Updates? What updates?

I’m experimenting with running our standard desktop Windows 7 image as a Hyper-V guest on my laptop. The laptop has Windows 8.1 installed. This means I can do the day-to-day stuff on Windows 8.1 and just switch to the VM when I need to check the experience for the users. There’s no good reason for me to be stuck on old technology just because our environment is always way behind, especially when there’s so much goodness in Windows 8!

It went pretty smoothly. Even though the laptop host OS isn’t a member of the corporate domain it lets the traffic through OK so the guest can join the domain. I had to ask the infrastructure team to update the network switch to allow the additional MAC address. Seems like an outdated security solution, especially given that MAC address spoofing is so easy, but whatever.

The image itself then network installed into the VM (I think we use SCCM for the network installs). The image includes Office 2013 and some other bits and bobs, so after a while I’m good to go.

However, the network icon in the notification tray indicates I have no internet connection, even though I do, and can Google quite happily.

I didn’t expect this to be a problem, but it actually is as some Office stuff, such as OneNote, will not open your SkyDrive notes. Instead we get some twee message about helping me get online. Outlook won’t open SharePoint tasks from their notification emails either.

Initially I thought this might be because IPv6 is on by default, and I know our infrastructure isn’t happy with that, so I disable that on the Hyper-V virtual switch. Still no joy.

Then I wondered if it was because I left my WiFi on the host as well as the plugging in the network cable, but disabling that didn’t fix it either.

Some Googling gets me to a suggestion that this might happen because of outdated network drivers, but this is a guest VM so uses the Hyper-V drivers from Microsoft. Automatic Updates are switched on so we should be up to date.

But I forgot about the “context”. I’m using someone else’s infrastructure, and in this case it’s configured to get updates locally, but never actually gets any updates. I forget what the backstory here is. I’ve a funny feeling they had WSUS installed at some point, but then abandoned it. I manually kick off the update process and tell it to ask Microsoft. 70 important updates are ready for me to download. It does most of these, then stops for a reboot.

When it comes back, sure enough, the VM now detects its internet connection correctly.

UPDATED: Boo. Following an overnight shutdown and restart the VM is back to “no internet connection” again.