Two Gateways? What's going on? Networking problems!

Hi all...I am having a problem with my setup here at home. It did work at one time, but I switched routers and also added an Airport Extreme (for wireless) in the house, but it is connected to the DLink router...so what I am about to say should involve NOTHING with the Airport Extreme!

Ok, here goes...

First off, I setup a network on my 2 different machines...In network places on each computer, all I see is it's own shared directory...I cannot see the other PC.

Next, if I do ipconfig, comp A says:

IP Address...................: 192.168.0.102
Subnet Mask................: 255.255.255.0
Def. Gateway...............: 192.168.0.1

Now, on comp B when I do ipconfig it says:

IP Address...................: 10.0.1.4
Subnet Mask................: 255.255.255.0
Def. Gateway...............: 10.0.1.1

Now, if I do ping 10.0.1.4 on comp A it request timed out out AND:

Ping statistics for 10.0.1.4:
Packets: sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 <100% loss>

Now, if I do ping 192.168.0.102 on comp B is gets replies and says:

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.102:
Packets: sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 <0% loss>

Now, how is this possible? How are the gateways different if they are on the same router, and how can comp B be pinging comp A fine, but comp A to comp B is otherwise?

I would assume this is the reason my network is not working...

Any help is appreciated here! It's driving me nuts!

 

Your IP address is provided by a service called DHCP. Almost all broadband internet routers provide this service. However, so do many wireless access points. It you have two devices giving out IP address you can have a problem such as yours.

I expect the PC with the 192.168.0.x address has got that from the router, and the PC with the 10.0.1.x address has got it from the Airport Extreme.

The solution - connect into the admin setup of the Airport Extreme and turn off the DHCP (automatic IP addressing) option.

Both PCs will then get their IP address from the router. However this may not happen immediately (only after the IP address lease runs out). However, you can force the IP address renewal by using:

IPCONFIG /RELEASE

and then

IPCONFIG /RENEW

 

That's true. However, this will force him to manually set up IP addresses for all wireless devices. XP can sometimes handle it on its own but I've found it unreliable. I would think it would be more important to need DHCP on the wireless connections rather than the wired ones. I'd rather make the wired PC's static and keep the Wireless ones dynamic.