Unable to PING under Windows 10 anymore

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About a month back, my main workstation updated itself to Windows 10 Creators Edition overnight.

I really didn’t even notice it at the time.

However, over the last month, I’ve had several bits that had been working stop for unexplained reasons.

The most recent that I could no longer PING other machines (specifically a RaspberryPiZero W) on my network. Worse, at least in this particular case, was that I couldn’t PUTTY into it iether.

However, I could browse to a Samba share I’d set up on the Pi and view it just fine.

After a LOT of gnashing of teeth, I discovered that for some reason, the PING hostname lookup had become CASE SENSITIVE!? What? DNS lookups should never be case sensitive.

Sure enough, though,

ping pictureframe

failed but

ping PICTUREFRAME

worked just fine.

Further, using the UPPERCASE version in Putty worked, but using the lowercase version failed.

There’s a ton of posts about this very thing, with equally as many ideas on how to fix it.

I really did not want to write up yet another BAT file and add it to my startup process, so I kept digging.

The Simple Solution

Turns out, I had IPV6 disabled in Network Properties. Turning it on fixed the lookup, even in IPV4 mode.

To do this:

  1. Got to Settings/Network/Change Adapter Options/
  2. Right Click on the network adapter in use and Click Properties.
  3. Scroll down till you find Internet Protocol Version 6
  4. Click the checkbox to enable it and close all the Setting windows.

In my case, it didn’t even take a reboot.

Granted, now, when I do a ping, I usually get a very unfriendly IPV6 address, but that’s easily remedied by using

ping computername -4

On to the next problem!

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