Network computers see/don't see each other

Three XP Home computers networked, dsl internet modem, wired to D-link wireless access point.

Each computer is connected to the wireless access point by Cat5 cable, as I gave up on wireless some weeks ago.

All have internal ethernet cards.

Two days ago all could access the internet and each other.

Now:

Computers A, B, C.

Computer A can access the internet, but cannot access either B or C.

Computer B can access the internet and access A & C.

Computer C can access B, but cannot access the internet or A.

Norton AV found 8 infected files, repaired 6 and quarantined 2 on C. Check of quantine file revealed 30 entries. Spybot found 500+ pests on C, deleted all. (13 year old son dangerous) Reg Seeker found 400 + entries, deleted all.

IP address on computer C: 169.254.180.119
Subnet mask on C: 255.255.0.0
IP address on A & B: 192.168.0.100 and .101 respectively.
Subnet mask on A & B: 255.255.255.0

Tried to change in internet connection properties on C per help files to 192.168.0.1 Change does not take.

AAARRRRGH!

I have very limited knowledge (maybe none) of this insanity called networking. Just trying to get the kids online to do school and research, so far a total failure, 13 year old wants XXX files and msn messenger, still believes in free lunch. 9 year old wants Nicolodian Games. But I still have hope.

I have run networking wizard on all three computers more times than I can count, have deleted network on C, shut down, removed card, restarted, shut down, reinstalled card, restarted, same results, same IP address.

Repair network connection on C (in windows) fails.

ipconfig /renew in cmd returns error message: "An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket. "

What the **** does that mean?

About ready to reformat computer C and start over. Or maybe toss it in the pond.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Martin

 

#1 Son is dangerous to say the least. Can I assume that your DLink WAP is actually a router? If so, let it handle DHCP and assign IP's as it sees fit to each of your machines. Sounds to me like you are trying to manually set connections.

 

Hi Rockster: Good to hear from you, glad you're still here.

I'm not sure if it is a router, switch, gateway, or access point. It has 5 connection ports on it, one goes to the DSL modem, the other 4 are for Cat 5 cable to computers, 3 of them are in use, one to my machine, one to each of the kids. All machines have internal Ethernet PCI cards.

It is from D-Link and says on the front: "Wireless Broadband Router" It is their model 614. I believe I am using it as an access point or gateway. (maybe they are the same thing?)

It can be used to connect wireless and wired computers to each other.

Like I said, I gave up on wireless some weeks ago because of signal strength problems and strung Cat 5 cable to the two remote computers, B & C. (I had to crawl under the house to do this and found out the hard way that my daugter's 3 cats were using the crawl space as their litter box, UGH.) My machine was wired even when I was trying to use the wireless.

The network set itself up the first couple of times I ran MSFTs network configuration wizard. All could see each other and connect to the internet. I had some problems, but with help from MSFT and this board I got them working. Just don't remember how.

Yes, I have been trying to manually set the connections, following directions from MSFT's Help file on son's computer, auto setup Networking Wizard fails. Somehow, the IP address always ends up as: 169.254.180.119, or a similar number starting with 169, with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and it will not connect to A or the internet but connects flawlessly to B. I think the correct IP address is 192.168.0.102, when manually set, with subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, it will connect to A and B, but the internet is not accesssable, even though A & B can connect.

This problem started when I cleaned the viruses and other garbage from son's machine. I guess the virus and "FREE" programs to access XXX sites he downloaded have mucked up the works. **** good thing he doesn't have a credit card yet!

I also ran: sfc /scannow with XP CD in drive.

But this network stuff is so Greek to me. Wap and Wep; LAN & WAN; access point, router, switch, gateway; Subnet Mask, IP address, DNS server; IEE802.1X Authentication, DHCP, WINS addresses, DHCP Suffixes, LMHOSTS, NetBios setting, TC/IP, ipconfig, winipcfg, Good Grief, to say nothing of how I recklessly tried to fix something that is not a socket!

I swear, the people who design this stuff must deliberately and with malicious intent make it as confusing and difficult as is humanly possible. My guess they have to generate revenue for the help sites in order to justify their college degree and their rediculous salaries.

I definately am not a rocket scientist nor a computer nerd.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

 

Somehow, the IP address always ends up as: 169.254.180.119, or a similar number starting with 169

This is a thing Microsoft introduced with WinME and has continued with XP and 2003. It has confused more than one person and many who think they 'know' networking.

To reduce the whole thing to English, ME & 2K and above PCs that have networking set up will have a major fit if they are booted and can't find a network. Startup takes forever and all sorts of ugly messages show up. Helpful stuff if you are a geek (and I are ) but not very comforting to a normal person.

So Microsoft put in a feature where a ME/2K/etc. PC that fails to find a network (bad cable, bad switch, bad hair day, whatever) will assign itself a 169.x.x.x address and will be perfectly happy even though there is no way for it to see the network. With that address/subnet mask, even if things recover, it still won't see the other computers. One of the following is probably causing the issue.

• Bad cable. Test by changing cables for a known good one.
• Bad port on either the NIC or at the switch (or hub or similar). Test by trying a different switch port. If that fails and the speed thing (see next item) is fine, try a different network card.
• Speed/duplex mis-match between NIC and switch. If you have a switch, set the network card to run at 100Mbps full duplex. If a hub, then 10Mbps half duplex. In your case, the DLink device has switch ports so 100Mbps full duplex is what you want.
• Since you are running all wired (if I read right) those are about the only possible sources for this problem. The fact that the PC can assign itself an APIPA (Automatic Private IP Addressing) setting indicates that TCP/IP is functional on the PC.

I know you were sorta joking with your alphabet soup listing but I think it is important to have an idea of the general meaning of those terms. So here ya go. If you don't need them, then someone else reading this might.

TCP/IP - Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol is simply the structure (language if you will) for a particular sort of networking that has become the only one used on the internet so pretty much the default for most networks. A set of rules for how packets of information are to be structured and sent/received/whatever. Others in use that do pretty much the same things but with different rules are NetBeui (old Microsoft protocol and pre-internet), IPX/SPX (Novell's pre-internet protocol).

IP address, Subnet Mask - TCP/IP requires that each member of a network have a unique address for much the same reason the post office requires each house, business, whatever have a unique address. The address you see is a decimal representation of the 8 digit binary number your PC uses. That's why 255 is the largest number you will ever see since in binary 11111111 = 255 in decimal. The subnet mask simply tells the PCs on a network how to read the IP address; which part is the PC's number and which part is the network number. I can put it in simple English if you are interested but it's probably boring to non-geek folk.

switch, hub - devices that allow network devices to transfer packets amongst themselves. Similar but a switch is much faster and more efficient than the older hub.

router, gateway - PCs on the same 'network' (as defined by the IP address/subnet mask combination) can talk to each other without help if connected by direct cable, switch, hub. But they cannot find PCs on another network without help. This is by design since you wouldn't want millions and millions of devices having to 'listen' to each other. A router is simply a very fast device that can watch network traffic and if it sees a packet meant for a device outside the local network, can transfer the packet out of the local network to where it needs to go. Gateway address is the address of the router that PCs on the local network are supposed to use when they need to talk to foreigners.

LAN & WAN - Local Area Network (all the PCs that can see each other without needing a router) and Wide Area Network (multiple LANS connected by routers. Larger companies tend to have WANs because it isn't efficient to have the New York office PCs always having to see the Chicago office PCs. Too much unneeded traffic. So they have a LAN in New York, a LAN in Chicago, and a router to move any packets originating in New York but needing to get to Chicago. The internet is simply a huge WAN.

DHCP - a service that assigns IP address/netmask and a few other goodies to a networked PC when it starts up. If they have a DHCP server identified, it's the first thing they try to talk to at boot time so they can get their values assigned.

DNS server, DHCP Suffixes (typo, should be DNS suffixes) - People like names such as windowsbbs.com. Computers like numbers like 112.34.129.204. DNS servers keep a database of name/number matches so you can put in windowsbbs.com and the router will know it needs to find 112.34.129.204. Not the real address BTW but the correct idea. The 'suffix' part is like xxx.com, yyy.co.uk, etc.

WINS addresses (WINS server) - Microsoft method from early on of doing what DNS does. Not suited to huge networks so is dying off.

hosts, LMHOSTS - manual methods of doing what DNS and WINS do dynamically. Fine for small networks but impossible to maintain for large ones since a person has to keep things up to date. Local files on each PC that have PC name & ip address matches. Microsoft set their networking up so that when a PC needs to 'resolve' a name to an ip address, it will first look for a hosts file with the information and if not found, will try (in this order) the local LMHOSTS file, a WINS server, and last a DNS server. Note that you can set the network card to never check for WINS but it will always try hosts & LMHOSTS before looking outside the PC. This is the reason you can block any internet site you want by putting a hosts file entry that points the site name to 127.0.0.1 since that is a local address (on the network card). The PC will simply never look any further but will fail the site name.

Wap and Wep, access point - WAP/wireless access point is a translator that takes wireless packets and moves them to a wired device. WEP does encryption of wireless data to make it harder to steal.

IEE802.1X Authentication - an engineering spec that defines a set of rules for an aspect of wireless network comms.

ipconfig, Winipcfg - Utility programs to list details of a PCs current IP settings. Ipconfig is for NT systems, winipcfg is for 9X/ME systems.

 

I know just enough to be dangerous but I believe that your Router has a standard address of 192.168.1.1. You should be able to access a menu from any machine cabled to it by typing http://192.168.1.1 in the adress bar of any connected machine's browser. Then you can do your router configuration to connect to your ISP - if cable - it will probably not need much if any changing, but you said dSL so you will need the primary and secondary DNS and the correct subnet mask from your ISP. Then let the router be the DHCP server and it will automatically give the computers an IP address. Now, all computers must be part of the same workgroup so check that out first. Then you may need to remove and re-install TCP/IP from each computer - just a couple of mouse clicks and then leave the default settings alone. Then you can run your XP network disk again and leave it all at default but make sure every machine is part of the same workgroup. You'll have to reboot your 98 machines but your XP boxes will handle things after a little "thinking ". Let the DHCP server handle all of your choices for you so each machine is really auto-detect. Hope this lends some help to your dilemma - you're working at this too hard - your equipment should handle all the tough decisions for you if you let it.



edit - Newt has already forgotten more about this subject than I'll ever know, so take your guidance from what he has to say re: network setup. Just wish he'd caught a bigger minnow to hold in that photo.

 

Hi Newt, Hi Rockster:

Newt, I'll do the cable, port, card switching tommorrow, and post back results. Changing out the cable will take another trip into the litter box (ugh) which I will only do in broad daylight with a little bit more caution this time.

The machine is already set at 100/duplex, so it probably is not that, but I'll check again. If I remember correctly, you advised that in a prior post on this same subject.

Rockster, you shouldn't be making fun of Newt's fish, I asked him about it a while back and he told me it was 3 feet long and weighed in at something over 100 lbs. Besides, you got to admire somebody who figured out how to put up a picture, I can't.

You said:

A couple of mouse clicks where? My ignorance knows no bounds.

Newt, No, I wasn't joking about the alphabet soup. I had no idea what all that giberish meant or what it stood for. (I was joking about your fish)

Frankly, even after reading and re-reading you explanation, I'm still not understanding it all. I'm going to print out that part of the post and see if a little more intensive reading of it maybe some of it will penetrate this thick skull.

As always, I greatly appreciate all the help from this great board.

Martin

Edit: Rockster, I clicked the link in your post and got an error message, page cannot be displayed. Next, I'll try typing it.

Edit 2: typed it, same results.

 

Should be http://192.168.0.1 then a login box should come up asking for username and password, usually Admin for username.

 

Like I said, "enough to be dangerous" - the address I gave works with Linksys and a few others, but obviously it was wrong for your DLink. And, didn't know a thing about 169.x.x.x (got it now though). Thanks

Good Luck Martin........

 

Hey Guys, thanks for the comeback. Well, Noadfear, at least I got as far as the window for Name and password, but to the best of my knowledge I've never been there before, or have forgotten any name or password created some months ago.

I used Admin for name and a stock password I use for this kind of account access, but no go. Get 401.

Any workaround??

Martin

 

Should have a default password, also admin, or no password. Check your manual if you have one or check with manufacturer. You should be able to view a manual for it.

 

martinr121

I also use Linksys router.
The above address suggestion is the default setting (can be changed)
Default settings below unless "Password protection activated "
Username = Leave it blank, no entry.
Password = admin

 

Hi All: I am so discouraged!

1. I cannot get into the Linksys settings, blank name and password: "admin" does not work. Typical for me, I have no idea where the manual is.

2. The router/gateway teminal is good, I unplugged computer C, plugged B there and it works fine. Plugged C where B was, no joy.

AAARRRGH!

3. New Cat 5 cable, new network card in C. Same results. Get IP address: 169 xxx.xxx.x.x cannot see A or B, no internet.

AAARRGH!

Manually set connections per Win help files, can see A but not B, no internet.

AAARRRGH!

Only other thing I noticed on C was: Physical Address: 00.00.41.23.53.98 I don't know if this means anything.

AAARRRGH.

Anybody want to buy a computer cheap??

Martin

 

Can you contact D-Link by phone, with purchase invoice number in hand, explain the situation.. possible they have a backdoor entry they can provide for you.

 

There has to be a reset button on that router which will restore factory settings. Then go online and read the manual, it will give you instructions to access the setup menu. But, and a big butt - you still need primary and secondary DNS settings from bellsouth or whomever along with your subnet mask which (here we go again) is probably 255.255.255.0

If you have installed any software from your ISP, like Bellsouth's Fast Access BS - lose it - you don't need it.

 

Martin - mea culpa. I read back thru your original post on this thread to see if I'd missed something and sure enough, I had.
An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket
Probably a side effect of the virus problem you had but TCP/IP on at least one and maybe several of your PCs is damaged.

On older OS versions you'd simply remove and reload TCP/IP but XP won't allow that. The thing is too deeply embedded in the OS.

On any of your PCs that aren't behaving just right,
start~run~cmd followed by
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
This does pretty much the same thing for XP that a removal and reload of TCP/IP would on older OS versions.

As a side note, you mentioned that my English translations of the geek-speak stuff still wasn't clear to you. That has to be a problem with the explanations I posted and since I'd like to have them so non-tech folk can read and understand, I'd appreciate your saying which in particular still need work.

Rockster - the home routers from Dlink, Netgear, Linksys, etc. will normally use an address of either 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 and the decision on which was purely a matter of what numbers the designer liked. The easiest way to be sure if there are any working members attached to them is to check their default gateway address since the router acts as the gateway so that will be it's IP address.

And the subnet mask is normally 255.255.255.0 which means that if the router uses 192.168.1.x, all the PCs will as well.

 

Newt: I'm getting nowhere.

I typed in command prompt: netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt The first time I did it, nothing happened, got an hrglass flash, then this:

The following command was not found: int ip reset resetlog.txt.
ignoring the netsh I had typed in. Did it again, same results.

The card was installed and "running" under 169.xxx.x.x .

I uninstalled the card (not physically) and ran the command again.

Got a flashing cursor, that was it, got command prompt back.

Re-installed the card, got 169.xxx.x.x again. Right clicked & repair, failed to renew IP address, contact administrator.

cmd-ipconfig /renew= fail to renew etc etc

Is there something I should be doing before going to the command prompt?

I had run NAV again earlier today, reports 0 infections. Also haver re-run spy bot and reg seeker, got rid of any reported entries.

Thanks,

Martin

Edit:

I forgot, on restart, get warning from NAV, "can't scan email, network not properly configured." Like I didn't know that!

 

Newt:

Thanks for the netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt tip. I've pretty much been a Linksys loyalist and am in full understanding of what you are saying re: checking the default gateway. Ditto on the standard subnet mask but the decimal equivalent was new news. When it comes to the finer points of networking, I've run in to some issues which reduce me to pre-neanderthal status. Regardless, your comments are always appreciated - you really blew me away when you broke down the settings that one of my favorite little broadband utilities, DRTCP, handled. Now, if you could just toss some of those minnows in Lake Norman ......

Martin - you'll get there.

 

Linksys supplies the manual via the install CD.. try checking yours.

 

Hi Dennis: Talk about Mea Culpa, I don't have any Linksys equipment installed on any of the three machines. Must have had too many Saint Pauli Girls tonite.

Sorry about that.

On the main machinen (A) is a MOBO integrated Intel ethernet adapter connected to a D-Link 614 wireless router/access point/switch by wire, Cat 5 cable.

Machine B, SMC 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI card.

Machine C, Network Everywhere 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI card.(now, new card, previously had same as B, going to change it back.)

I really don't know how Linksys snuck into this post. I guess I could go back and read it all, but not tonight.



Martin

Edit: Rockster, I got my doubts that I'll ever get there.

 

I have great confidence in you my friend. You'll get there, just wish I could be of more help.

I think Dennis L was implying that DLink might have the manual on their CD, similar to Linksys having their manual on the CD. If not, let's go help him out with that Saint Pauli Girl!