Unable to get an IP

[jake858]

Greetings,

This is my first time posting here and I hope I found the right thread.

Earlyer this afternoon my wifes computer lost its net connection. We arent sure when, she sat down to read a book and when she came back her connection was gone.

First of all our setup. Its not great, we have our cable modem connected to a hub and than to each of our computers. To make things easyer I switched to a direct connection to troubleshoot. Her system is windows XP home SP2, basicly she is getting limited or no connectivity message. When we try to renew her IP via command it says unable to contact DHCP server.

I went out and purchaced a new network card but have had the same issue. The tech at our ISP walked me through a few things. Winsock cataloge, swapped out cords. Powercycled the modem and her system. All the basics.

Anyway, at this point im completely stuck. Her computer is clean of virus' and she is running the win firewall. Nothing major happened that would have changed the state of her system yet its suddenly not working. I also ran the patch from microsoft related to SP2 and having limited or no connectivity, longshot at best which didnt work.

Any advice or information people have to offer would be of great help.

Thanks,
Jake

 

[El0him]

Well first off, do you have a hub or a consumer switch/router, i.e. netgear, d-link, etc...etc....

If you truely have a hub, than it could be that your ISP is limiting how many CPE devices you have behind your cable modem. This could have happen while wife is reading as all they need to do is reboot the cable modem with a new docsis configuration file. Try putting in a consumer switch with NAT capabilities.

How many computers do you have and do they have internet access?

 

[jake858]

We have the 2 computers and an acutal hub. My computer connects fine, but hers doesnt. Our ISP is aware of the 2 IP's being drawn and we pay extra for it. So I'd hope they wouldnt just shut it off. The issue is also still there when we directly connect from the modem to her computer.

I contacted my ISP and they said the problem was with the computer.

 

[piasabird]

What kind of ISP do you have?
CABLE?
DSL?

How many IP Addresses do yo have?

If you only have one IP, then you can only connect one computer to that IP using a HUB. There is a possibility to share an address with a hub but it is very difficult and very clumsy to do so.

However, if you had a Router you could connect both computers to one IP and share it through the router. A router should let you connect both computers.

The ideal connection would be to connect the Cable modem to a Router with a 4 port switch built in. Even if the ISP was using the hardware address of your Network card you could masquerade the hardware NIC address from your nic on your router so that all they could tell is that you are using a router. It also adds a little security.

With a router at home, I have 2 computers hooked up to the cable modem and I only have one IP address. The thing about a router is that it makes the connection to the ISP itself. All you have to do is connect to the local network on your side of the network to the built-in switch. Basically all I ever had to do is tell IE that I connect directly to the local lan when I set up the network with the wizard built into Windows XP. Works great all the time. XP should be good at autosensing the network.

Sometimes your computer can get some damage that you can not tell if some file you get in your e-mail messes up one computer. All it takes is for a file to become corrupt or damaged. This is fairly rare with Win XP.

 

[Nanikawa]

try don't use DHCP, static your IP address and try again.