Wrong PC Name Shown

[rboynton]

Since upgrading to 6.5, I have a PC on my network that is not showing up with the correct name. At first I thought I had an intruder, but as I rebooted one PC, the name dropped off of the client activity list. I am using static IP assignments on all systems. A couple of the systems are set as assumed, and they show up properly.

When I changed the IP on the problem system, it showed up again (correct IP shown under properties), but the PC name changed to something else. It almost seems like WG is grabbing some old PC/IP associations and using that name. Has anyone else seen this?

[adrien]

Hi

Normally this can happen if you used DHCP originally to assign that address to another machine.

You can see if this is the case by looking in the registry under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Qbik Software\WinGate\DHCP\Leases

and find the subkey relating to the offending IP. It's safe to delete these keys and restart WinGate.

Adrien

[rboynton]

thanks, Adrien. I'll look into that. It seems to me that when a user disables DHCP that the software should go out and attempt to delete such entries automatically. Perhaps an enhancement in a future release?

[logan]

Having the client actually call up the DHCP server and cancel it's lease sounds like an awesome idea in theory, but unfortunately, to maintain interoperability between devices (i.e. supporting every serving all the other DHCP enabled devices in the world), you have to adhere to the practices and functionality already defined by the DHCP RFC. To think outside the box or add more functionality would require defining a new DHCP protocol which would then break interoperability with existing DHCP enabled servers and devices. This is the dillema of the established internet I'm afraid.

In saying that, what you COULD try is shortening the lease times. I think, by default, WinGate will hold a lease for 30 days. This means if a client gets an IP from WinGate, that client effectively owns that IP for 30 days and it won't be offered to any other clients. If the client leaves the network, and somebody else manually assigns that clients IP, then the new client with the manual IP will be seen as the original computer that obtained the DHCP lease by WinGate.

If you shorten the lease time to 1 hour, then after an hour is up and the client leaves the network, that IP address is then free to be used by somebody else. Ultimately, as long as all the clients use DHCP and none are set manually (or at least make sure the IP's that are manually assigned are exempt from DHCP in WinGate) then there should be no problems at all since WinGate will keep track of all the IP's it's assigning ;).