard part is finding out that its a known issue with the last update; and that you need to get a new update... since you are offline and can't search to find out. (assuming this computer was your only internet access)

      But really, if my computer did an update, and then couldn't connect to the network, step one is to roll back the update. Windows can still do that... unlike, say Apple OSes.

      That's not to say I am onboard

    • Re:Networking.....Windows Update? (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:23PM (#53485793)

      How do people get the update fixing the update when you've broken their fucking network you dumbasses?

      I'm sure the Microsoft people never thought of this and the Slashdot people are smarter. After all we only ran a story a few days ago about how this problem is transient and doesn't persist through a full restart, which is precisely what Microsoft is telling people to do. (It was also mentioned in TFA)

      This is one of those issues which will affect some Slashdot users more than mum and dad's, not because the Slashdot users are more technically minded and mess with their machines, but because they seem incapable of doing something as simple as reading.

  • Yet another result of decimated QA (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The stability and security of Microsoft products has always been (insert pejorative here), but this is getting really serious. They need to reassemble at least a small portion of the QA team that was flushed.

    They've been soundly beaten in every area of innovation they've tried so all that's left is corporate lock-in of Windows and Office. If they continue to risk that monopoly revenue stream shareholders are not going to stand for it.

    Captcha: upkeep

    • They've been soundly beaten in every area of innovation they've tried so all that's left is corporate lock-in of Windows and Office. If they continue to risk that monopoly revenue stream shareholders are not going to stand for it.

      What are you talking about? How are they risking those revenue streams? It doesn't matter how many mistakes they make like this, or how awful the Windows experience becomes: users (especially businesses) simply *will not* abandon the Windows platform, no matter what. It makes ze

      • I wouldn't say never. We're looking at replacing our Exchange infrastructure in the next 2-3 years, and I said after I brought us up to Exchange 2010 that whatever moderate benefits Exchange offers, I wouldn't be pushing ahead with another version, and now that I'm in a management position with the authority to decide, I'm definitely not going to be staying with Exchange. At the moment the most likely route will be Google's offerings, and once we've broken away from Exchange-Outlook, I think it's likely tha

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Khyber ( 864651 )

          " At the moment the most likely route will be Google's offering"

          Enjoy Google sniffing and stealing your shit with their machine learning. I just learned they did exactly that to me and sold the knowledge out of my e-mail database to fucking China. How? One of my e-mails ended up getting re-routed and the idiot that received it did a reply-all, thus re-sending the stolen data back to me.

          Google is heavily invested in stealing your technology.
          Same way Spez is heavily invested in pleasing u/SuperAngryGuy (aka T

          • We have Windows 10. We're already handing mountains of data to MS, so what's the difference? And I've been using GMail for well over a decade and never experienced what you did.

      • Its called "Battered spouse" syndrome.. One spouse, often the man, but not always, beats the shit out of the weaker spouse, verbally abuses him/her, but said abused spouse won't leave the batterer because ...reasons... In this case, the battering "spouse" is Microsoft and the weaker "spouse", the millions of abused Windows 10 users (and their support staffs) who won't leave Microsoft behind because .....reasons.... A lot of us, were we to be on the recieving end of MS's abuse wouldn't put up with it... and

  • So the patch knocked computers off of the internet.

    How are they planning on patching them if they can't access the internet?

    What am I missing here?

    • Re:Update available! (Score:4, Funny)

      by subanark ( 937286 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:47PM (#53484929)

      Uninstall patch, then update?

      • Wish I could mod you funny... Maybe sad too?

        • 3rd party drivers break all the time. This is the standard solution (minus the update part).This gets attention as Microsoft is held to a higher standard than OEMs, and device manufactures.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        Not saying it works flawlessly, but rollback has been around since Windows 98. Linux? As of 2011 at least, the general consensus is reinstalling being faster than fixing the problem under Linux. Gee, that's the EXACT SAME SOLUTION for Windows.

        IOW, fucking useless.

        • I think uninstalling is faster than a rollback though. If you're using Windows, go to the "View Installed updates", right click on the one you don't want and select uninstall.

  • I'll just go online and download the patch...ohhh waaaaait.
    I run a computer repair company and saw this on 2 customer's computers. The fix was inconsistent too. Some responded to ipconfig commands, some didn't.

  • Windows 10: "It just wor*&3_!#dfr2($ carrier lost

  • I work at an ISP and we've been dealing with this for 4-6 weeks now. Of course customers tend to blame us why their Windows 10 computer won't connect to the internet, so we have to at least figure out a solution to keep them happy. A quick google brings up a solution where you clear a few caches to fix it. We've walked quite a few computer un-savvy people through the process, so it's not too difficult --just annoying.

    • Sue them for the costs to support your clients because of their bug and also for the damage to your company's reputation since you say your clients think it's your fault. If you could get all ISPs to do that they might do more testing before deploying an update.

    • If you were to switch to IPv6, wouldn't you automatically get rid of this problem? Since DHCP6 is completely different from DHCP, and not a part of the same stack. That way, you can have them set the router to either take DHCP6 or one of Windows 10's privacy extensions

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • And fix this bug - but they can't! They don't have an IP address!

  • Maybe they can still access http://www.trumpet.com.au/inde... [trumpet.com.au]

  • What a shitshow.... Grabs popcorn (Score:3)

    by LVSlushdat ( 854194 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:13PM (#53485117)

    Having dumped all MS products when I retired in 2010, and went 100% Linux, I sit back with a bowl of popcorn and laugh my butt off at how badly MS treats those unfortuate souls who *still* use MS products. Kinda reminds one of the "battered wife" syndrome where one spouse is abused by the other, but the abused spouse refuses to leave the relationship because ..reasons.. Believe me if I hadn't already dumped MS products, I sure as hell would NOW, no matter WHAT, after seeing what a "turd_in_the_punchbowl" Win10 is privacy-wise and just plain MS abuse...

  • According to a statement from Virgin Media, the issue affects "anyone who wants to access the Internet from a computer with the downloaded Windows 10 software update, regardless of the ISP."

    Phew! I was really concerned that it might only affect AOL users.

  • In admin command prompt:

    netsh int ip reset
    ipconfig /flushdns

    Presto.

    • Wrong, the actual fix is:

      ipconfig /release
      ipconfig /renew

      That's all it takes. Also, to prevent the problem until patched a user can disable fast boot in the Power Options.

  • We badly need a Software Consumers Bill of Rights (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LeftCoastThinker ( 4697521 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:32PM (#53485263)

    There are a lot of states where damaging someone's property is a crime and makes you both criminally and civilly liable. Unfortunately all the normal ambulance chasers who would quite rightly file class action lawsuits are scared of the MS legal team and deep pockets. We badly need a software consumers bill of rights to cover all for profit software. In this day and age computers are a mature field where people spend much of their lives. It is about time that the government enact some legislation recognizing this and protecting the citizens from predatory and/or fraudulent software companies. Among those rights:

    - Convert all software to be covered by copyright instead of patent law.
    - Limit software copyright to 20 years or 5 years after it is no longer for sale or the day and date when it is no longer supported, whichever is first.
    - Any software purchased by a consumer is covered by a standard set of rights that parallel ownership of a physical item where applicable or are spelled out in the bill of rights. EULAs are all illegal except between business entities.
    - Right of resale is retained by consumer for the physical copy or license key of the purchased software.
    - Consumer purchases allow unlimited installs by consumer on equipment they own or use. (Software must be removed from hardware prior to sale/donation).
    - Software must function offline unless that functionality requires an online connection.
    - Make it illegal for companies to remove functionality previously contained in software/hardware via update, except as a temporary security measure.
    - Developers are legally required to provide security and functionality patches to fix bugs and security holes discovered either internally or by security researchers for 5 years minimum after date of final sale without any strings attached. (Failure to do so implies that they intended to defraud the consumer by selling a broken/unfinished/dangerous product and could require refunding all customers and criminal fraud liability.)
    - Software updates should not be mandatory unless there is a clear, urgent reason for them to be. If a mandatory update causes the software to become unusable, the company must pay affected users $150/h spent dealing with the problem, cover cost of repairs, pay $60,000/year of lost documents (i.e. if it was 4 weeks since my last backup and all data since that backup is lost, developer is on the hook for $5000), and/or replace affected hardware, the combination of which is based on what it takes to get the system completely restored in a timely fashion.
    - Online software licenses/keys/virtual goods and the like have value to the customers who hold them and can be traded/bought/sold/transferred/inherited etc. If a consumer pays actual money either directly or indirectly for a virtual commodity, it can be handled in this way.
    - Source code for any and all software and back end servers for sale in the US must be provided to the library of congress in order to enjoy copyright protection. 5 years after that software is no longer for sale or the day that it is no longer supported, LOC should publish source code and the software becomes open domain.

    Note this only affects consumer software. Businesses can still do all the licensing and other more flexible arrangements.

  • ... then how do you download the update?

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