Wireless woes

[eclectic_boy]

I spent seven hours yesterday banging my head against wireless technology, with nothing to show for it except a banged-up head. My dad is using my old G3 blue-and-white desktop Mac, and I'm trying to get him on the net. For Christmas I got him comcast high-speed cable internet, whose modem is set up in the room where the TV is. When I move the computer into that room and plug it physically into the modem with an ethernet cable, it works fine. But dad doesn't want the computer there, nor does he want cables snaking around the house. So I want to connect him wirelessly. I bought a wireless PCI card for the G3, since there isn't an official Airport card for it, and it seems to be working fine. I bought an airport base station (the original graphite version, which should be plenty for the G3 and that wireless card). All the pieces are there. But I can't make them work.
Both the G3 and my iBook detect and connect to the airport fine. The airport's lights show that it's communicating both (wirelessly) with the computers and (over ethernet) with the cable modem. But there's no actual connection; nothing loads, from either the G3 or my iBook. Tellingly, one light on the cablemodem, an amber one which usually flashes whenever it's sending/receiving, stays utterly solid when connected to the airport. The airport auto-setup on the CD-rom that came with the airport base station won't run on the G3 because it's using a 3rd-party card, so I have to configure it with the Admin Utility, but I think I'm getting the settings right.... I think. But when I had the G3 hooked up directly and used DHCP, it gave me IP and router addresses starting with 71. When I tried the same thing with the airport, it got assigned number starting with 192. I don't think that should be happening, but I don't really know.

On the hope that there's just a problem with the base station, I'm bringing it back to Swarthmore and I'll see if swapping it for the (non-graphite but oh well) base station we use is any more successful. If it doesn't work there either I'll assume it's the culprit, and see about getting my money back. Sigh, this is enough to make me say maybe the grapes were sour anyway and my dad wouldn't use the net if he had it......

Comments

IANA Networking Expert

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

The IP address behavior you described is exactly right. The 71. address is what the network sees, and you only get one of them from Comcast. The router base station should get that IP address, and then give any computers connected to it an IP address in the 192. series. It then does it's routerly magic (I think involving NAT, but I don't actually know anything about this stuff) to connect the computers behind it to the internet.

Re: IANA Networking Expert

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

That's right. However, it's not necessarily the case that the base station should get that address. It is possible that the cablemodem should get that address, and then act as the router, doing DHCP for the computers beyond it (and assigning 192.168 addresses), while the base station simply acts as a bridge, with a manually assigned address of something like 192.168.1.200 (assuming the cablemodem has an internal adress of something like 192.168.1.1), and (this is important) with DHCP turned off on the base station—otherwise, if both the base station and cablemodem are trying to do DHCP, they will collide, and nothing will work. This is how my network is set up, anyway, though I'm on Verizon DSL.

Re: IANA Networking Expert

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Ooh! That's something I hadn't tried, although I remember in my researching the problem I learned that having two DHCP servers running on the same network was big trouble. I'll give this a try (the next time I'm at my parents). Thanks, to you BDan and to all who've had suggestions!

Re: IANA Networking Expert

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure my Verizon DSL modem does not work this way, but I could be wrong - I think my modem is the bridge.

Re: IANA Networking Expert

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it can be either way, but in any case they shouldn't both be doing DHCP.

I should also say, if all else fails a call to Comcast tech support can't hurt—the worst they can be is useless, and they may actually be able to help, since they generally have to help people set up all sorts of networks like this.

Re: IANA Networking Expert

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Calling Comcast was actually the first (okay, tenth) thing I tried. "Sorry sir, but we do not provide customer support for setups involving an Airport."