PCA Forums

Ok, my friend bought a router a day ago and I've been working on it forever. The problem is that we can't get the computer to see the router in order to set it up. It's a linksys 4-port (BEFSR41). Anybody have any experience with one of these? I've tried everything I can think of. The main computer we were trying it on is a slow POS so we brought down my friends 1.4GHz machine to hope to speed things up and still no go. We can get the internet when we hook up the computer directly to the modem (like we are now) but when we hook it up to the router, no go. We can use it as a hub and see the rest of the PCs on the network, but no internet. We tried to manually set it up as well and no go.

okay you connected the cable or dsl cable line into the wan port right? you then type in http://192.168.1.1/. you set it up manually or automaticallythen you just hit apply boom auto and make sure your other computers nics are set to auto get ip and your dhcp is on if you still have trouble contact linksys they are great techs there i needed help getting thru firewall to make cs server. i have one like the one you have she is nice router. here is link from linksys site to help.
http://www.linksys.com/tech_helper/hardware.html

We've tried setting it up both manually and automatically and it didn't work either way. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong now... it just doesn't make any sense anymore. When I setup TCP/IP to find an IP automatically (how the manual says it should be) then I can't access the router via http://192.168.1.1 When I specify my own IP then I can...

[edit]
well, I changed EVERYTHING back to default, allowed everything to find info automatically and we made a <i>little</i> progress. Now we can atleast talk to the modem without having to specify an IP on this machine. We still can't access the internet though...

Is this DSL or Cable?

You need to be able to bring up the router configuration menu before anything else. Dont' even bother connecting the modem to the router until you can do that.

Did you release and renew the DHCP lease after connecting the router? If not, it'll continue using the old IP that the modem assigned it.

Whenever you conenct a computer to a new device that uses DHCP to generate an IP address, you need to force Windows to obtain a new address (rebooting also does the same thing).

If it's Win9x then you run WINIPCFG from the run menu. Then select the network card and click the release then renew buttons.

If it's WinNT/2K/XP then you run CMD from the run menu and at the DOS prompt type IPCONFIG /RELEASE and hit the Enter key. Then type IPCONFIG /RENEW and hit the enter key.

If it fails to assign itself an IP address (it should also assign itself a gateway and DNS numbers) then it's not talking to the router. Check for bad cables, could be a bad router.

Could also be you have some strange network settings. Make sure there is NO proxy setup in the Internet Conenction settings in Control Panel. Also make sure you are NOT assigning the DNS and Gateway in the TCP/IP settings for the network card manually. It should all be on auto.

Is this WinXP? If so and this is a DSL connection and he was using XP's built-in PPPOE client then that has to be disabled in the network card's network properties to allow the NIC to be used as a standard network interface.

If this is a DSL system, make sure you are NOT using the PPOE dialer on his computer. That's only to connect directly to the DSL modem. If you have that enabled then your network port can't proeprly communicate with the router.

It's a Win98SE machine on cable. We never had a problem talking to the router, we could just never get the router to talk to the modem in order to get online. We tried to manually set the config in the router and that didn't go. Just recently, we put EVERYTHING back to default (reset the router and re-installed all protocols/services/etc. and now we can get past a particular part in the setup where it couldn't find hte router (problem was that we needed to reset the modem before we continued). We finally figured that out (I always told him to reset the modem after each restart, never though doing it DURING setup would be necessary).

Now we've reached another part on the setup disk (provided by linksys) that we can't get past. We tried resetting the modem like before and that didn't work. It's stopping on the DHCP settings and I read somewhere that I need to unplug the modem for a couple hours for it to expire (does any of this sound familiar?) so thats what we're doing now.

Oh, I misunderstood.

Okay, well a LOT depends on the cable system. USUALLY you have to cycle (turn off then on) the modem when you change the computer or router it's connected to. That's because some modems "lock" themselves to the MAC address of the network device they're connected to (mine does).

Additionally, some cable systems also register an account to a specific MAC address (your NIC card's in your case). You may need to contact the cable company and ask. If so, they'll need the MAC address of the router (written on a label on the bottom next to the serial number).

Thats a good idea. I don't <i>think</i> it's registered to the MAC on the NIC beacuse I've switched out my NIC's several times and all I had to do was reset the modem. I'll pass on the info, either way though.

Thanks.

Kick it.




Then, try 192.168.1.100 -- that is what my default for the lynksis i bought. BTW it only worked for about 6 months, till it started its plcket loss streak.

Well, unplugging it for 'X' amount of time didn't work so I just suggested he either call linksys or comcast. Thanks for all yer suggestions though.

Well, it's workin' now He decided to try it once more before he called anybody and it just worked. He said he didn't do anything different? Ah, the joy of computers