GordonB
Guru
- Location
- Somewhere just north of Ipswich
Free! 13yo boy, reasonably well house trained, some thumb and finger marks to neck, will fade in a couple of days.
Polite and well behaved but has a tendency to fiddle with bits of technology without informing his father who spent 2 hours last night trying to find out why his home network was behaving like a mad thing that had sucked down a couple of gallons of mad juice followed by several tabs of E.
Our network is a big one by most home standards, 3 desktop pcs, 2 laptops, 2 iPads, 4 smartphones, 2 NAS servers, live feed weather station, networked printers, etc, etc, etc. Sitting there working on sorting out my book collection (time to go digital when I've got well over 1000 books in the house, most of which I also have as epubs) when the internet connection disappears. This isn't the first time in the last few weeks, we've had BT back numerous times to sort out the relatively fragile copper link to the exchange) but this time it was very odd. I could interrogate the router status but only as far as the setup page which told me there was no connection between the router and the modem. Modem? It's integrated into the router, a very nice Buffalo wireless N job, so it can't lose connection. Ho, hum time to reboot. Did so, internet connection reappears but iPad loses it. Odd. Reboot the router, desktop pc, 16 port gigabit switch and iPad. Desktop now won't connect, iPad will but smartphones and son's iPad wont. Try rebooting again, different devices will or won't connect. Several reboots later I find that there is no pattern to which devices will connect, it's random. Virus? Ghosts in the machine?
I then notice that when a device won't connect, interrogating the router connects me to an IP address of 192.168.11.1 rather than 192.168.0.1, which is the usual home address of the router. Hmmm, I recognise that first address from when Rezillo helped me set up my wireless relay. Perhaps I should explain; we live in a huge house, it's a former primary school with attached teachers house and the walls are extremely thick. So thick that even with a top notch wireless N router you can't get a signal in half of it. To get over this I installed a second router in the house part, hardwired to the network, and that relays the wireless signal to formerly dead zones. Works a treat, but it too is a Buffalo router, one without an internal modem and if you interrogate it you get the same screen as you would when interrogating the main modem/router. When Rezillo and I set it up we set the address of the relay to 192.168.0.99 and made sure we turned off the DHCP server. For them as doesn't know about these things, the DHCP server is the part of the system that allocates IP addresses when a bit of kit is turned on or re-booted. I found that the DHCP server on the relay router was turned on and its home address was 192.168.11.1, which is the default set up. Rebooting kit would cause it to ask the DHCP server for a new IP address and if it got it from the relay server it had no modem so no internet. Resetting the relay back to 192.168.0.99 and DHCP off solved it all.
I suspect that anyone reading this who doesn't deal with networks has either given up the will to live or is sitting with eyes glazed, which is much how I felt last night because I rely on this network for my business. For much of the two hours I had been struggling with this problem my 13yo son had been watching and asking more or less sensible questions about networks, viruses etc but when I had my eureka moment he then calmly announced that he'd had problems connecting his iPad to the wireless network (he's in the house part where the relay gives wireless coverage) so he'd rebooted the relay! ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! He hadn't rebooted it, he'd reinitialised it, setting it back to default settings. Two hours wasted!
I only metaphorically strangled him, but it was tempting........
Polite and well behaved but has a tendency to fiddle with bits of technology without informing his father who spent 2 hours last night trying to find out why his home network was behaving like a mad thing that had sucked down a couple of gallons of mad juice followed by several tabs of E.
Our network is a big one by most home standards, 3 desktop pcs, 2 laptops, 2 iPads, 4 smartphones, 2 NAS servers, live feed weather station, networked printers, etc, etc, etc. Sitting there working on sorting out my book collection (time to go digital when I've got well over 1000 books in the house, most of which I also have as epubs) when the internet connection disappears. This isn't the first time in the last few weeks, we've had BT back numerous times to sort out the relatively fragile copper link to the exchange) but this time it was very odd. I could interrogate the router status but only as far as the setup page which told me there was no connection between the router and the modem. Modem? It's integrated into the router, a very nice Buffalo wireless N job, so it can't lose connection. Ho, hum time to reboot. Did so, internet connection reappears but iPad loses it. Odd. Reboot the router, desktop pc, 16 port gigabit switch and iPad. Desktop now won't connect, iPad will but smartphones and son's iPad wont. Try rebooting again, different devices will or won't connect. Several reboots later I find that there is no pattern to which devices will connect, it's random. Virus? Ghosts in the machine?
I then notice that when a device won't connect, interrogating the router connects me to an IP address of 192.168.11.1 rather than 192.168.0.1, which is the usual home address of the router. Hmmm, I recognise that first address from when Rezillo helped me set up my wireless relay. Perhaps I should explain; we live in a huge house, it's a former primary school with attached teachers house and the walls are extremely thick. So thick that even with a top notch wireless N router you can't get a signal in half of it. To get over this I installed a second router in the house part, hardwired to the network, and that relays the wireless signal to formerly dead zones. Works a treat, but it too is a Buffalo router, one without an internal modem and if you interrogate it you get the same screen as you would when interrogating the main modem/router. When Rezillo and I set it up we set the address of the relay to 192.168.0.99 and made sure we turned off the DHCP server. For them as doesn't know about these things, the DHCP server is the part of the system that allocates IP addresses when a bit of kit is turned on or re-booted. I found that the DHCP server on the relay router was turned on and its home address was 192.168.11.1, which is the default set up. Rebooting kit would cause it to ask the DHCP server for a new IP address and if it got it from the relay server it had no modem so no internet. Resetting the relay back to 192.168.0.99 and DHCP off solved it all.
I suspect that anyone reading this who doesn't deal with networks has either given up the will to live or is sitting with eyes glazed, which is much how I felt last night because I rely on this network for my business. For much of the two hours I had been struggling with this problem my 13yo son had been watching and asking more or less sensible questions about networks, viruses etc but when I had my eureka moment he then calmly announced that he'd had problems connecting his iPad to the wireless network (he's in the house part where the relay gives wireless coverage) so he'd rebooted the relay! ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! He hadn't rebooted it, he'd reinitialised it, setting it back to default settings. Two hours wasted!
I only metaphorically strangled him, but it was tempting........
