midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

The frustrating thing about running your own home network is that when trouble strikes, there’s no IT guy to call up and fix things for you. (Well, I guess you can always call Nerds on Wheels, but they’re $75 an hour). So you just have to get stubborn and not sit down till you fix what’s wrong. Sometimes, though, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for why things went wrong in the first place, which makes solving the problem all the more challenging.

In this latest problem, somehow I got into a situation where both my wired router and my wireless router had DHCP turned on, and both were trying to serve up IP addresses to the PCs on my network. I noticed the the IP address for my main workstation wasn’t in the range of addresses I expected the wired router to serve up. And neither was my backup workstation (kids’ PC). But I couldn’t check the wireless router to see what was happening, because at the same time as I noticed the first quirk, I also discovered that I could no longer connect wirelessly to the internet (or to the wireless router). Problem no. 1: get that connection working.

Then followed a series of time-consuming procedures to change the IP addresses of my workstations from automically-assigned to fixed, and back again, with little progress in sight. Then I discovered that if I disconnected the wireless router from the wired router, I could get out to the world from my workstation. One step forward! Soon after, I was back to a situation where the wired router was serving up DHCP addresses and both workstations were enjoying life. Or more to the point, my kids finally stopped bugging me about no internet access.

But the next step took longer to resolve. In an earlier post back on Dec. 24, 2004, I wrote about my latest network topology. Nothing’s changed there, except we now have a wireless notebook added to the wireless PDA. I was able to connect from the notebook to the wireless router, and reassign it a fixed IP address outside of the range served up by the wired router (though that router persists on assigning one anyway, and recognizes the name of the wireless router in its list of DHCP clients). But the important thing was that the notebook could connect to the wireless router through the fixed IP address. The notebook itself was assigned another fixed IP address, again outside of the range served by the wired router, just as shown in the diagram in that earlier post.

The issue was that though I could connect from the notebook to the wireless router, I could not connect to the outside world. After numerous combinations and permutations involving futzing with the DNS settings, I finally asked myself whether perhaps the problem was not with software, but with hardware. (I mean, you can only hit your head on the wall so long…). I replaced the ethernet cable connecting the two routers with another one. No go. As a wild card, I then tried a cross-over cable, though it shouldn’t work: nope, it didn’t! Then I tried one last thing. From the wired router’s port 2 (one of four it has available), instead of connecting to one of the wireless router’s 4 ports as shown in the diagram, I connected to the WAN port on that router, reasoning that for the wireless router, the connection to the wired router is indeed its connection to the WAN (wide area network, or internet). The damn thing worked!

Now why is it that my original setup worked for several months, but suddenly stopped working? And why it is that a connection setup that wasn’t required previously now is required? I’ll leave such philosophical musings up to the truly twisted. Excuse me, I have work to get on with.