I have just got back from spending a very frustrating hour trying to get a mate online.

He is using a Linksys wireless network card to hook up to his housemate's cable modem connection which is shared through a Cisco WRT 54G router.

There are 2 machines already set up and working through the router.

I have limited experience with wired LANs but none (prior to this evening) with wLAN. I have tried a number of techniques to get this going, including:

Copying all settings from a working PC which is using DHCP (result : Peculiar IP address - 169.254.213.101 and "limited connectivity")

Manually configuring a static IP address in the range that the other machines get one from (192.168.1.XXX) both with and without specifying ISP DNS IP addresses

I tried other things too, all to no avail, resulting in either one of the above outcomes, or no IP address at all (0.0.0.0)

With the manually assigned IP address, I can ping 127.0.0.1 but NOT the gateway IP 192.168.1.1.

Please help!

Hey Arty,

Networking is not my area of expertise, the hardware gurus will be around soon and be able to help you troubleshoot this problem.

Look for their posts.

TTFN

LGW

Ok can i suggest that you do this.

1) Turn the router off
2) Turn the Cable Modem off
3) Shut down all PC's
4) wait a couple of minutes
5) Turn Cable Modem On (wait for this to settle)
6) Turn router on (wait for this to settle)
7) Turn PC 1 on (the one thats connected to the router)
8) Turn PC 2 on

Cool. I shall suggest it.

Just an FYI though - as far as I could make out none of the PCs have a cable connection to the router - there's just a cat5 from the modem to the router and everything else is wireless.

Will let you know how they get on.

OK, I passed this on to my friend, and he passed it onto his housemate who has control over the router.

As far as I am aware, they have tried the above (assuming the "router chief" housemate can follow simple instructions) and it hasn't changed anything.

Any more suggestions please?

Well, in the end we gave up.

The machine now has a CAT-5 connection to the router and is working.

Please mark as closed.