Tech Tip
Today, like many, I was trying to watch the inaguration while at work. The campus has some TV channels that you can watch over the network using multicast. For some reason, I wasn’t able to make it work on my office computers. I tracked the problem down to having VMWare Workstation installed. It appears the “virtual” network that it installs was causing problems. The program to watch the stream would send out the subscribe multicast request, but it would go out the VM network, not the real one (and no, I wasn’t trying to watch this inside a VM).
My solution was to adjust the network properties to make Windows Vista prefer the real ethernet card. In the advanced settings of the TCPIP configuration, turn off “automatic metric” and set a value.