A friend of mine has an ethernet network at his workplace. It uses a Linksys router, netgear hub and has 4 Macs running System 10, and 3 PC's running XP sp2, and two printers ( a brother and an HP). they have cable modem access to Internet.
The network was quite stable for nearly two years, then all of a sudden problems started developing. Some of the Mac's were unable to print, and it seems that at one time or another the networked computers also lost connectivity to the Internet, although not necessarily all at the same time.
I suggested that they reboot everything and see if that didn't correct the problem. My assumption was that maybe RoadRunner had changed their IP address and the router was getting confused because of it. In any case, rebooting the cable modem, router and all the computers seemed to fix things...for a few days. then the problems came back.
I used the Linksys webadmin to peer into the DHCP client list and noticed that on one occasion, only one computer was listed, even though
4 computers were "online" and able to surf the net, etc. So I'm wondering how it's possible that they apparently had Internet access yet haven't apparently been assigned an IP address by the router. Is this even possible?Any ideas what might be going on here? We've been trying to isolate this problem for over two months and don't know if it's a failing router, hub, bad ethernet cable, or some combination of all of the above, or something else that I don't know about (which is HIGHLY probable)
Appreciate any suggestions.
Michael