This morning I opened the flap of my laptop and windows started resuming from hibernation. I noticed that all resources on the machine were getting consumed and eve after good 10 minutes the machine did not recover completely and CPU usage was still 100%. Instead of waiting any more I did a hard reboot of the laptop. After restart, I started getting all kind of weird error messages thrown at me. Errors that I have never seen before. The network service failed, event notification service failed, networking was not working and all kind of errors related to network. I thought my network slots on mother board has failed. So I decided to plug-in wireless broadband network modem to get connected. Well there was surprise I get error "Windows Sockets could not be initialized". Well that was kind of indication that something is seriously busted now. I did the usual routine of trying to run machine in safe mode. Well, i could not access event logs as well for any errors at that point because it complained about event log service not being started on the machine.

Since I was getting WinSock initialization error from my broadband card connectivity so I decided to reset WinSock stack on my machine. I ran the following command from command line.

netsh winsock reset

When the command started running first message I got in the console was saying nitialization function INITHELPERDLL in IPMONTR.DLL failed to start with error code 10107. That is very typical message you will see when winsock stack is corrupted. The command ran for few seconds and then I restarted the machine as it asked me to. That fixed the whole issue for me.

Once the machine started normally, I was able to look into System event log. Well, there was huge number of network related errors from last night. Some of the errors were:

• A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Net.Tcp port Sharing Service service to connect.
• The network location awareness service terminated
• The IP helper service terminated
• The network link is down

How this information helps you if you are running into similar issues on your machine.

Some time back I wrote an article on similar topic How to get IP address of a machine using C#. That article was written in days of .Net1.1. Since then .Net framework has come a long way. Some APIs were deprecated and a lot of new APIs were added. This post is an update on that old article. While I was working on a silverlight socket programming project, I had to deal with lot of Networking APIs. During that process I ended up writing a new method that returns me list of local IP addresses and presenting that to user to decide on what IP address they want to run socket server. Hope this post provides a quick coding tip on how you can get local IP address of your machine.

Private Function GetIPs() As StringCollection
 Dim localIP = New StringCollection()
 Dim localHostName = Dns.GetHostName()
 Dim hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(localHostName)
 ' Grab all ip addesses.
 For Each ipAddr As IPAddress In hostEntry.AddressList
  localIP.Add(ipAddr.ToString())
 Next
 GetIPs = localIP
End Function

Pardon my VB.Net code. I am not very intimate with this language. You can find C# code at old article location

If you are using Verizon Wireless Broadband Access you may run into this problem some time. After you disconnect from wireless broadband and try to use LAN access or wireless network at home or work, internet explorer refuses to connect to any URL. But if you use any other browser like FireFox or Chrome, you can connect to internet. From what I have seen, VZAccess Manager adds an entry in Internet Explorer's connections options for Broadband Access. And modifies other settings in there so that Internet Explorer can only connect when you are connected to wireless broadband. To fix this problem, following the following steps.

• Launch IE
• From menus goto Tools > Internet Options > Connections tab.
• In Dial-up and Virtual Private Network settings section, you will see an entry for NationAccess-BoradbacnAccess and may be some others as well if you have other dial up connections configured on your machine. Remove these entries.
• Hit OK and then try to connect now.

Following image shows how Connections tag entries may look like before fixing it.

I have been using CISCO VPN client to connect on Windows Vista to my work for more than a year. All of a sudden I started getting following error.

I searched around to find cause and solution to this problem. It seems that a lot of people have come across this issue on Windows Vista at some point or the other. There are different solutions provided for this problem but it looks that there is no one silver bullet that kills this error. I went through process of trial and error with different solution. And found that there is one solution works most of the time.

• Open list of your Network connections from control panel
• Set the connection for VPN to Disable state.
• Now connect with VPN client.