I wouldn't want to annoy him - he is doing me a favour as I can't afford to pay for my own connection at the moment, and I don't want to be tied down on a contract.
How do I find what IP address is in the DHCP lease?
Yes but from the sound of it, his neighbour that offers the connection wouldn't be any the wiser and as I said, it's likely not to cause a problem anyway. How many home users have more than say 3 or 4, at most
6 or 10 machines on their wireless connection?Out of 254, he should be able to find an IP address without any problem.
David.
No reason why it would annoy him. This is the silliness of it. You have an IP address in his range. How you get that, DHCP or static is irrelevant and has no security value and it's irrelevant how many other WLAN's are around.
Go to a cmd prompt and type IPCONFIG then set those parameters statically in your adapter properties. Personally, as I said, I'd use one + or - 50 but if you give us the result, it'll help.
Typicall the router is .1 or .254, sometimes .50. The IP address lease range is often something like 20 onwards or 100 onwards for about 50 addresses.
David.
No such luck. If if did I would be laughing, as the other three wifis are all unsecured. But it doesn't connect to any.
Last night I tried until 2 in the morning, then gave up.
It did connect to next door for about two minutes, during which time I quickly did an IPCONFIG and an IPCONFIG /ALL and wrote down the IP, the Subnet, the Def Gateway, the DNS Server and the Alternate DNS server.
But apart from those 2 minutes, even though it continued saying that the signal was very good, four green pipes lit up, etc, it wouldn't connect and remained on Automatic, no matter whether I reentered the PEK or hit Connect or hit Renew....
IPCONFIG or anything like that wouldn't work - IPCONFIG would give "Ethernet Adapter Wireless Network Connection Media State. Media disconnected".- IPCONFIG /RENEW would say "No operation can be performed on Wireless Network Connection While it Has Media Disconnected"
I'd try fiddling, tightening, etc the DLink antenna at the back to no avail.
TRISTÁN
Thanks - exactly what I meant... I don't want my neighbour, who is doing me a good turn, to feel that I am pressurising him into doing something he's not keen to do.
He does work with IT so probably he could tell which IP addresses were being used, or that I was connecting via a method he'd asked me to avoid.....
True, but I'm loath to go against his wishes. He's doing me a favour after all!
I think he has about four laptops on his wifi, he's a bit of a techie.
Correct :)
Not quite. Leave the wireless connection set to automatic connect, just edit the properties of the Wireless Connection in "My Network Places" to set the IP address properties to those you have discovered.
If it were me, I'd opt for 192.168.0.79 (nobody uses 79) ;) You'll also need to fill in the mask, gateway and DNS.
David.
The only time IPCONFIG works is when it's actually connected. It's not enough just to get the signal.
When connected it says (I'll disguse the early bit of course)
IP: ***.***.0.3 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Def Gateway: Same as IP but ending .0.1
When I do IPCONFIG /ALL I learn that the DNS server is the same as the gateway above, with an alternate one which looks nothing like any of the other ones **.***.96.5
Currently, I connect via the PEK.... If I go to my wireless connections, and go to the advanced properties of my neighbour's router, I can change the PEK. It's set to connect automatically, but setting it to manual makes no difference.
I take it then you are saying that I should tell Windows *not* to find Wifi or connect automatically, and instead go to my TCP/IP properties under the advanced settings of the name of the router and fill it all in but change IP address to something like ***.***.0.20 , yeah?
If he does, it doesn't sound like he should make a career of it! Handing out an IP address is trivial, not a security "thing" and certainly irrelevant with other networks around. If anything, DHCP would make things easier for 3rd parties to connect.
Tell him you were troubleshooting if pushed, if he really does have a clue about IT, it shouldn't bother him.
Then there are another 249 addresses to choose from (give or take a few for any LAN connected machines).
If you are reluctant to try a static IP address on his misinformation then there's nothing more we can do to help.
David.
Configuring your own static IP in this context is both rude and A Really Bad Idea(tm), since you then have no way of preventing conflict with some other wireless client. It's especially bad to use an address handed out by DHCP, since that virtually guarantees a conflict.
DHCP is failing either because (a) the DHCP server gets hosed or (b) the wireless link is unreliable. The right thing is to fix the real problem, not create a new problem.
No it doesn't John. This is a soho network issuing what? half a dozen addresses. The likelihood of clashing with an address when choosing one over a hundred or so higher is minute as the machines which already have a lease will be requesting to renew the same address over and over again and at the moment we're just trying to troubleshoot this.
How many wired networks have their IP addressing scheme "managed" by pinging an address to see if it responds, then using that address if it doesn't?! Loads. :)
I disagree. I have had exactly the same experience where for some reason DHCP has failed yet configuring a static address will then not drop a single ping for hours on end. It wasn't clear to me why at the time but the wireless signal was fine to permit both ping and faultless network traffic, just ropey DHCP.
David.
Many (most?) SOHO routers always hand out the lowest available address (as compared to a round-robin approach), and do change addresses to given clients under common circumstances (e.g., router restart). This is why such conflict can and does (as I know from experience in solving such problems) happen.
But if it gets working, then it is likely to be left in place, which is why it's a bad idea to point down that path. Much better to address the real problem, the failure of DHCP.
None that are properly managed -- that's another Really Bad Idea.
Fair enough.
The client, requests the same address during renewal, if there's no reason not to, all the DHCP services i've seen will hand out the same address. I've got a handfull of laptops here, on a Linksys RT31P or whatever it is, range starts at 100, never gets higher than 10. No conflict, no problem.
Lets just troubleshoot it, or get the guy a static address in a suitable manner, why fix something that doesn't actually *need* fixing if something else works better in the first place?
Define "Properly managed". In an ideal world I agree with you and wasn't suggesting it was a way of managing but plenty just pick an address when doing some troubleshooting, it's quick and dirty and for the purposes works.
David.
That it's not a problem *much* of the time doesn't mean that it's a good idea. As I wrote, it can and will fail *some* of the time, which makes it a bad idea as a general proposition.
Because DHCP *needs* to be fixed -- it's how that network is being managed.
I've had to fix way too much grief time and again from such quick and dirty approaches. It's just not worth it. That it works for you is fine for you, but it's not good advice in general. Better to fix the real problem.
The plot is being lost here, totally.
I very much doubt that DHCP is being used to issue 253 addresses thus leaving plenty for static use and even if it is, if he picks the top one, I can confidently say it won't be a problem *if* he does pick that one. DHCP doesn't need to be fixed if he can set an address that works through either a) DHCP never getting that far b) It's part of the static pool c) He can convince his neighbour who clearly doesn't understand the role of DHCP that it's actually ok if he uses a static address.
How do you suggest he does that John? He has a fine signal yet spends hours just trying to get a DHCP lease. He doesn't control the other end, all the client can do is sit there banging out DHCPDiscover packets, all 342 bytes in size each time. There's *nothing* other than get closer to the AP or improve and already suitable signal but to what end? Just to get an IP address that he can test and report to his neighbour. Sure he can stick a sniffer on and see if the DHCPOffer comes back and whether his client follows it with a DHCPRequest and then a DHCPAck but if not, what *can* he do?
In the two hours he said he tried for, he could have configured his address statically probably 120 times. He could have done firmware updates on the router but he doesn't own that. His neighbour doesn't even understand the relationship between the number of networks in the neighbourhood and static IP addressing. In the time we have discussed this back and forth, for two days now, OP could have just put in a static IP address and reported back on success/failure.
The plot here is "troubleshooting" not general advice on how to manage an Enterprise IP addressing scheme!
Really, there is no need to continue this unless you have information on how he gets to fix a DHCP service (that isn't broken) that he doesn't own. :)
David.
a question, do you have service pack 2 installed to Win XP.
-aljuhani
Did that last night (with 79) and the same problem. Just wouldn't connect. In fact, it didn't even connect once, and again I tried again and again until 2 in the morning.
I'm going to ask the neighbour to come over tonight and see whether between the two of us we can't crack it. I'll let you know how we get on....
Thanks by the way to all of you for your advice, which is very much appreciated!
Assuming that all your IP addressing was correct then it's not a DHCP issue but more like interference possibly.
Try a directional antenna.
David.
Most 'home' APs with DHCP default to a range of about 50 dynamic IPs don't they? The few brands I've seen do. They all tend to support a range of 256 IPs, but the way the DHCP servers are set up, seems like they only hand out in a continuos block of about 50. This gives the user the ability to 'reserve' some addresses for things like print servers and those little wireless webcams and other gadgets that don't sport a built in DHCP client or would be a problem if the 'leased' IP changed for some reason. I can't imagine someone who was letting you on their network even noticing if you picked an IP out of the DHCP range unless by blind chance you picked the same one as say their print server (and how many people have those).
fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.
For that matter why not pick an IP in the higher end of the dynamic range and go static anyway. What are the odds that the DHCP server in the router would suddenly start handing out that IP? Now what I'm saying is if the DHCP is set up to hand out say:
192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.150 and he has say 4 laptops and half a dozen other gadgets, he's using .100 thru about .110, add a girl friend over to visit or another couple of neighbors and you are out to 120, set up around 192.168.1.145. Again this is just an example, even if he knows networking, it might look odd but he would be unlikely to be alarmed, just some 'glitch' in the way the DHCP server doles out leases.fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.
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