Another question for the IT hive mind!

[lizwilliams]

Be patient with me. I may not know what I'm talking about.

T has set up a wireless router. This worked yesterday on both laptops, but has since stopped working, citing a conflict in IP address. As far as I understand it, there's a fixed IP address attached to the router. He says he does not know how to set the IP address on the laptops (2 are PC, mine is a Mac). Can anyone help?

Comments

[timill]

They should be set up to get their addresses from the router. In XP, this is in the network properties; don't know about Macs.

But posting this should prompt others into adding the details...

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! I'll pass this on to T and await other info.

[catherinew.livejournal.com]

I'm not a techie, but our home wireless network has this same problem every so often. Not always, and we don't know why it happens, but it does.

I have written down an elaborate series of steps to take when this happens, involving "cloning my PC's Mac" (it is not a Mac, nor do we own one), and various other arcane steps, possibly including the blood of live chickens. I would be happy to PM you *my* series of steps, but I don't have any idea whether it would actually work on your network, which is presumably quite different from ours. (We have a Linksys router, fwiw.)

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

In this context, "Mac" means "the hardware address used by the network interface." Something like 11:22:33:aa:bb:cc.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

For the PCs (I'm not a Mac expect, sorry). On XP, access the "Network connections" through the Settings Panel. Right-click your wireless connection, and choose "properties". In the middle of the window that opens is a "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)", and if you ask for the properties of that, it should have a series of IPs (gateway, DNS, etc). There's a little thing at the bottom that says something like "get the addresses automatically" (or DHCP, I can't remember right now). If you uncheck that, you can set your IPs manually.
You'll need the IP address of your gateway (your router, I think), your DNS (that's given by your internet provider), and a mask. Er. Not sure about the sub-network mask.
Maybe someone else knows more?

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for all your advice! I'll pass it on to the domestic IT staff when he gets home. Meanwhile, the mac laptop has suddenly started talking to the network again.

Blood of live chickens sounds about right. Maybe Mercury has shifted position??

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Do you think you might be using dynamic addresses? They renew periodically, which might explain the sudden recovery. If that's the case, it might be possible to fix the problem on the PCs by opening a command prompt window and running the command "ipconfig /renew"

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

Do you have a wireless telephone on your land line? It may be operating on the same channel as your router. I had to do this. Can't tell you how to do it but tech support from the maker should.

Good luck.

[cherylmmorgan.livejournal.com]

I've had this happen to me too, and one lesson I learned was never to have both wired and wireless networking running on the same machine at the same time. I used to keep my laptop wired in most of the time, because wired was faster and more reliable, but keep the wireless up in case I ever needed to move it away from my desk. This turned out to be a Bad Idea.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

For Macs - those running Tiger, anyway - it's this:
1. Start System Preferences.
2. Click on Network, under Internet & Network.
3. Select TCP/IP tab.

There you can find the configuration options to set your IP address manually (like wot I have), or via DHCP (getting your router to allocate the addresses). For an easy life where your laptops live at home, you can allocate all these addresses manually, then forget it. Right up to the point where you're *not* at home, and someone else has a different network config.

Another point is that, by default, AirPort (the Mac wireless thingie) will hunt for other networks (this same tab will have "Location" set to "Automatic"). This might mean you've connected to someone else's system. The AirPort icon in the menu line at the top of the screen (the signal-strength icon) has a drop-down menu showing the network to which it's connected.

Finally, someone else might be connected to yours. I have my router configured to only accept connections from machines I own. This means knowing your machine's "Mac" network interface address. Still in the Network part of System Preferences, click on the Airport tab; it'll show the "AirPort ID", which will look like aa:11:bb:22:cc:33, or something like that. That's the MAC address you type into your router configuration, if you want to lock freeloaders out.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Thank you all very much! T is now back and I've passed on all your comments to him to play around with tomorrow morning.

He says we had DHCP (sp?) (dynamic assignment) and now can't get it to work, 'don't ask him why!'

More later. We're really grateful for all this.

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

It's an oddness of the whole network thingie.

Basically you need to be sure the router is aware that it's supposed to hand out IP addresses (if you're doing DHCP) and that your machines know to pick them up once handed out. If at any point those two things aren't happening then it'll get all wacked out.

ADD IN the fun of having a provider.. and it gets entertaining. My provider, for example, requires our machines be registered as ours. We only got so many machine addresses (two, in fact) capable of hooking up from our house. So I had to set it up so our router's machine ID was one of them. Our provider won't see past that router so I can hook up (and have right now three) more machines through it.

One of those is a wireless port. And I have it all kinds of secure so only my machines can hook up to it, the network it creates is hidden and password protected on top of that. So yay me.

Anyway. If T changes things so IP addresses are static, make sure all bits of the network are aware of the change.

But you've pretty much gotten all kinds of great advice. Keep us updated, k?

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Uh-oh, it sounds to me as if the router has forgotten the configuration or something of that it.

I say that because Wed. at work I went over to a set of machines which are on their own router and each of the computers was complaining about a conflict... two were on DHCP, one on manually sets values, and the third had one interface on DHCP and the other set manually (some of the product requirements involve multiple network interface handling on the same computer). The IP addresses showing were 0.0.0.0 That is NOT what they had been the last time I looked at the setting. I tried changing things,pulled the power on the router and that didn't fix the problem, and finally gave up, sending email to the coworker who'd set up the router.

(I did't trying mucking around with the router other than pulling the plug to power cycle it in hopes that it would recover from whatever braindead lobotomy had seemed to have occurred to it. Again, didn't efect any real change when I repowered it)