Winblows strikes again

Once again, Bill Gates nightmare of an operating system has struck again.

I woke up this morning to find the network partially down, rendering me unable to get online from any of the PC's around the house. Once I found the cause, and got everything back up and running, two of the three machines restored internet connectivity, and all PCs all show up on the network. As for the one that still will not connect to the net. I'm at a total loss as to what is malfunctioning. All settings are correct, no hardware or software has been added to this particular machine in months, virus and spyware checks all show a clean slate. Verifying the network I.D. and address all show what they are supposed to, and there are no user restrictions at all on this machine. Any ideas from the guru's out there? TIA.

 

Yes, I've tried the ipconfig/renew command, and the machine has been power cycled. The problem still persists. I can try it again as it's only been done once. <<shrug>>

Jayman, the system is a 100Base-T Ethernet with a wireless ethernet bridge connecting the two houses.

The neighbours son has been gaming again, which is only confounding the problem as it has direcway throttling the connection - always a guranteed source of issues. I had to power cycle the modem a minute ago to get internet access back again. :cussing:

 

OK, I finally have the damn thing working.

I ended up setting the machine to a fixed address, and then re-releasing it back to autoconfigure, and having it re-poll for a new address. Now it connects. I hate winblows.

As for the cause of this mornings networking troubles, one of the WAP's apparently went unstable, and then locked down. The one that I work with to keep this connection up, is in Missouri right now, visiting his folks. I ended up pulling his box off on his side, and putting mine in place, and setting up my spare WAP here to get the bridge back up and running. For some strange reason, I couldn't get his WAP to respond to being queried, so I thought it was the dead one. When I put mine up over there, the machine wouldn't query it either, so I'll have to test his box on my machine later.

It's his son, about the same age as me, who is doing the gaming. Believe me, I'm not far from strangling him right now, but he is the neighbours son/pet. I think he's aware of my frustration at the moment. I "asked" him for some bandwith, and told him that his damn game has the entire works shut down. This was when I went down to reset the modem.

Satellite internet is the absolute WORST form of broadband one can use for gaming. Due to b/w limitations, direcway will throttle connections where the useage is particularly heavy. Add to this, the fact that this is a shared connection, and I want to put a boot up a certain derriere.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"75195)</div>

I have found WiFi to be finicky too, so I don't use it. Never mind the security issues. Even CEP doesn't always play nicely with WiFi.

The biggest problem to satellite Internet isn't the bandwidth throttling, but the latency/jitter. The Clarke Belt for the satellites is a *long* way from here, so anything that depends on isochronous or plesiochronous connections can latch up or act oddly.

Remember when the Afghan war started and we were watching embedded reporters like Christianne Amanpour? Yeah, I think she's hot too.

Anyway, the anchor here would be done with his question and she'd still be nodding in that annoying way she has for 5 seconds after the question was asked? That's latency.

Happy to hear you finally resolved the problem. As far as your neighbor hogging all the bandwidth: Isn't a guy in his 30's a wee bit old to be living at home? Or is he caring for his folks??[/b][/quote]

Yeah, we use the Wi-Fi as it's the only practical means to cover the distance between the two houses, as it's too far to bury a wire, not to mention that we'd have to cut across two people's properties.

You know how some people have dogs and cats as pets. Well, this guys kids are his pets. His son arrived a couple of months ago for a "two week visit." He works whenever he feels like it, and has done some rather "unique" things to his body - the kinds of things that cannot be concealed, and that render him unable to seek "normal" employment. The guy apparently has no drive for self support.

His daughter lives in a mobile home behind the parent's house. She also has a kid, and pays zero, zip, nada, nothing for rent or even attempts to cover any part of the electric bill. She needed a car, bought one from one of those "sell it a dozen times" stealerships. The neighbours wife decided to be nice and cosign a regular loan so that it would be possible to actually pay off the car - a used Hyundai Accent. Not long after this was done, the daughter all of a sudden was "unable" to make the payment.

All I can say is, that if these two were my kids, I would have had them packing their bags long ago. I would personally never dream of putting my folks through this kind of crap. My folks wouldn't have anything to do with it either, as one of my brothers is finding out. Him and his wife want to be pets, and have been solidly and flatly refused by both my foks, and his wifes' folks - the way it should be.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"75369)</div>

Wolfy:

Well, as far as your 2-doors-down neighbor and his kids, that's his business. An odd arrangement to be sure.

Anyhoo, I'm still a bit puzzled about this DirecWay Satellite Internet and the WiFi thing. Do you own the DirecWay and the neighbor "borrows" bandwidth, or vice-versa?? I know it's very expensive compared to cable and DSL with inferior bandwidth.

Sharing bandwidth over a terrestrial link is troublesome enough, but over a satellite link it becomes highly unreliable. Again due to the latency/jitter issue. I'm assuming where you live now has zero access to cable modem or DSL.

Let's hope you can sell and that the new development has cable modem, DSL, and maybe even fiber to the home. Hey, you can always dream, right?[/b][/quote]

Yeah, I just grit my teeth and keep my composure when his pets act up. It's not really any of my business, and they already know that I feel that they are being severely taken advantage of. Everybody has flaws, and this is theirs. It's what makes the world go 'round, and gives us fodder to complain about our friends. :mrgreen: We are all on very close terms, and I often refer to them as adopted family. We even just "knock and walk in" when we go over to each others houses. They are one of the things that are making this decision to move very difficult.

They have the equipment, and I couldn't afford to pay for the equipment myself at the time. They were initially trying to have a wireless USB setup to get the internet to all of the PCs at their house, and having massive issues with it. I then helped them wire and set up their house for ethernet. When we did this, we got the bright idea to link the houses. At the time, I was also having all kinds of problems with sprint and their phone service. Once this was done, it opened up the opportunity to dump sprint altogether, and I offered to pay for a portion of the monthly bill if I could tap off of their system.

Initially it was a mess as we had to have a dedicated server to process the Direcway system. Network issues and outages were almost weekly. Direcway has since come out with a modem that connects directly to ethernet networks. It's a plug and play operation now, as it does host duty for supplying network addresses. The system works well, untill they start throttling the connection to restrict b/w. When they do this, the modem seems to get flaky, and will then lock down. The only option then is to power cycle it, and let it resynch. Beyond this, it's no harder than setting up any other home network, as the modem only sees network addresses polling for internet useage.

DSL is available, but would entail letting sprint back into my house - which will never happen. The new development is also serviced by sprint, so no phone lines will be hooked up there either. When I move out there, I'll purchase a direcway system off of evilbay to offset some of the startup costs, and go with satellite again, since there is no cable service at the new place either. I'm not an online gamer, so the system works fine for me.

As for the WiFi part, it is just two WAP 11's set up to act as a wireless bridge. You have to put the far end's mac address into the respective units, and they simply act as a long cable. Even the sniffer equipment will not latch onto this system for hacking - I've tried. :mrgreen: