I want to write a random woolgathering post about how all various things are happening in the world and thoughts are occurring in the mind of the Ultimate Ground of Being and all, but right now I’m going to write about a Microsoft Windows thing, because well there it is right there.
There are many places on the Internets where people are asking or complaining or telling about an error message like “One or more network protocols are missing from this computer” and/or the associated “Windows sockets registry entries required for network connectivity are missing”, presented by various different “Microsoft Windows” operating systems, often but not always after making some change to the system (like being fooled into upgrading to Windows 10, for instance), and finding that networking isn’t working (haha!) through one or more channels through which it ought to be.
In my case it happened after I put a nice little Ethernet splitter in the basement (between the house modem-thing (cable or phone company or something I always forget) and the little boy’s room where the PS/4 or 5 or 7 is, which is there because the WiFi doesn’t really reach quite to that end of the house) and ran another Ethernet cable from that into the Maid’s Room (we don’t actually have a maid, but maybe someone did once), and plugged the end of that cable into an Ethernet-to-USB adapter, and that into a USB port on this laptop here, because really the WiFi doesn’t reach all that well into the Maid’s Room either, at least not if I’m lying comfortably back on the little bed there ’cause I’m staying up late in WoW or Second Life or whatever.
Anyway! After doing all of that plugging, Windows saw that it had an Ethernet connection, but it couldn’t get to the Internet through it, and the reasons that it gave were the (misleading, erroneous, and generally unhelpful) messages above, there. The little boy’s PS/whatever worked fine, even after replugging of things to make sure it wasn’t a bad port on the splitter or something, so I suspected Windows.
After trying all various suggestions that I found on the Internets (via the WiFi connection, while not lying back too far) and the YouTubes (why do people make videos of things that could just as easily be written down?), involving resetting things and restarting things, none of which worked, I clicked down into more menus in Windows, and found what the problem was in my case.
All modern client computers (that is, everything but servers managed by professional IT persons and their close equivalents) these days get their IP addresses assigned by asking the network for a conveniently-free one. But clicking down into the “Properties” of the “TCP/IP V4” or whatever thing listed under the Ethernet connection in the “Change settings of this connection” in the “Network Connections” section of the Windows Configuration maze, I found that the “Use the following IP address” box was checked, and that there was no IP address following it.
Checking “Obtain an IP address automatically” instead (and also “Obtain DNS server addresses automatically”, which also wasn’t checked) fixed the networking problem pretty much instantly. Something that had nothing whatever to do with missing network protocols, or Windows Socket registry entries, and that apparently, despite being blindingly obvious in retrospect, none of the various “Troubleshooters” that I’d run on the way there had thought to do.
Pheh!
tl;dr: If you have the “One or more network protocols are missing” and/or “Windows sockets registry entries required for network connectivity are missing” problems on your Windows computer, drill down into the TCP/IP properties of the network connection in question, and make sure “Obtain an IP address automatically” and “Obtain DNS server addresses automatically” are checked. (Unless for some reason you don’t want them to be, in which case make sure that the proper IP addresses are in fact filled in!)
And Windows’ error messages and troubleshooters are really very bad.
ceoln 