Help me with my wireless home network problem

Factual Questions
1

Ok, so I just moved into a rented room in a financial planner’s home. I’m trying to get connected to the internet.

She has a wireless network with a D-Link DI-624 wireless router. She has firewall stuff enabled in the D-Link. She doesn’t want to mess with her router because she works from home, and can’t fix anything if it gets messed up. Because she works from home, the firewall stuff is important to her.

I have a USB-based wireless adapter, the NETGEAR MA111v2. She has given me the WEP keys. She gave them to me in ASCII, and NETGEAR MA111v2 driver only allows hex entry, so I converted the ASCII to hex and input them, and miraculously, it connected.

The display on the NETGEAR MA111v2 app says that signal strength is good, is connected to her D-Link, is receiving packets, but when I open the IE browser, and try to connect to Google, I see a numeric IP at the bottom of the window, and it can’t find Google. Naturally her internet connection is fine.

The last place I lived, I had different problems with getting the NETGEAR MA111v2 to work with a D-Link router, which I never solved. Instead, I replaced the D-Link router with my own Linksys router, and it worked perfectly for everyone in the house.

Options:

  1. Is there some way for me to use arcane windows/D-Link/NETGEAR configuration to fix the problem?
  2. Is there some way for me to chain my Linksys router with the D-Link router, so that her firewall is unchanged, and I can connect through the Linksys (I’m not as worried about security)?

Thanks a bunch.

2

If you are able to connect to the wireless network with a decent signal strength, I would next suspect that somehow you aren’t getting the IP address from the router, or aren’t even asking. I’m assuming this is XP.

First, make sure your network card is set to ask the router for IP settings. Under the start menu, click “connect to”, and then “show all connections”. If you can’t find this, go to the control panel, and find network connections. Once in network connections, right click the wireless adapter and go to properties. Find “TCP/IP” in the list of protocols, highlight it, and click properties. Make sure both the IP address and DNS servers are set to be obtained automatically. If you had to change this, click ok all the way back out.

Now to find out if you are getting an IP address from the router. Under the start menu go to run. Type “cmd” (no quotes) and click OK. At the command prompt type “ipconfig /all”. Note the IP address, default gateway, and DNS servers.

If the IP address is 0.0.0.0 or starts with 169., then either the router isn’t configured to assign IP settings with DHCP or the problem is your wireless connection. To figure out which, check the settings on the working computer. If it’s set to get the IP settings automatically, then you have a wireless problem. If it has them statically assigned, then you will need to copy all the information, but will need to add 1 (or 2 or 3) to the IP address. You will also need to get the gateway setting from the advanced IP settings.

If you have a real IP address, which will probably start with 196. or 10., then you are definitely talking to the router. In the command prompt type “ping GATEWAY”, where GATEWAY is replaced with the default gateway from ipconfig. If you receive replies, instead of timeouts, then you’re on the network with the router and there’s problems either on your PC (firewall, virus scanner, spyware), or something on router is filtering you. If it’s the latter, nothing short of changing the router configuration is going to make it work.

Hope this helps.

3

In addition, if you’re not being assigned an IP via DHCP you may need to manually fill in the gateway and DNS servers under TCP/IP in your network adapter’s properties.

4

Scratch the 196, I meant 192.168.X.X.

5

Thanks nesta. I’m at work now, and I haven’t tried this, but this is the thing I haven’t tried yet (everything else you mentioned is good).

My PC has the default Windows firewall running, Norton anti-virus, and maybe some kind of spyware. My uncle set that stuff up, but I know it worked in the previous wireless network with my linksys router. Is it possible that it could specifically filter stuff from the D-link but not the linksys?

That leads me to believe that it is the D-link router. I have the admin password for that, so I can configure it. The former housemate mentioned something vague about an encryption password. Is it possible that this “encryption password” is something in addition to the WEP keys?

Thanks for any help.

6

If it isn’t an IP address / gateway problem, and your computer can’t surf on the D-Link, I doubt it would be able to on the linksys. The Windows firewall will always let you surf, unless you go to great lengths to break it. It’s been a while since I messed with the Norton firewall (I hate Norton AV with a passion), but I think it might be application based. It is very easy with application based firewalls to click “block” instead of “allow” and end up blocking all traffic to/from Internet Explorer or whatever browser you use. You might want to go through the Norton setup and see if it has a firewall enabled, and if so, see if you can reset it to the defaults.

The encryption password is the WEP key in this case, so if the wireless network says it’s connected, I think you’re in the clear there. I personally doubt it’s the D-Link router, since the other computer is working. It is very possible to configure most routers to break the internet connection for a specific PC, but this isn’t the default setting, so I doubt this is the case.

In addition to pinging the gateway, you might also want to ping www.yahoo.com. It should say something like:

If it says it couldn’t find the host, try pinging 68.142.197.76. It may say “request timed out”, which means there was no answer or the packet was dropped somewhere. To be safe, you should also try these pings from the working PC to verify your ISP isn’t dropping pings.

If you can ping the IP address, but not www.yahoo.com, then you have a DNS problem. If you can’t ping either, but you can ping the router, then it’s a routing problem. If you can ping both the hostname and IP, but can’t surf in your browser, then it’s probably Norton or spyware.

7

Thanks, that’s great information. I’ll try it out ASAP.

8

Actually in my experience on at least 6 different routers including Netgear and Linksys, it will always associate and even sometimes receive packets regardless if the WEP key is correct or no. If the WEP key is wrong, however, you will get a situation as described in the OP.

Note, that when a key is specified in ASCII as “jane123” i.e. password style, there’s usually an algorithm used to convert it to a 128-bit HEX WEP key. I.e. it hashes the ASCII “Wep Password” into a WEP key. This stuff would be router specific so I’d go on the web and see what you can find out about converting ASCII keys to HEX for a specific router.

9

Uh oh. There is this Microsoft wireless connection icon that goes into four+ states. They are “disconnected,” “scanning,” “connected,” and something like “no connectivity.” When I used a passphrase instead of the WEP Key, it ended up in the “no connectivity” state, but still sending/receiving packets. When I entered the WEP Key, I got to the “connected” state, so I assumed it was good. But I’d better check out how D-link hashes the ASCII WEP Password.

Thanks.

10

Yeah, I had assumed he was in the fully connected state. I’m not sure on the D-Link as I’ve mostly worked with the Linksys routers, but if you have the password to the D-Link you can probably log into the web interface and find the WEP keys. Look for a wireless security tab, or something like it. On a Linksys at least, it will have a place to enter the text passphrase, and then will have four hex hashes generated which will work. Of course don’t change anything, or the working PC will stop working.

11

Hey! I’m posting from home now!

It were the DNS Gateway – I stupidly had it set to the wrong one in my TCP/IP config. As soon as I removed the setting it automatically found it, and then I felt stupid because it was the same as the D-link configuration address. :smack: now I get it.

Thanks for all your help.