Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler This Linksys switch has outsmarted me….

Round three….or four or whatever it is now….I'm getting the crap beat out of me too.

Now that the boy has been home screwing around on the internet in his room, and I have the laptop in the HT room, I’m having issues with this thing.

I can not seam to have more than one PC on-line at once. If one is on-line and I go to open a browser on a different machine, I get a “no connect” windows error page. When I kick the other computer off the LAN, I can then get on with the other computer, but more than once, I’ve had to unplug the router to get the PC to link up.

I thought a switch / router was supposed to network numerous PC’s on a LAN. Are there some settings that I’m supposed to do??

So all of your machines are set for DHCP, and the router is handing out DHCP addresses? (this is default on the router). The switch shouldn't matter in the slightest; for this intent and purpose it's just a connection multiplier--a dumb device. The router is where the settings to split the connection would be.

Does your DSL connection use PPPoE? If so, these settings should be set on the router, and the router should be handing out private IP addresses via DHCP to your computers.

Hmm, yes, you should be able to share the internet connection amongst multiple computers in your house. We usually have three going at once here at home since none of us are willing to share.

When you say you have to kick the other computer off, do you mean that you're shutting the other one down/turning it off? If that's what you mean, perhaps all of your PC's are sharing the same IP address.

UH...... I don't know Ken. Where do I go to check that stuff out? I think everything is set to auto.

I don't know if they all share the same IP address or not.

Did I mention that I'm an idiot when it comes to computors before??

Okie dokie... first thing to do on all of the computers is check how their networking is set up. I assume you're on XP. Go to the Start menu, choose Network Connections. Then double click on Local Area Connection, then click the Support tab. You should see

Address Type: Assigned by DHCP.

If not, there's the start of an issue. I imagine that the router (it's a Linksys, right?) is handing out addresses in the 192.168.1.x address space, so the IP address should be close to that.

One thing to remember is that all of the computers MUST have a different IP address.

or you could log onto your router...for linksys type the following into your browser..

http://192.168.1.1

user and pass should be admin

you can look around on your router and see if it is assigning DHCP to all users. It will actually be ont he first page when you log onto your router...

look for "Local DHCP Server: Enable/Disable" on the first page you log onto.

The all have DHCP selected and all three have different IP addresses.

I should have also mentioned that this doesn't happen EVERY time, but often enough to be iritating.

Hmm. Intermittent problems are always a pain. Lemme think.

I don't suppose the router is set to allow only one connection at a time? I use this setting to add a little extra security as I leave my systems running all the time, no one else can access the router as I use all the ports available.

How do I check that?