Vista RIP Listener

You can find plenty of posts out there on the way to add a RIP Listener to Vista (For sake of completeness: use the "Programs and Settings/Windows Features" to install it).

I'm writing about this because I had a specific need for the listener: I needed to troubleshoot some RIP publishing problems for our remote clients—clients that connect using XP's PPTP VPN capacity. Those clients use the XP RIP Listener, and I needed to be sure that changes being made to the RIP controls in the central VPN router weren't affecting those clients.

Well, I didn't have access to a remote system running XP, but I had remote access to my Vista machine (thanks to LogMeIn). I configured the VPN and added the RIP listener, but no route updates were being received.

Nuts.

So I fooled around with the Vista firewall, thinking that Port 520 might be blocked, but there was no joy.

Finally, I pulled up SysInternal's Process Explorer to make sure that the listener was running. Sure enough, the RIP Listener wasn't running under any of the svchost.exe instances. It dawned on my to look in the Services control panel, and lo, although it was set to run "automatically", it hadn't been started upon install.

I started it, and within 30 seconds, all the remote routes were in the routing table as desired.

I made the updates to the VPN router, saw my changes didn't break anything on my remote Vista box, and closed the case that started the whole thing.