Hi all! My company has both a wired and a wireless network. XP's
"Automatic Metric" feature sets the interface metric on the routes for
both network connections to "20" by default. This causes a problem
when a user wants to be on the wired network but has their wireless
card enabled...in effect they most often end up on the wireless
network.
To get around this we implemented the "003 Microsoft Default Router
Metric Base" server option on our Windows 2000 DHCP server (for the
wired network) and set the value to "0xa" (10). That way, clients
would choose the wired interface over the wireless which was still set
to "20". Everything seemed to work just fine for 6 months or so.
I just replaced my old Windows 2000 DHCP server with a new Windows
2003 DHCP server and set up DHCP the same way but some of the clients
are not getting that metric setting. When I do a "route print" I see
the default "20" metric on about 50% of my client machines. All other
scope and server options are coming down just fine...except for that
one for some reason.
FYI...All clients are WinXP and it doesn't appear to be related to
DHCP scope, hardware or SP level (yes, some are testing SP2) as none
of these are commom threads.