[wpkg-users] Server connection failed with RealTek cards

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Tomasz,

Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> Florian Effenberger schrieb:
>> on new machines with Realtek 8111/8168 Chipsets (Gigabit PCI Express),
>> we're having issues with WPKG Client on Windows XP Professional SP 3.
[...]

> Oh, cool. Finally someone has identified a piece of hardware which 
> allows to reproduce this problem.

It could be related to broken drivers only. As far as I remember I had a 
similar problem some years ago with some 3Com OnBoard NIC (Or was it a 
Marvel Yukon, I don't remember exactly). However the problem was that if 
I logged on immediately after the logon prompt appeared, then the 
roaming profiles have not been loaded from the server and an error was 
displayed that you're logged on with a temporary local profile. When I 
was waiting for a couple of secondes (30s to 1 minute) it worked fine.

I remember that once I found a MS KB entry clearly stating that this is 
a bug of the NIC drivers. They were simple behaving the wrong way. 
Something like rejecting requests on the interface while initializing 
instead of queuing them.


The only solution was a fixed NIC driver (or manually wait a while at 
the logon prompt). For my specific NIC it was solved after some driver 
releases. Until then I used the second NIC (different Chip/Driver) on 
the same Board.

If this is somehow related there are three possibilities to resolve the 
issue:
- Update NIC drivers to latest release and hope it's fixed
- Change NIC/Driver (put a second NIC into the computer)
- Change WPKG Client to impose an optional "initial wait" to the client.
   This will extend logon wait time by some seconds.
   Unfortunately the required time might depend on other services, load
   and system performance.

br,
Rainer