I just a Dell Precision 490. I have hooked it up via ethernet to one of the four ports on my router. It says LAN is working. IPCONFIG gives the following information:
IP address: 192.168.2.126
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.2.254
Are these the numbers it should be? What am I doing wrong.
Those numbers don’t seem necessarily wrong to me.
Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Can you access your router’s control panel? If you can tell us the brand and model of your router we might be able to help more.
Basic troubleshooting first. Are other computers connected to the router working properly? If not, make sure to check your connection between the router and the modem, and be sure to check your connection between the modem and the internet source.
It’s a wireless router, model Dl-624. I have computers hooked up to it both wirelessly and one hard wired, plus the cable modem is hard wired to it. All those things work.
Assuming XP or Vista OS
Power down the PC & unplug the router & cable modem power connectors. Wait 30 sedonds then replug power in this order cable modem > router > then turn on PC.
If it still fails to work see if the PC can connect to the router by logging onto the router’s config page from the Dell
This is not the most efficient medium for troubleshooting, but here are a few things you can try (run these commands in a command prompt):
1b) If you’ve passed that test and know how to get status from your router to find out what its default gateway is (it’s usually in one of the admin web pages on the router), do that and try to ping that address. It may or may not respond to pings, but if it does, you know the basic connectivity between you and the ISP is working. While you’re in there, if the info is available, make note of the IP address of its DNS server as well.
if you’ve passed that test, verify that you can reach things on the internet using only addresses (not names): “ping 209.85.133.27” (this is one of gmail’s SMTP servers, which should be pretty reliable, and it responds to pings. If you’re going to be troubleshooting network connections a lot, it’s helpful to memorize the IP of something stable and pingable like this, or have a machine handy where you can look it up). If this fails, it’s probably your router config or something outside of your control (e.g. outage in your ISP)
if you’ve passed that test, check your DNS service: “nslookup www.google.com” should tell you some raw IP addresses for google. If this doesn’t work, check that your computer’s DNS settings are set to “automatically configure” and if you know how, make sure your router is also set to “automatically configure” DNS settings. If you managed to find it, also try to ping your router’s DNS server by IP.
Finally, try to be your own browser. This part will make you look like a computer genius to anyone watching but is actually very simple. If this works but regular browsing doesn’t, there’s something wrong with your browser configuration (e.g. proxy server). You start by typing “telnet www.google.com 80” at the command prompt. If this connection succeeds, the window should clear and you’ll be typing blind, but if you can type the following without making any typos: “GET / HTTP/1.0” and then hit enter twice, you will be rewarded with a screenful of HTML. This means you successfully got a web page from www.google.com and should go poke around in your browser configuration. If you make a typo during that connection, you’ll have to start over but it won’t hurt anything.
Hope all that helps. This is all more helpful to you personally if you know what it means, but if you do this and tell a knowledgable network nerd where it failed, they’re much more likely to be able to help you. Some of these tests are simplistic, but I’m pretty good at network troubleshooting and they pinpoint most of the network problems I have.
Ok, it failed. It said 4 packets sent, 0 received and then timed out. How do I play with local network settings?
At a guess, you need to plug the new PC’s MAC address into the router.
Shouldn’t matter, mac addy cloning to to fool the modem into thinking it is talking to the computer it was configured to.
Please be more specific, what IP/web address are you pinging here.
I was pinging the gateway (router) at 192.168.2.254
You said that you have other computers hooked up to the router. What IP address, subnet mask and gateway do they have?
I’ll bet a dollar that it’s a faulty ethernet cable, or a faulty ethernet port.
Try plugging the cord into a different ethernet socket on your computer, and on your router. Try switching the cord you’re using for a different cord. Keep trying different combinations of this until you’ve ruled out the possibility of a faulty cable or a faulty port socket.
If it is a Linksys the default is address is 192.168.1.1 Try pinging that and see if you get a response. If you do, open IE and type 192.168.1.1 as the URL to access the router. IIRC the default login is user name = administrator leave the password blank. On the first page you should see the range of IP addresses available. For example on my router the addresses run from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.149
Things may have changed, but in my memory, the default user name on Linksys routers was, to be precise, “admin”.
:smack: I think you are correct. I changed my user ID and login and was too lazy to search for the documentation.
This is good advice. Go do an ipconfig on the other computers that are successfully using this router. If they have a different default gateway and an IP address on a different network (something besides 192.168.2.*), then your computer’s network settings are probably not set to automatic configuration and need to be changed. Or another possibility if this is the case is that you have more than one DHCP server on your network (is there by any chance an old router that’s not necessarily being used anymore?).
Thanks for all the advice. Turns out that it was set to manual. Clicking on automatic solved the problem.