I just installed a WGR614v6 at my fiance's office at work. She has a basic DSL modem running into the WAN port of this router, and then two wired connections - one to an desktop, one to her laptop. All is well when we're wired.
However, when we use the wireless connection for the laptop she cannot access *some* of the websites she uses. If we plug in the wire, everything works again.
While this looks purely to be a network configuration issue, the fact that it works when wired has be absolutely puzzled. I've disabled all firewalls and changed the wireless channel, but still running WSA-PSK.
Does she have any form of "safe surfing", "parental controls", "anti-phishing", or "anti-spam" software installed under Windoze XP that blocks access to known spam, porno, phishing, etc sites? Some of these (specifically Norton Internet Security) are configured by connection type which means you could get different site access blockages depending on whether you're connected via wired or wireless even though they go to the same router IP address. Try disabling the safe surf stuff and see if that helps.
If this isn't possible, try a wireless connection with a different laptop to identify whether it's a router or laptop issue.
Incidentally, this problem appears as an issue with the WGR614 series of routers ocassionally:
The problem is sometimes causes by either out of date router firmware or that it required a hardware (paper clip) reset to clear out some garbage in its NVRAM.
Thanks. The firmware is already up-to-date, and the laptop is a new Dell Latitude 620 with the Broadcom 1490 minicard. Unless there is some extra protective software configured, to my knowledge it's vanilla. Maybe I should install Firefox in case it's Microsoft-centric.
I will reset the modem to see if that helps.
Also, Dell discusses something about not handling SSIDs properly in a dual-band setup. I will also try setting the router to 802.11g only instead of b and g.
It's possible. Look under the IE6 or IE7 security settings at: Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Restricted Sites and see if there are any sites listed.
Not the modem. Reset the WGR614 router.
Yeah, I've seen something like that with some dual band laptops. If the access point is a dual band access point, and has the same SSID on both the 802.11g and 802.11a sides, then the client sometimes gets confused as to which side to use. However, the WGR614 is only
Thank you I will update the drivers, etc. I checked last night and her laptop software drivers all date from about 12months ago. Sheesh, it was built last month.
All clear. IE6.
Yes, sorry I was thinking of the router.
Oh, 'dual band' only means 802.11a/g, and not 802.11 b/g?
In any case, I found that Dell mentions this router in their knowledgebase:
formatting link
I don't have everything in front of me, but that doc appears to disable WEP passphrase security, which we're not running (using WSA-PSK at the moment).
Thanks for your help - I now have a full list of things to inspect next time I make the trip to her office to help.
Chuckle. I did a new Lenovo T60 last night (yawn). Delivered at midnight for a European vacation. The Thinkvantage utilities, which included the wireless drivers, required about 170Mbytes of downloading, which included two rather scarey flash RAM updates. The out of box experience was not very good considering this took about 2 hours (including the usual Windoze updates).
802.11b and g are both 2.4GHz. 802.11a is 5.8Ghz. The Dell 1490 will do all of these thus making it a "dual band" wireless card. I guess it could also be called "triple mode" but I don't wanna go there.
(I had to tell the above URL that I had a Latitude D620 before it would display anything.)
That's quite a laundry list of Dell versus Netgear problems. The unintelligible gibberish about the WEP key really means that Dell had discovered that there are incompatibilities between different manufacturers implimentations of converting an ASCII WEP key to a Hex WEP key. This is a very common problem, but usually ignored by vendors because it's only a problem with compatibility with different vendors, and they don't support other vendors products. I'm amazed that Dell would even mention it, and disgusted by the unintelligible explanation. Anyway, that's not your problem.
Jeff, I did update the drivers with the latest software from dell, and the wireless connectivity dropped to zero.
So then I uninstalled it, and was left with only the windows wireless support. (It was using a slightly more featureful utility from Dell/Broadcom). Voila, everything works now on all wireless networks.
Cool. I just went through that exercise on an HP laptop for a customer. Broadcom wireless card. (I forgot the model numbers). It had some early version of the driver and client utility. I updated the driver but not the client utility when everything started working weird. For example, the wireless on/off button would allow me to turn off the wireless, but not on. I eventually realized that the driver and client utility (or whatever it's called) had to go together with the same version. I downloaded version 4.x of the driver and the Broadcom utilities, and everything worked just fine. Kinda nifty looking interface.
In addition, I found that in the properties for the driver, were a bunch of settings that I thought were only in Cisco and Intel Proset. I can now control how aggressively the client sticks to a single access point (for roaming), and SNR thresholds. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to explore, tinker, and test.
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