Motorola SBV4200 trouble

[Lain]

My friend has a Motorola SBV4200 cable modem. Currently they have an old Dell XPS450 with hooked up to the modem with a generic ethernet card. That computer seems to connect all right (although sometimes it will drop after the computer has been left on all day); since this modem supposedly automatically assigns IP address, etc., it seems to me I should be able to directly connect any ethernet adapter on another computer and it will work. But it doesn't...I think this modem is a real piece of junk (also b/c of connection dropping, but that could be a software issue--someone without much experience set up all this unnecessary software on the computer, blah blah...). The reason I have been trying to connect another computer is because firstly: I have been trying to set up a wireless network with a Motorola WR850G router, without success. I have no problem accessing the router settings on the Dell through Internet Explorer, so I don't think this is a problem with any components other than the modem. With the router hooked up, the Dell cannot access internet. But when it's directly connected, as I said, there is no problem (for a few hours) accessing the internet. That's why I resorted to trying to directly connect several other computers, because the Dell works fine in direct connection, but no other computer can access internet through this modem. There are no drivers installed on the Dell for this modem; no settings specific to that computer that allow it to connect; I know this because some idiot just installed XP on this computer, and he had no idea what he was doing, but it still connects. Therefore, any specific settings in a previous instance of Windows would have been erased. And yes, on the other computers I have tried, I made sure that auto-assignment of network addresses was enabled. All computers involved are running WinXP. I have even tried taking the addresses I get off the Dell's ipconfig and manually typing them into network settings on the other computers, to no avail.

Any advice for the next step to take would be deeply appreciated; this has been a profoundly frustrating problem. Maybe I just need a different modem...

 

[hubbardt]

You are correct in saying that any ethernet interface connected to the cable modem should get an I.P address (as long as it is configured to auto assign).

When you connect a PC that doesn't appear to work what does a "IPCONFIG /ALL" tell you ?

Looking through the user guide (click me !) ... did you use the correct ports and configure the router for DHCP ?

You can sometimes get useful info by looking at the Surfboard logs (192.168.100.1)

Anything in the Windows event logs ?

Regards,