Well, I’m over at Searching for Truth’s house trying to help set up a wireless network. Problem is, I’ve never done this before and I haven’t really read up on wireless configurations, etc. Background info: we’re setting up a Linksys combination wired/wireless router (model number BEFW11SF) to connect via CAT-5 to a desktop and wirelessly to two laptops, all of which use XP. The wired desktop connects perfectly (I’m posting from it). The wireless setup isn’t going so smoothly. The laptops are able to see the network and claim to be getting a good signal, but are both unable to connect either to the internet or to the router. Looking at the packet traffic, I see that they’re both sending at a fair pace, and, more confusingly, they’re both receiving a small number of packets as well. I’m not sure what information is relevant at the moment, so I’m going to just list all of the router’s current settings; maybe there’s something obvious (to someone else, anyway) that I’m missing.
I ask this because before the wireless router, all the computers may have worked fine with a hardwire router with possibly the same IP addresses. And now the wireless adapters need to be reconfigured for a static IP. (This all assuming there was a previous router and if it was setup as static before)
Nope, no previous router; the cable modem was connected directly to the desktop PC (via USB, at that). One of the laptops has been used on wireless networks before (Searching brought it back from college and wanted to be able to use it at home) and the other is using a newly-installed wireless card. Also, since I should’ve mentioned it earlier, the channels and RTS & fragmentation thresholds have been matched to those of the router.
Nope. Can’t access the firmware’s settings pages from them either. I am, however, receiving a few packets from the router on both laptops, though it doesn’t seem to be in response to connection attempts.
When you say the laptops can see the network, do you mean that when you had setup the wireless NICs, they found your SSID and attempted to connect? If so, I’d say maybe the encryption isn’t setup correctly and is preventing you from connecting to the router. The router is setup on channel 11, were you able to configure the NIC’s to connect through channel 11?
Since the router is broadcasting your SSID, it would be a good sign that the NIC’s can recognize it. At this point, i’d say it’s a security/encryption configuration issue.
Yeah, I meant that the laptops found the SSID. Security settings do seem to be the issue here, but I can’t pin down exactly what the problem is; I’ve tried nearly every combination I can think of.
You apparently have WEP enabled. Have you set the notebook’s 128 or 64 bit WEP code keys set to match the router-switch code key and/or pass phrase?
Another thing that sometime works is to power all the devices down includiing the wireless hub (actually remove the power adapter plug from the body) then power everything back up.
Another troubleshooting device you can also use is to the hold down the reset button on the Linksys router and clear all the setting back to default. If there is some incompatible router setting deep in a sub-menu this will clear it out. Then re-enter all the shared WEP code, channel and other info.
That’s good. First I would try to disable the security, and verify that your wireless part of the network is working. Then choose the security you want to go with. I think you have a ‘B’ only router so you only have WEP up to 128bit encryption, and I think that’s it for your security.
Disabling WEP doesn’t seem to have any effect; the laptops still find the SSID and can’t connect. Powering down didn’t help either. I reset the router, but the only thing that seems to have been changed from default was the WEP, which I’d already deactivated. I really appreciate the help, though; please don’t hesitate to give any suggestions you can think of.
Are you using “infrastructure” or “adhoc” wireless mode? Make sure you are using “infrastructure” mode.
Try channel 6 instead of channel 11 and make sure the “network mode” option when setting up the wireless adapters is set to “mixed mode” on both the notebooks.
Also make sure you try addressing the router with the browser address http://192.168.1.1 from the notebooks. If you have not configured a user name and passwork just leave the username field blank and put “admin” in the password field. The net connection may not “take” until you do this and click on “apply” for the settings.
Thanks for the continued help. It’s set to “infrastructure,” and I’ve already tried channel 6 to no avail. I don’t recall seeing “network node,” though; I’ll have to look for it next time I go to Searching for Truth’s house (I’ve given up for the night). As for attempting to reach 192.168.1.1, it’s the first thing I do to make sure that the problem is between the computer and router rather than the modem and router. So far, I’ve been unable to reach the router’s configuration interface from either wireless connection.
(For what it’s worth, it’s the specifics of a wireless setup that’s giving me a hard time; I’ve successfully set up networks before.)
Again, thanks for helping me with this problem. I hope for Searching’s sake that this thread doesn’t die overnight.
If you can’t reach the router’s config interface the problem is not likely to be modem based.
Umm… this is fairly basic, but I didn’t see you mention it. If you already did it never mind.
You should run the Linksys wireless router setup CD on each notebook PC. The setup procedure goes through a diagnostic and double checks system settings and attempts to communicate with the wireless router network. It has fixed or identified the problem with hinky wireless setups a time or two for me.
Just ignore this if it’s been mentioned and I missed it: Are the laptops getting IP addresses? I’d turn off wep and then see if I can get one of the laptops to get an IP address through DHCP. If not, from the physically-cabled PC, make sure that the router’s DHCP server, if it has one, is set to hand out addresses, and more than just one. If the router doesn’t have a DHCP server, does the DSL modem?
Also, some ISPs provide service to a single MAC address, so you need to use “MAC address cloning” if your router can do that. Basically tricks the modem into thinking it’s talking to its one allowed PC.
Not really sure of your skills, so I’ll lay this step out for you.
If you could post the IP information from the PC and one of the laptops so we could see the IP’s.
On the PC, click the ‘Start’ button, select ‘Run’, type ‘cmd’. At the ‘C:’ prompt, type ‘ipconfig’. Click on the program window icon, goto ‘edit’, select ‘mark’. Now select the text in the window with your mouse, hit ‘enter’ (that basically copys the text). Now paste that info into this thread.
You probably can’t do that with the laptop obviously, so do the same steps, except the copy and paste, we will need the same info, typed manually.
I’ve been using the same model router for wireless for over 2 years - and I second the recommendation to temporarily turn off WEP. If this works, re-enable it, and go with the 128-bit flavor.
It’s not the ISP MAC cloning issue if your wired computers work OK through it.
Do you still have a normal ethernet card installed in the laptop? It looks like you do, because ipconfig is showing an Ethernet adapter Network Bridge, which is getting the IP adress 169.254.156.66. If I recall correctly, this is the IP adress given by the OS when no DHCP server is found, while DHCP is activated. You need to check in your Device Manager if you don’t have a second ehternet card listed there. It will probably have a yellow question mark on it. Just remove it from here, and then reboot.
Your laptop is probably trying to connect through the 169.254.156.66 IP adress, and that won’t work. Also, are you using DHCP? It is usually easiest to make the router a DHCP server, and then all the computers are automatically assigned valid IP adresses when they connect to the router.
