Disable Windows TCP/IP Routing Automatic Metric Calculation Feature

TCP/IP, which Internet depending on, is a packet switching network that relies on routing to get data packets forward and transmit to the destination address. Routing, or routeing, is a process of selecting paths in the network along intermediate nodes such as routers, bridges, gateways, firewalls, switches, or hubs, which to send network traffic.

During routing, the selection of path is based on a routing metric, if there are more that one routes to the destination, such as in computers with multiple network cards. Path selection selects or predicts the best and optimized route metric wihch is computed by a routing algorithm which takes into account information such as bandwidth, network delay, hop count, path cost, load, MTU, reliability, and communication cost.

In Windows, metric calculation is automatically been done for each network interface or connection available. In the automatic metric calculation does not result in best network performance and routing cost, user can disable the automatic metric calculation feature and manually set a metric value.

How to Disable Automatic Metric Calculation Feature

1. Click Start -> Control Panel -> Network Connections (In Windows Vista, go to Network and Sharing Center -> Manage network connections).
2. Right click on Local Area Connection or other desired link such as wireless network connection or other renamed connection, and select Properties.
3. Under the list box of This connection uses the following items box, select the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) or Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6), and then click on Properties.

   Note: Select IPv6 only if your network is using the new IP protocol.

4. In the IP Protocol Properties dialog, click on Advanced button.
5. There are a few tabs in Advanced TCP/IP Settings dialog window: IP Settings, DNS, WINS and/or Options. Go to IP Settings tabl.
6. Uncheck the Automatic metric checkbox located after IP addresses and default gateways sections to disable the automatic metric calculation feature.
7. In the text box of Interface metric, enter a metric value between 1 and 9999.
8. Click OK to close all dialog windows and save the changes.
9. Display the routing table with route print command to confirm that the change has taken effect.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 2:13 am and is filed under Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.