NetSetMan Support

Giom

Member

Registered: 2009-08-23

Posts: 2

Gateway Metric

Hello

I've been testing NSM 2.6.0 today and I noticed that the gateway metric never gets set to 'Automatic' !
I created 2 profiles. One is 'DCHP' and one is 'static IP'.
The 'DHCP' profile works great.
The 'static IP' profile always set the gateway metric to1 whenever I set it to blank or 0 in NSM.
I don't know much about gateway metric but I know that Vista default value is 'Automatic'. So how come doesn't NSM provide a way to set this way ?
What is the limitation of having the gateway metric set to 1 ?

Thank you

NetSetMan Support

Administrator

Registered: 2005-08-06

Posts: 1,878

Re: Gateway Metric

The metric specifies which network route to prefer. Possible values are 1 - 9999. The higher the value the less it is preferred.

Unfortunatelly Microsoft doesn't provide a way to set the gateway metric to "automatic" for 3rd party software. (at least there's no documented way).

As long as you don't have different network interfaces working at the same time with different gateways there's no difference at all which metric you have specified.
If you do have, you very likely would want to set the metrics manually, anyway. And even if not, you will end up having the same metric for all possible routes which will make Windows decide itself which route is the better one.

To shorten it up: The way it is working now you won't notice any difference.

Giom

Member

Registered: 2009-08-23

Posts: 2

Re: Gateway Metric

Hello Ilja

First of all, I'd like to thank you for your detailed reply.

Next, I've been looking further more on this matter. And after doing some tests, I found a way to set the gateway metric to 'Automatic'.
I'm using Vista SP2 and running the following command line as an administrator did change the gwmetric from 1 to 'Automatic' :
netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Wireless Network Connection" static 192.168.1.10 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 0

Seems like the 0 value is the key here ! But when we set the gateway metric to 0 in NSM then NSM keeps setting gwmetric to 1 instead.
Do you think there is a chance you can fix this 'bug' in a next version of NSM ?

NetSetMan Support

Administrator

Registered: 2005-08-06

Posts: 1,878

Re: Gateway Metric

netsh.exe is a built-in tool from Microsoft. It uses some functionality that is not documented and therefore not accessable by third-party software developers. At least I didn't find a way to do so.

Of course it would be possible to use the netsh command internally but it would bring lots of disadvantages. Therefore that's not a real solution for NSM. As soon as I find a solution I will implement it, of course.

However, I'd like to point it out again: There's no noticable difference to the current solution. Simply don't worry about the '1'.