Ok, this weekend we saw a bunch of fud on the issue of the 10 connections through TCP/IP in windows XP sp2 and how some people thought that it would limit their connections to P2P applications. Alot of the infomation that was spreaded was not true, in fact it was very similar to the similar fud that came out about QoS in windows XP in how it allegedly limited bandwidth for itself (news flash, it dosn't) so im here to set the record straight. Feel free to archive this in a faq somewhere.
1. First order of business.
the new TCPIP.sys file DOES NOT LIMIT MAX CONNECTIONS OUT! I dont care if you connected to kazaa before and after you did the patch it wont make any difference on the amount of people you are connected to. Likely the people who saw a drop in connections are having issues with the new XP firewall. if you need proof do the following.
surf for a while. go to a command prompt and type in 'netstat -a' a lot more than 10 connections eh?
What actually is going on is that windows is now queueing up the amount of connections it will make in a second. an example of this is say that program X wants to make 100 connections in one second, but the max allowed out is 25, windows will send out 25 per opening. To tell you the truth a fair amount of modems in general do the same thing in hardware. its not createing lag, it wont prevent you from connecting, its all to prevent network congestion. Did you know that some Blaster infected machine sent out as many as 3,000 connections per second? Now you see why they did it. now the possibility of millions of XP machines online all broadcasting a virus wont slow the entire web down similar to what happened then.
2. But Event 4226 is filling out my logs, that must be bad right? NO. its fine. what the event is telling you is that its queueing connections. Use this as a tool, if you see this coming often and you are not doing anything that can cause it to sometimes occur like P2P apps check your system out! I can guarantee that half the people who say "I use common sense so I dont need AV" were most of the people coming here crying because their machine was rebooting when blaster hit. Be a responsible Netizen and keep your machine in check!
3. I dont care, I still want to patch. Thats fine. just remember to keep your system in check, if you are running a server you probably definitely want to do it if you want to maximize capacity. The widely circulated way of going into the registry to fix the problem does not work as its for something entirely different and only deals with Internet Explorer. The only way that you can change this is to edit out tcpip.sys. The site at the moment that has correct info is
http://www.lvllord.de/index2.htm He provides a patch that you must run in safe mode that will update the stop to 50 connections. For most people even hardcore users this is good enough. it wont help you if you go to unlimited connections and will only cause you to spread whatever you have if your caught unpatched on the next big virus. He also provides the correct keys if you still want to go unlimited.