Win98 computer suddenly not connecting to the internet

[Fancia]

I've had a most perplexing problem recently; one of my Win98 computers, out of the blue, is no longer connecting to the internet. (We have a router, which splits our broadband connection.) It's always worked before, but now it can't seem to get an IP from the router. Does anyone have any ideas how I might fix this?

[apeman]

Could be a million reasons - can you be more specific? In what way can't it connect? Did you install anything new recently? Have you scanned for viruses?

Mike

[Marten]

Most ethernet cards have a little light (a small LED) on them to indicate if it detects a working network.  Check the card first... do you have a light, or a blinking light, or no light at all?

[Fancia]

Tom: No, nothing was installed recently. As I said, it can't get an IP address. The one in winipcfg is junk, and it can't renew it.

Marten: There's a steady light. The router is also lit up on the appropriate port.

[Zemus]

Win98 and networks..that can be hell...
The only reason I could think of is that the card is set to a specific IP in Windows and therefore doesn't try to get an IP from the router. You've probably checked that already, but I thought I mentioned it since you say winipcfg shows an IP.

[Fancia]

I have, Zemus... it's grabbing a garbage 169.blah address, which isn't right, and it's not set to do that automatically.

[Wodball]

Few things you could do...

You could reset the router, or you can reinstall the drivers for the ethernet card.

Consequently, you could power cycle the router (Unpluging then pluging back in), just to clear junk out of it without reseting it.

--Woody

[Laust]

The 169.* address is, if I'm not mistaken, derived from the MAC address of the ethernet card and is what Windows defaults to when it cannot get a DHCP lease from the DHCP server.

If you can log into the router, do that and check the DHCP settings. It might say if something is up. I doubt power cycling the router would do much difference as the config and lease tables are usually stored in flash or SRAM (and will survive power down). Resetting the router (via the reset button it no doubt has) I can't really recommend unless you know what you're doing.

Is this the only computer getting its DHCP address from the router? If not, do DHCP requests work from other machines?

Alternatively, and this may be the simplest solution, simply assign a static IP address to the W98 machine. Configure the Internet settings manually (grab values for name servers, netmask, etc. from an already configured machine on the same network).

IP addresses are usually assigned from 10-255 or 100-255 of whatever subnet the router is using. Pick one, preferably a highish number, and the chance of it clashing with a DHCP-assigned IP address is virtually nil. The router will, if possible, assign the same IP address to a machine each time it makes a DHCP request, so if you manually set the IP address to *.*.*.250 (for example), the router will not try to use that address for a lease until you have had 150 (assuming first assigned address is *.*.*.100) machines (or ethernet cards, really) connected. And that probably doesn't happen anytime soon.

I hope that made some sense... I use this procedure myself (not every OS supports DHCP out of the box, sadly) and it works fine - even if it might be considered admitting defeat

[Marten]

Laust is correct; the address you're seeing is a fallback address used when DHCP fails.

My only suggestion is to see if there are log files on your DHCP server/router that might shed light on the situation.

[Fancia]

Bother. If there are logs on my router, I certainly don't know how to get to them. I have a Linksys BEFSR41 with the latest firmware, if anyone's familiar with that.

I've tried manually setting the connection settings on the machine, but with no luck; it still doesn't work. The router's light for it is on, so it clearly recognizes that there's something conected there; Goddess only knows why it's being so stupid. -.-;

[Wodball]

Get onto a computer that actually works with the router.

Go into your browser and type in the address bar "192.168.1.1", without quotes of course. Then when it asks for user name and password, then type in "admin" in the password slot, while leaving the user name blank. This is assuming that you didn't change any settings since you got the router.

Once you get in, go to "Administration" on the top bar, and click logs. I remember about this is that the log is pretty jumbled up, and only logs stuff if you turned it on in the past.

You can always click on "Status" and check out your DHCP client tables, or even change the DCHP settings under "Setup", where you just click "no" for enabling DHCP.

I hope I don't get these problems from my router. It's a BEFSR41 v3.

--Woody

[Fancia]

Oddly enough, the computer that won't connect is on the client table - and is the only thing on the client table.

Turning off DHCP elsewhere might cause a problem for the other computers that are using it, so I'd prefer not to try that. :x Bother all.

[Laust]

If manual settings don't work, I'm beginnnig to suspect the network card. If the machine isn't ancient (but then, why would you run Windows 98 on it, I wonder), it might be worth a try to boot a Linux rescue or live-cd (all the rage these days it seems) in the machine and see if that can get a DHCP address from the router. If it can, it points towards Windows being the culprit. If it can't (and the NIC otherwise appears to be supported), it points towards the card being bad. Especially if manual configuration of the card under Linux fails. Regardless, it might shed some light on the situation.

[Fancia]

That's a very good idea; I'll download Ubuntu or Knoppix or something and give that a try. Thank you!

[Fancia]

To anyone who may care, probably no one.. :b I did end up downloading Morphix and trying that. It worked, I got sick of Windows, and installed Debian using the Morphix CD. Now it's looking and working better than it ever did with Windows, so that's all right; happy ending. ;3