Yesterday was a pretty good day for me as I passed the Managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment exam I had been studying for a few months and straight away I got to put my new skills to the test. A phone call from Phrixus with a strange networking problem he was having when Dave was connecting his PC to the main DLink router. Basically whenever Dave’s PC was plugged in, internet connectivity went completely from other client PCs on the network and the router needed to be rebooted. After swapping out cards and cables and running a pretty exhaustive series of tests it was discovered that there was a process called mDNSResolver.exe running in task manager. A quick end process tree on that process and a reboot of the router and everything worked fine until the process was started again at the next reboot. The exe file and a couple of DLL files where tracked down to a Bonjour installation. It seemed as though Bonjour had been installed and not quite removed properly as it was still in the services list.
A quick bit of tidying up later and Dave’s computer was running perfectly although none of us could seem to offer an explanation as to why the network went so badly wrong when a pc running Bonjour on it.