So here’s the deal: my brother, wife and I are visiting my parents for a week. They have an unsecured wireless LAN in their house. For three days, all of us have been here and running fine. We’ve all been hooked up to the net, all at the same time, no issues. We played a bunch of WoW together, we played Left4Dead, etc. No problems.
Today, out of nowhere, my brother’s computer won’t connect. He gets Local Only access. None of us, as far as we know, have changed anything about anything. The WLAN is set up the same, my wife and I still have full access, nobody has changed any settings or installed any software.
Does anyone know what could cause that? I could understand if stuff just didn’t work to begin with, but it seems so bizarre to me that it would just arbitrarily conk out after working fine for three days. Does the Hivemind have any wisdom to offer?
(additional info: we are all running Vista; he can see the network and other wireless networks in his network connection thingy; we can’t try connecting to other WLANs because they’re all security enabled…but we do get the “Wrong password” error when we try.)
It could be a DHCP issue. Have your brother type:
ipconfig /release
in Start > Run
and then after that completes,
ipconfig /renew
If that doesn’t work, assign your brother a static IP address, for the gateway use the IP address of your wireless router, and type 4.2.2.2 as the preferred DNS.
If that doesnt work, set his network back to using DHCP to automatically get ip address and DNS info, because obviously whatever the problem is, DHCP wasn’t it.
Curious. I goggled this IP address and saw others reocmmending it, too. Whose DNS server is this? Why is it better than the DNS server from your own ISP?
Two reasons:
a. It is easier to remember 4.2.2.2 than 208.67.222.222 (OpenDNS’s server)
b. I’m lazy, and writing “Use 4.2.2.2 as the DNS” is easier than writing instructions on how to poll the router to find out what DNS server your friend’s ISP is actually using. :-)
Did you keep the same wireless SSID name? If you did, your laptop might still be using the settings it stored from your old router, because it see the same name and has no idea it’s a new one. To fix this, you have to reintroduce your laptop to the new router:
Try this (you said you’re on vista):
Click Start > Networks > Network and Sharing Center > Manage my Wireless Network.
Remove all the wireless networks listed on that page and then click OK. 3. Restart your computer.
Try to connect to the router now (it will rescan for wireless networks)
If this works, please name a baby croc after me. :-)
D-Link has become my first choice for N-class hardware, assuming you’re above the $80 USD price point. For G-class, it’s Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 flashed to DD-WRT FTMFW.
