Or do they know which computer should be the primary machine?
I’ve got the cable modem connected to a Belkin Wireless G router (wireless disabled, the two machines are wired) and the primary pc is an XP machine. The secondary PC is a Win 98 machine.
When I set them up through the router about 18 months ago they both worked fine. We use the XP machine 95% of the time and recently the 98 machine would work online for only a few minutes after each restart and then I get a message saying that the “request is denied”. No matter what site I try to go to I get the same message, - request denied.
What would cause a request denied message?
Is it possible that Roadrunner can see my machines through the router and they don’t want people networking without paying for it? Not sure if they consider a do-it-yourself network a violation of the service agreement or not, but they do charge a fee for their techs to come out and install a network and then a monthly service fee from then on.
If I unplug the primary machine I still can’t access the internet for more than 5 minutes or so on the 98 machine. It’s like they’re teasing me by allowing a few minutes of browsing and then BAM, turn me off.
So, two things. Something is limiting the 98 machine from staying connected and whatever that is isn’t limiting the XP machine ever.
It matters not which ports on the router I use for either or both machines. Connecting directly to the modem doesn’t work either for the 98 machine, neither does using the USB connection.
Connecting directly to the modem doesn’t work either for the 98 machine, neither does using the USB connection.
This is your clue that it’s not Roadrunner, it’s the Windows 98 machine. There’s then nothing for anyone outside to distinguish it from another machine.
This might sound silly, but what you describe is one of the symptoms of a bad ethernet cable. Try running a known good cable to the 98 machine, or switch the cables and see what happens. I have Roadrunner and I have 2 compuers, 2 TiVos and Vonage all accessing the internet with no problems.
You should be able to ping your router no matter what your ISP does.
The only restrictions I’ve ever seen are for a max of 1 or 2 PCs directly connected to a modem… since you’ve only got the one router, your ISP neither knows, nor cares what’s going on behind it.
If it’s a local network problem, your ping test should fail.
Says you, but what If I lived in an apartment building and was giving my seven neighbors free access to the internet via a wireless router? Or what if I tapped the phone lines in the building and connected them to a wired router, thereby giving access to everyone in the building through my single Roadrunner account?
They really don’t have any way to limit this type of activity?
For what it’s worth, I’ve had applications cause onboard NICs to fail/lose the connection in situations where sturdier, $15 3COM cards didn’t. Perhaps try a new NIC?
That thought crossed my mind, but the thing does work, I mean, I have a connection, just not for long, and predictably only on startup. It just doesn’t work long. And the Access Denied thing has me thinking that someone or something is Denying my Access.
They don’t know where the walls start and stop in your building, is the person on your wireless router in the bedroom or the next apartment, they are clueless. The only clue they have is where all those packets are going and a household with a few teenagers could just as easily account for such traffic loads.
I have been pondering just such a thing in my apartment complex, couple access points, a few deposits for equipment, and away we go.
Cool, but did it do it to just one computer? or all of them on the router?
I’m talking to a fellow employee and he claims that his ISP provider (Charter, also a cable modem setup) can tell what kind of computers (like a Dell, or an HP) he has connected to their equipment through his router and then through their modem. He seems to think that they can id a machine and possibly deny access when that machine is on the net. They could do this to make you pay extra for their ‘network’ services.
Sound far fetched?
Folks, the way routers work (and the internet, for that matter) the ISP isn’t “sensing” that you have other computers connected to the internet at once. You purchase an IP number from your ISP. In the old days (before household routers) you had to purchase a separate IP address for each computer you wanted to hook up. However, the way NAT router works, your router gets the IP assigned by the ISP. It then creates a local network (you know, the 192.168.X.X thing) and “routes” outgoing and returning traffic to the appropraite local IP address.
It’s probably possible for an ISP to tell that all the requests aren’t coming from a single machine through some kind of packet analysis, but I assure you this isn’t happening.
Likely, but I hate throwing parts at a problem untill I know what parts to throw. I just wanted to find out if there were any teeth to my hunch that Roadrunner is somehow limiting my useage to just one computer.
Jayrot, what makes you so sure they aren’t ‘detecting’ a second machine and then preventing that machine from accessing?
Nope. As Jayrot indicates, it may be possible to tell some limited information by doing low-level packet analysis, but there’s zero chance they’re doing that.
It’s probably in your contract with them that you don’t go letting everyone on the 'net, mostly so you aren’t taking away any potential customers.
The only other reason they have to care is if you’re taking up excess bandwidth, something they’ll send you an email about if they end up caring. My ISP gives me at least 60Gb/mo. though, and me downloading bittorrents vs. me and my whole block doing nothing but surf the 'net are going to generate equivalent amounts of data
There’s simply no easy way for them to do such a thing. There’s no transparency between the ISP and your local network. All that the ISP can tell is that it’s talking to a machine (the router) that makes requests and sends data.
I’m sure that they could run statistical analyses on the traffic that’s coming out and figure out that it’s likely generated by more than one computer. They might (in some cases) also be able to exploit known bugs or timing discrepancies in the router itself, or in the software on the computers in the local network if they’re running different versions of the same program (or different OSes). There are probably dozens of ways for sophisticated attackers to figure out something about what you have behind that router, but none of them are easy or foolproof. The likelyhood that your cable company is doing that is pretty slim.
OK, I just talked to a RR service technician and he suggested that the power level on the modem may not be high enough to run a router and two computer connections.
???
He followed up by saying that it may not be something that can be field adjusted and that the modem may need to be replaced if I can’t get it to work after removing the battery (when I get home from work) and powering the unit down for a few minutes and then back up again.
Sounds odd, we’ll see if it works.
I still wonder what that access denied dealio was all about.
Well it’s not “access denied” but rather “request denied”, at least according to the OP. It’s likely that all that means is that your web browser was unable to get a response to it’s “request”. Request in this sense being “please send me the current version of YOURHOMEPAGE.html”.
As to the power issue, I’m not real up on power requirements but I assume it’s one of these combo DSL-modem/router dealies. Stand alone routers can be had for like $40 these days so you might want to get one of those. Let the modem be a modem and the router be a router.
Bwuh? Everything your side of the modem is data, not power. That just doesn’t make any sense at all; in fact there is only one device connected to the modem; the router. Nothing else matters (as far as the modem is concerned).