Odd Wireless Problem

Froggitt

I have had a 3Com Officeconnect ADSL Wireless Firewall Router and a laptop with a wireless card, and I had a PC with an ethernet conenction, and it was all fine. I then put a wireless PCI card in the PC, and since then I have had problems with both the PC and the laptop "acquiring network status" - ie it seems only one of them at a time can connect.....the other one has had its IP address revoked.

Ive changed the router to give a permanent lease on the DHCP IP address, but it still happens.....the second device that tries to connect has no IP address.

After much fiddling (removing Windows Firewall, restarting various services etc) Ive found that the only way to have them both connect is to power both devices on, and then to reboot the router.....theyre currently both OK as I speak after doing this.

Any thoughts?

Toxteth_OGrady

Disable DHCP and manually assign fixed permanent IP addresses to the PC and laptop.

Alternatively right click the connection status icons on both the PC and laptop and click repair.

:cool:

TOG

Froggitt

Hi TOG - its not a broadband issue - its an internal LAN issue - the router acquires its IP fine from the ISP - its just the PC and Laptop IP address acquisition from the router (the 192.168 address).

Repair does nothing to help.

And the DHCP lease was not up and yet it had no IP address.

Toxteth_OGrady

its not a broadband issue - its an internal LAN issue

I know lol

When your router has DHCP enabled it automatically assigns internal IP addresses to the other devices on the LAN and acts as the gateway between those multiple LAN IPs and its single ISP assigned public IP address through Network Address Translation (NAT).

You can however in your router set-up disable DHCP. Because it's the gateway its LAN IP address is usually fixed at something like 192.168.1.254.

You can however go to the Properties of the network connection on each PC in turn and select TCP/IP Properties. You will see in there that the default for the connection is "Obtain IP address automatically."

Select the alternate "Use the following IP address" and enter it manually. So for PC 'A' use something like 192.168.1.100 and for PC 'B' use 192.168.1.200.

Subnet and gateway would then be 255.255.255.0 and 192.168.1.254 (or whatever your router's fixed LAN IP address is).

Then put in your router's LAN IP address for the DNS server.

:cool:

TOG

Froggitt

Cheers TOG - I'll try that.

Frog