[BC] Windows 7 networking

[Rob Landry]

Is it just me, or is Windows 7 networking this ugly?

Yesterday I had to move a computer from office B to office A, and install 
a second NIC on another machine to put it on the radio station's private 
LAN in addition to its parent organization's network. Both projects turned 
out to be hair-tearingly complicated, with colleagues insisting that the 
parent organization's IT people were blocking our access to the Internet.

Every time I've installed a second NIC on a Windows 7 machine, it has 
given me trouble. It'll pull an IP address and a gateway address from the 
DHCP server, but won't allow me to ping the gateway. It'll insist that the 
private network is "public" and "unknown", and won't allow me to change it 
to "work" or rename it. Merely moving a configured machine from one office 
to the next will cause it to think it is on a new, unknown, "public" 
network instead of the parent organization's "work" network (probably 
because the DHCP server assigns an address corresponding to the jack 
number in each office, even though they are all on the same subnet).

Solving the problem invariably involves making Win7 forget every network 
it's ever seen, disabling all the network interfaces, and re-enabling them 
one at a time, letting each one pull an address, labelling the parent 
organization's network as "work", and rebooting.

Has anyone else had trouble getting multiple NIC's to play nice with Win7? 
Or is it just me?

Linux networking is easier than this.

Rob