How Vista Sees the World

I have a list of User-Agent strings I’m reviewing that I collected at a client site. I’m trying to normalize and classify each of them for a project at work, and I ran across this one- User-Agent: microsoft ncsi

It was the 65th most popular user agent string generated in a large enterprise environment where a web browser or Operating System wasn’t identified. We are still talking about a thousand or so hits on this particular string. I’d never really heard of it and began to do some research.

That little globe icon that shows up whenever you have an Internet connection in Vista or Windows Server 2008? That is what happens when the NCSI, or Network Connectivity Status Indicator service on these operating systems work. Simply put, your host, upon sensing network connectivity will attempt to resolve DNS to “msftncsi.com” and then do a get request with the user-agent string above to a popular text file on that site. You can browse to it yourself by clicking http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt

If Vista can see that text file, it posts the little globe over your network status icon. So.. is that cool or gay? I’m thinking gay.