Nazeeh’s Little Corner on the Web

This has always been one of my pet peeves with Windows. There is no way through the UI to set multiple IPs on the same network card if you set the card to DHCP. If you set it to static IPs, you can do it through the UI and add as many IPs as you want. Once you switch to DHCP, you can’t add any other IPs.

This is very useful if you only have one network card and want to have it connect to multiple networks. To do that in Windows XP (I haven’t verified if it works on Vista or not yet), you need to do the following:

Edit your registry using “regedit.exe” and find the following keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\<interface>\IPAddress

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\<interface>\SubnetMask

<interface> will be GUID that you should be able to figure out which one is your network card by looking at the settings under it.

IPAddress and SubnetMask are multistring values. When you have DHCP on, they will have 0.0.0.0 in them both. Just add a new line with the IP and subnet masks you want to use on the same NIC. Reboot…and you’re done. Enjoy :)

Seriously… if you haven’t, you really should go check out http://www.opendns.com now! It’s this really cool site that lets you use a network of DNS servers that they created. The benefits are a lot, some of which are:

• Faster DNS lookup by far! Which translates to a faster web browsing experience. I verified this myself!
• Smarter DNS caching on their side.
• It will freaking SPELLCHECK urls you type! So something like www.hotmail.cmo will be autocorrected by them! How cool is that?
• It will warn you if you try to access any phishing sites.

All you need to do is update your router’s DNS entries to point to their DNS and that’s it! I love it! Do check it out.

Oh wow! Now that’s something I didn’t expect! I just downloaded Microsoft Windows Live Writer (link) which allows you to create posts to weblogs. I did not expect it to work with WordPress (the engine I use here). Not only did it work as you can see, but it did everything to autodetect the blog settings without me doing anything! Even the editing surface I am using looks just like the theme of my site! It actually pulled all that info from my blog! I just supplied my URL and user/pass and everything else happened automatically. This thing ROCKS!!!