During a scheduled disaster-recovery test, a systems administrator finds that a new Windows Server 2022 VM can successfully ping every host on the 10.10.10.0/24 subnet but receives Destination host unreachable when pinging any other company subnet such as 10.10.20.15 or 172.16.0.5. A snippet of the VM's ipconfig /all output is shown:
Local Windows Firewall is disabled and DNS resolution works for hosts on the local subnet. Which change will most likely enable the VM to reach the remote subnets?
Change the subnet mask to 255.0.0.0 so all private IP ranges are treated as local.
Update the NIC driver to clear any corrupted ARP cache entries.
Add 10.10.10.1 as the VM's default gateway in the NIC IPv4 settings.
Disable IPv6 on the adapter to prevent dual-stack routing conflicts.
A host must have a reachable default gateway to forward packets that are destined for IP networks outside its own subnet. Because the Default Gateway field is blank, the server has no Layer-3 next hop, so it can only communicate within 10.10.10.0/24. Configuring 10.10.10.1 (an address on the same subnet that is owned by the upstream router) gives the VM a route of last resort and immediately restores connectivity to every remote subnet.
Changing the subnet mask to 255.0.0.0 would still not include networks such as 172.16.0.0, so the problem would persist.
Disabling IPv6 has no effect on IPv4 routing for this issue.
Updating the NIC driver does not address the absence of a gateway entry.
Therefore, adding the correct default gateway is the required fix.
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What is a default gateway, and why is it important?
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What does the subnet mask 255.255.255.0 indicate?
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Why wouldn't changing the subnet mask or disabling IPv6 solve this problem?