Wireless/Wired networking problems

Here's my current situation.

About 18 months ago, my work supplied me with a Linksys BEFSX41 Router for security when working from home. I got that setup and working fine and was able to connect two PCs at home and share files across them as well as getting VPN going.

A co-worker had showed me how to setup Remote Desktop from work to connect to my home computer (using dyn-ip.org) but after doing everything he said I was never able to get it to work.

4 months ago I got my wife a laptop. I went out and bought a Linksys WRT54G Router and replaced the BEFSX41 with it. My existing home network was fine, but I was unable to get filesharing going between the two computers. With all firewalls turned off I was able at the following state: Neither computer could see each other in the workgroup The LAN PC could ping the laptop The laptop could not ping the LAN PC Using the IP address I could browse the laptops files The WRT54G has a diagnostic Ping function. From it I could ping the laptop, the router itself but could not ping the PC.

When I physically hooked the laptop up to the Router everything was fine. The laptop showed in the workgroup and file sharing worked great. Because of this I had the idea of putting the BEFSX41 back as my main Router, turn the WRT54G into a wireless access point and everything would be good to go.

So I hooked it up that way. Initially I had the Wireless Router connected via the WAN port but realized that I needed to connect it to one of the LAN ports. With that figured out I was in business.

Everything was working great, except for the fact that file sharing still didn't work. I was basically at the same point I was above except that on occasion the LAN PC would realize that the wireless PC was in the workgroup. I can ping the laptop fine, but not the other way around. While playing with the wireless routers, ping tool I had it set to continuously ping my PC. During this time I happened to VPN to work to check my e-mail and noticed that for that time period, the router was able to ping the PC. I'm not sure if that actually means anything though.

My setup is as follows: BEFSX41 - 192.168.1.1 WRT54G - 192.168.1.2 PC - 192.168.1.100 Laptop - 192.168.1.101

The only firewall enabled on any of the routers is on the wired router. I tried disabling it, but it didn't change anything either. Besides for all intents and purposes the Wireless router and laptop are now on the LAN side of things.

I have no idea what else to try. I'm hoping somebody can give me a suggestion or sees some obvious error. It's almost as if my PC has some kind of firewall setup on it (other than the disabled Windows firewall) but I don't have any idea where something like that could have come from. Besides I can ping the PC just fine if I physically plug the laptop into the wired router (I haven't tried doing the same thing on the wireless Router).

Please if you have any ideas let me know. I don't know what else to do.

Thanks

Reply to
Mordred
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There is nothing wrong there.

That seems OK.

The router FW would not come into play here on the LAN.

I was told on my W11S4 v1 router to set it as a router and not a gateway when I converted it to a switch, which there was an Admin screen for that. I cannot say that's going to correct your problem. It seems that you're on the money with your set-up.

The SX41 is a router VPN end-point solution and may be you need to do something special in the setup. You should contact Linksys Tech Support about it.

Duane :)

Reply to
Duane Arnold

Suggestion: If your posting lots of detail, start with what you're trying to accomplish. It makes reading the "current situation" easier to understand. Notice how I hop around with my answer following the organization of your posting, rather than answering your question which I'm sure eventually appears at the bottom of the message.

I'll assume you have some XP mutation since you're trying to setup Remote Desktop. Is it Home, Pro, or Media Center?

Remote desktop requires:

  1. Windoze XP Pro as the server with a static IP address, or a static DHCP assigned address so that it doesn't move. XP Home will NOT work.
  2. Any Windoze version as the client. The Remote Desktop Client can be downloaded from the MS web pile.
  3. Redirecting TCP port 3389 from the WAN side of your router to the Windoze XP Pro server.
  4. Enable Remote Desktop Sharing on the XP Pro server. Right Click on My Computah -> Properties -> Remote

See: |

formatting link
details.

I do this all the time and it's quite easy. Instructions are all over the web. However, I don't like Remote Desktop for various reasons and prefer Symantec PcAnywhere 12.

File sharing should have NOTHING to do with the choice of router. Local file sharing doesn't use the router section. The wireless is a bridge and does not involve anything with IP addresses. I suggest you try to get file sharing working using a wired connection first (CAT5 cable to the switch ports in the Linksys WRT54G) before attempting to deal with the wireless.

Try the following: Start -> Run -> cmd \\\\netbios_name_of_other_computer That should open a window with a list of shares on that computer. If that fails, try: \\\\192.168.1.xxx which is the IP address of the target computer. That should do the same thing. If you can ping these machines, but not open the list of shares, then you have not enabled sharing on the target computah. If you get some kind of "cannot open..." error message, you have the machines in different workgroups, or you do not have a common login name and password on both machines. Lots of ways to do it wrong.

Turn off the firewall in the LAN PC. I know you said it's off, but the situation you describe could only happen if the firewall is still on. You may have more than one firewall. Look for XP SP2 firewall, ZoneAlarm, Norton Firewall, McAfee Firewall, etc.

Ok, so things are working in one direction only. I'll assume that both the laptop and the LAN PC are running XP something. See:

formatting link
's a tutorial on how to setup XP LAN networking in there somewhere, but I can't seem to find it tonite.

Same issue. Turn off the firewall in the PC. Since the PC is connected with a cable, there's a small chance that there may be a flakey connection or cable. Replace just to be sure it's not the cable.

Weird. There should be absolutely no difference between using the wireless LAN port and the wired LAN port. The wireless connection is a bridge and does not involve any layer 3 IP configuration. The 802.3 ethernet packets are simply encapsulated inside 802.11 packets and should emerge unchanged. To the best of my knowledge and experience, there's no way a wireless connection could magically work in one direction only.

Well, that will work. However, you're recreating exactly the same situation that you currently have. Traffic from the LAN PC to/from the laptop go only through the wireless (bridge) part of the WRT54G and the ethernet switch. The router part of the WRT54G is not in the circuit.

Yep. That's what I would predict. See my previous paragraph.

Packet loss? Try this stupid experiment. Dive into the WRT54G wireless configuration page and change the speed from "auto" to

6Mbits/sec. That's the slowest OFDM speed. That should also be the most reliable and least error infested.

Weird. I has to be a firewall issue. Are there any other PC's around that can substitute for the LAN PC? If another PC works, then it has to be something in the configuration of the LAN PC.

Without knowing how you have your VPN setup it's difficult to tell. If you have the VPN setup to change the default gateway to whatever gateway is at the other end of the VPN tunnel, then ALL your internet traffic will end up going through the tunnel instead of directly to the internet via your cable modem. However, that should have absolutely nothing to do with LAN to LAN traffic.

Everything on the same subnet should allow everything to talk to each other. Hopefully, you do not have both the WRT54G and the BEFSX41 connected simultaneously with both their DHCP servers enabled. That will not work at all. It might also explain what's happening. The gateway address delivered by each DHCP server is different. Therefore the return path *MIGHT* be different if your LAN PC gets it's IP from one router, while the laptop got its IP from the other router. Remove the BEFSX41 and try it with just the WRT54G in the system.

Well, I agreed. It acts like a PC firewall issue, smells like a PC firewall issue, and may actually be a PC firewall issue. Dive into the startup programs with msconfig or Startup Inspector for Windows and see if there's some residue from a previous firewall program that wasn't completely uninstalled. I've seen this problem with McAffee and ZoneAlarm. The add-remove shows that the program has been removed, but there's still some junk running.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Remote desktop should work. Try it from the XP Home laptop to the XP Pro LAN PC. I forgot to mention some items.

  1. The XP SP2 firewall exceptions has to include Remote Desktop.
  2. The user or Administrator login *MUST* have a password assigned. If there's no password, then you'll get some kind of security related error message. I forgot the exact message.
  3. If you have more than one video card running, remote desktop will screw up badly. Use Pc Anywhere instead.

You can get the Remote Desktop client at: |

formatting link
It's also available for the Mac: |
formatting link

The common login doesn't really matter if you're doing "simple" directory sharing from XP to XP. It's an easy way of not having to type a login/password every time you connect to an XP share from a W98 or WinME box.

The \\\\192.168.1.xxx trick *SHOULD* work to the LAN PC. Try a little troubleshooting locally on the LAN PC. Try:

  1. From the cmd prompt: net view net view \\netbios_name_of_LAN_PC That should give a list of available servers and shares including the ones on the LAN PC. If you get an error message, something is screwed up on the LAN PC. I don't want to speculate exactly what's broken.
  2. Not being able to ping the LAN PC is indicative of a firewall issue (if normal web browsing through the router really works on the LAN PC). Try pinging yourself from the LAN PC: ping 192.168.1.xxx ping 127.0.0.1 They should both work. If not, the IP stack is busted or once again, the firwall has a problem.
  3. Try some of the network diagnostic commands: ipconfig arp -a netstat tracert any_machine nbtstat -A your_ip_address I'm not so much looking for diagnostic output as I am looking for error messages when the programs are run. That would indicate something busted with the IP stack.

You're doing fine so far. Whatever is wrong has to be something simple (or buried deep inside Windoze). I lke the idea of introducing a 3rd PC into the LAN to act as a tie breaker. If two out of three work perfectly, then it's a fairly good guess that whatever is wrong is broken on the odd PC.

Oh-oh. By any chance are you using the same class C IP block for the VPN as for your local LAN? That doesn't work and creates all kinds of weird problems. If your remote office network assigns an IP of

192.168.1.xxx, then you cannot use 192.168.1.xxx on your local LAN.

In addition, I've seen routers and a few clients (mostly Unix) go insane when connected through a VPN where the terminating router has RIP or RIP2 enabled. This will change the default route on both the local router and sometime the local client. If you have no control over the remote VPN router, at least check that RIP is disabled in both directions in your routers.

Also, extra protocols (Netware and Netbeui) can cause problems if they have magically become the default protocol. If they are present on either machine, I suggest you disable or remove these protocols.

ICS will also mess things up as it turns your PC into an NAT router. I'm not sure of its exact effects because I don't use the piece of [insert suitable explitive]. Methinks it would be best to uninstall the service instead of just killing the process.

Run: ipconfig /all | more and see if there are any funny looking IP addresses listed on interfaces that you didn't know were running (i.e. ICS).

No. As I previously ranted, the router section of is not in the system when going from LAN client to LAN client. The router is only in the circuit when going through the WAN port. However the router and remote VPN router can deliver funny numbers via DHCP and RIP. Therefore, try this experiment. Unplug the WAN port from the router. Reboot both computahs. Make sure ICS and whatever VPN client you're using is off, disabled, or uninstalled. Try the client to client test again with ping. If you can't ping each other, then nothing else is going to work.

I'm still stuck with a mystery I can't explain. Why would it work with a direct CAT5 cable to the LAN ports on the router, but not via wireless. As far as I know, that's impossible.

Good luck.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

On 10 Jun 2005, you wrote in alt.internet.wireless:

Point taken.

My LAN PC is XP-Pro (SP2), the laptop is XP Home. I have done all the above. In a similar situation, Remote Desktop works just fine on the LAN, but I can't get it to work from the WAN side of things. Port 3389 is being forwarded to the LAN PC.

Well the netbios thing did not work, but \\\\192.168.1.103 (to the laptop works fine) but going to the PC does not. I do not have a common login name and password on both machines though. I fail to see why this would matter.

While it's been a long time since my networking class I thought the same thing. Since I was seeing something else I didn't know for sure though. At least I'm not crazy.

Didn't change anything.

Nope, disabled the DHCP server on the wireless router when I set it up.

Okay. As far as I can remember, I have never installed ZoneAlarm or a McAfee firewall. I am running McAfee virus scan, but I certainly didn't see anything in there that is firewall-ish (although it certianly has a ton of processes running).

Today I turned on my secondary PC (XP-Pro SP1). The laptop can ping that one just fine. The secondary PC can ping the laptop, but NOT the primary PC. I VPN'd to work just to make sure I wasn't crazy. While VPN'd the laptop could ping the PC just fine and I was able to use remote desktop to connect to 192.168.1.100.

I've started going through my processes punching each one into google (something I do somewhat regularly) and nothing looks particularly out of place. However I did notice that alg.exe was running which is supposedly only used for ICS and Windows Firewall. AFAIK I'm not doing anything with ICS so I killed it. Didn't change anything though. All the other processes were either programs I knew I had running or windows OS processes, that don't appear to be involved with networking.

Is it possible that something obvious is not setup correctly in the Routers? I was starting to believe that the wireless Router was in someway defective until I realized that I couldn't ping the PC from my secondary PC (even though file sharing worked just fine!).

Thanks again for your help. I'm really hoping we can get this thing figured out.

Reply to
Mordred

When dealing with Remote Desktop, it has been my experience that having the same logon passwords usually end with a successful connection. Remember, if you are attempting to connect to a machine running XP Home using Remote Desktop, you will be unsuccessful, however, the XP Home machine can successfully connect to a machine running XP PRO.

Reply to
Doug Jamal

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Remote Desktop across the LAN works fine. It's only from the WAN side or the laptop that I can't get it to work.

Okay, that's not a problem then.

  1. Worked fine, but didn't show the laptop of course.
  2. Pinging myself isn't a problem.
  3. ipconfig, arp, netstat and tracert all worked just fine. I'd did see something I didn't like in netstat (a CLOSE_WAIT connection to ini.fi??) which I'll investigate further. I've never done a nbtstat before. This is the output I got which seems a little odd to me:

Local Area Connection 3: Node IpAddress: [192.168.1.100] Scope Id: []

NetBIOS Remote Machine Name Table

Name Type Status --------------------------------------------- MORDRED UNIQUE Registered MSHOME GROUP Registered MORDRED UNIQUE Registered MSHOME GROUP Registered MSHOME UNIQUE Registered ..__MSBROWSE__. GROUP Registered

Does that seem right to you?

Nope my Client IP is 130.164.36.X. We're a pretty big tech company and I don't think IT department would make that mistake.

Only the wireless router has any mention of RIP and it's disabled.

Everything looks fine.

I'll try that either tonight or tomorrow.

Well I know that I can get filesharing to work without being able to ping this PC as my 2nd LAN PC is doing it. So something is swallowing the pings, but will still let filesharing work. I obviously can't figure out what a ping wouldn't work but frankly I don't need to get that to work. Do you think something basic could be broken on the laptop PC with regards to the Wireless connection? I know the Wireless and Local Area connections both show up under Network Connections. Since you don't think it's anything with either of the routers then it's got to be a problem on the laptop.

Thanks for your help.

Reply to
Mordred

"Doug Jamal" wrote in news:oJNqe.124204$ snipped-for-privacy@tornado.tampabay.rr.com:

Yup that's what I'm doing, or trying to do rather, XPHome to XP Pro.

Reply to
Mordred

Let's Review.

  1. On the XP Pro machine, have you selected "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" option in the System Properties menu? (right click on MY COMPUTER then click PROPERTIES then the REMOTE tab)
  2. While in the REMOTE tab menu, click SELECT REMOTE USERS. Click the ADD button and add the usernames of the users who will be allowed to logon remotely to your system. It would be easier if the users already have an account set up on the particular system.
3.On the XP Home machine, start the Remote Desktop Connection app. Enter the name of the XP Pro machine (right click on MY COMPUTER, then click on the COMPUTER NAME tab. The name of that computer is or should be listed under FULL COMPUTER NAME)
  1. Now back to the Remote Desktop Connection..After entering the name of the XP Pro machine, click on OPTIONS to expand the menu. Type in your username and password and then click CONNECT at the bottom of the screen.

Afterwards, you should be able to connect. After successful connection, you can go back and fine tune the settings.

Reply to
Doug Jamal

As far as that is concerned, you can use MS Netmeeting RDS that's on the O/S too. You'll have to tweak it I here on XP which you can findout using Google. There is a free one that is very good too,which I used and I have recommenced to others but the name of the software escapes me right now. I had RDS using the software between the machine running in about a minute. Maybe, someone else will supply the name of the popular RDS program.

Duane :)

Reply to
Duane Arnold

Forgive me for my attention deficit or should I say my failure to completely read your post. My apologies. Anyway, to access your XP Pro machine from the WAN, set your router to port forward TCP port 3389 to your XP Pro machine's LAN IP address. In the Remote Desktop Connection settings, type in the IP address provided by your ISP. When it dials that IP address, your router should forward the connection to your XP Pro machine. Just Me, D

Reply to
Doug Jamal

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