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It seems whenever I go back home from uni my laptop seems to mess up my mum and dad's wireless network, unfortunately they've spotted this correlation and are not happy. Given that I'm about to move back there after graduation this summer I thought I'd better sort things out.
I think from my poor IT knowledge that it's having some issues giving out IP addresses. All the computers seem to see the wireless network but when connecting they seem to hang up when aquiring network address. It seems to start with me losing connection (say after my laptop going to sleep and being restarted) then trying to reconnect. I don't manage to reconnect then other computers start having issues.
I occassionally have this problem on the network in the flat at uni with both my desktop and laptop however it is far less frequent, maybe once a month.
Connecting to the network at home we have:
Parents laptop
2x Parents IPhones
My laptop
My desktop
Sisters laptop
Printer (via ethernet cable)
although these issues happened before both iphones & the network printer.
I'm really confused as to what's causing it, it happens even with just the 3 laptops which surely shouldn't cause much trouble, I thought a wireless router could cope with 15 different addresses? Is it worth manually assigning IP's or would that be a faff?
Router is one of these:
http://www.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=505381#
however we had the same issue with the previous 2 routers.
Any advice would be much appreciated
Thanks
Mat
What OS and WiFi chipset are you using on your lappy?
Had something similar in the past with Linux and the IWLxxxx series Intel wireless cards. It was sending out malformed packets and crashing the router.
Solution was to update firmware on the router (stopped the router crashing and kicking everyone else off at least) then to wait over a year for Intel to fix their shitty drivers.
Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG with XP Pro.
Its a reasonably old laptop (Dell D410 bought in August '05), I've reformatted it a couple of time now and always just used the latest driver from the Dell website. Although I do recall having issues installing it and getting it to work so maybe thats where I need ot look.
I always fix IPs - makes life so much easier and more predictable. But you shouldn't need to.
Yep, as with coffeeking, I still enable DHCP on the router, but I set it up so that each of my own devices receives the same reserved IP address every time (with a nice long lease).
That way only guests get assigned a floating address by the DHCP.
That means if I ever have any problems and have to look at the logs I can tell which device is causing the issue by looking at the IP address rather than messing around finding out what all the MAC addresses are.
If you can, grab the proper intel drivers rather than dells ones which are probably out of date. IIRC that is the exact card i had the issue with too, tho it seemed to be specifically the lin driver which was poo
I still enable DHCP on the router, but I set it up so that each of my own devices receives the same reserved IP address every time (with a nice long lease).
I do this too; however, it's largely for OCD reasons, I wouldn't recommend it as a troubleshooting step.
Personally I'd say forget setting IPs manually on the laptop, and try and work out what's going on. Firmware update on the router is a reasonable idea, make sure you back up the config first in case it wipes it. However, if you get similar problems with other routers, I'd be looking at your lappy as a root cause.
Network cards and powersaving are poor bedfellows. If you can disable powersaving on the network adapter, that's a good start. Definitely look for updated drivers for the adapter, and consider disabling hibernation completely (I've always had far more issues with hibernating than any benefit from using it, I'd rather just switch off the machine fully).