Monday, July 14, 2008

Default Gateway of 0.0.0.0 in Vista

Strange one just occurred - woke up my machine from sleep, and plugged in the various cables in no particular order.  Everything looked good, except no network access.  Could ping the local network (including the gateway), but nothing outside of that.  Everyone else on the same subnet was seeing external IPs just fine. 

A quick investigation with IPConfig showed that I had two default gateways, once with the correct address but another with an address of 0.0.0.0.  And it was the one that was first in the list.

No idea where it came from - Vista does use that address if you are using dial-up networking, but I wasn't (although my mobile was plugged in through USB to charge it, so perhaps it is related in someway).  Anyhow - that was clearly the problem, so it was just a case of getting rid of the rogue gateway address.

Tried "ipconfig /renew".  Tried "ipconfig /release" then "ipconfig /renew".  Tried unplugging network cables, mobile phones etc.  No luck.  Reboot was looking likely.  Last attempt was to use netsh.  Success :)

For those of you who may get stuck in a similar situation, here's the netsh rune that you need to cast:

netsh interface ipv4 delete address "Local Area Connection"
addr=a.b.c.d gateway=0.0.0.0

where a.b.c.d is your local IP address.  netsh can do just about anything to your local network config - well worth some exploration if you're *really* bored.

11 comments:

eXist said...

Perfect, had the same problems after connecting a computer straight to my dsl modem in preparation of dealing with tech support. I noticed the 0.0.0.0 above the default gateway that was set both statically and dynamically and figured I'd be removing it with netsh, but I wanted to check on the net for others that this happened to. Thanks.

Matthew Frahm said...

I started having this problem lately, too. I found that disabling/re-enabling the NIC worked as a bandaid, but why does this happen in the first place?

I saw some mention of a similar problem in KB 933872, but that hotfix is included in SP1, which I've had installed for a while now.

I only have one NIC on the desktop in question, so this is perplexing.

Anonymous said...

thanks men u r great

Anonymous said...

That did the trick! Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Saw this on another forum when googling for the problem. User created a batch file since it happened so often. The solution looks a tad shorter than the net sh command, so I figured you might be interested:


@echo off
route delete 0.0.0.0
ipconfig /renew
exit

Anonymous said...

Tanks, this Fixed my problem.

I hope more people find this website right away. Here are some search terms I tried. Maybe google will pick them up even more:

Vista default gateway 0.0.0.0
Vista multiple network connections
VIsta local mode only

Anonymous said...

Please refer to the following two KBs and see if it is applicable..
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970313
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/933872/en-us

Anonymous said...

GOOD GOD THANK YOU MAN! I've been trying for days to fix this and it did the trick...well done...well done.

Sanaa said...

clearly, I'm a noob. I have this problem but I have no idea how to do what you are saying. I do follow directions well though, could you please break it down in uber laymens terms? step by step. I have no idea where to find this gateway default much less a netsh. Thanks

Anonymous said...

Nice. Had this issue on Server 2008 RC 2.

This fixed worked perfectly.

Nice. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

I found the same problem, and also saw a lot of links talking about Adobe CS3 / Bonjour Service adding in the 0.0.0.0 route.

Lo and behold, yes I do have that service (but not named as Bonjour Service", but a service with a weird name, pointing at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe".

Will remove this service, and see if the 0.0.0.0 problem is cleared.