Victoryette

Last night, I had a small victory.

A neighbor was having a problem with his PC. It had connected fine to the net through a direct USB connection from the PC to his cable modem. When he added a wireless router, connecting it to the cable modem with that USB cable, and then running a CAT5 Ethernet connection from the router to the PC, it could not connect to the net.

The reason he had added the wireless router was so that his wife's laptop could use the net connection. At first, it wouldn't connect to the net either, but after he plugged the CAT5 cable into it, it 'recognized' the router, and from then on it would connect wirelessly.

(There's no security on his personal network, and so no MAC addresses needed to be defined to it for access. Yeah, thats a hole.)

But his desktop PC would not connect. He was advised by his Internet Service Provider that there was likely something wrong with the CAT5 card in the PC, and so he replaced it. When he did that, he realized that he had not been plugging the router into the original card's CAT5 plug, but into another one on that same PC. (Makes me wonder what else would have a CAT5 jack on it) He tried plugging into the new one, but the PC still would not connect to the net. He defined a new personal network ( I assume he'd created the first one when he installed the routrer), and the desktop still wouldn't connect. The laptop was able to connect to the new network, and from there to the internet, but the desktop could not.

At that point he asked if my wife and I might take a look at it.

We asked a lot of questions. We disabled his firewall. We rebooted in diagnostic (but not safe) mode. We deselected the original personal network, so that only the new personal network was available. We connected directly from the modem to the PC (don't recall if that was a USB connection or a CAT 5; think it was CAT 5). Still nada.

Finally, we had given up and were about to leave. We reconnected the router to the modem, and the PC to the router, and rebooted into normal startup. After it came up, I tried one other thing. I went into Internet Explorer's internet options, Connections, and told it to create a new connection. It went through its jiggery pokery, and then asked if I wanted to join his network. I gave the obvious answer, and then it asked if I wanted create a network definition for other PCs, or exit. I said exit, and we tried it again.

And it worked. The laptop could still connect to the net, but now the desktop could, too.

I'm guessing that when he created his original network, as part of the installation of the router, he never told IE to use that network. If he had, it might have worked -- ie, the desktop might have connected to the net. I am not sure about that, though, since he said he found out later that he was using the wrong CAT5 jack. To tell IE to use a network, it has to be able to find it, and if you're not connected to the router (which he wouldn't have been if he was using the wrong CAT5 jack), IE wouldn't have known about the original network. When he created the new network, he apparently didn't tell IE to use it, and so he still wouldn't have been able to connect. To make life more confusing, the network connections showed 'connected' when the PC was connected to the correct CAT5 jack, and from there to the router, but it never established the logical connection - it didn't connect to the net - because it didn't know that it was supposed to be part of that personal network. So even though it said connected, it really wasn't. A network guy would say 'oh yes it was', but non network people, like me, would say 'oh no it wasn't'.

But it works now!