Ok, I'll try to explain this as well as I can and see if anyone has had a similar problem and may know of a solution.
I set up the router the night I bought it, putting the cd in and following the directions and the setup seemed to go fairly well and was fairly easy. Im running a home pc with debian linux and have a laptop running windows xp home edition. I had to use the laptop to set the router of for the first time. Once the set up process was done, i reset the network on the computer running debian and rebooted the laptop after unplugging the cable so that i could connect wireless. Both computers seemed to connect without trouble.
Later on that night, a friend came over with their laptop which is exactly the same as mine, both dell inspiron 6000 and both running exactly the same hardware/o.s. We tried to connect it to my router and it seemed to connect just fine, aquire an ip, yet nothing would resolve when trying to get out onto the internet. I could ping the router no problem and connect to the routers setup but it wouldnt let anything out. I then rebooted my laptop which has been connected already, and when it finished rebooting, it had the exace same problem. It would connect to the router, aquire an ip, but the router was not letting it out. My home pc running debian still seemed fine. Well, the next morning, i reset the network on the debian computer and bam, same thing. it aquired an ip, was able to see and connect to the router fine but was not letting me out. I got the router to release and renew an ip from my isp an seemed to do so without trouble but would not resolve anything. The router didnt seem to be able to ping or traceroute anything.
Has anyone had a problem like this or know of a solution?
BTW, I should say that i also have a netgear router sitting here and every time I would go back to the netgear and restart my network it would connect flawlessly and that is what im hooked up to now. the netgear doesnt have the range i want nor the advanced setting im looking for and ive heard very good things about this particular linksys router so i have a feeling its something im either doing or not doing.