Mine is LAN, hers is wireless

[Felecha]

My wife got a laptop for her work at school. She got a wireless card for it for school work and loved it so I got a wireless router for home and fumbled with setting it up and got it to work so she uses that at home now too.

But now I can't see her laptop from my office desktop. I have a home network, Linksys BEFSR41, and it's all DHCP.

I'm looking through the wireless box and I find in the setup instructions that it is evidently set to 192.168.0.1, which is why ipcionfig says hers is 192.168.0.2.

Can I change something in the router settings so she's back in the 192.168.1.xxx group? I went to 192.168.0.1 in her browser and found a place where I could reset that value, but I hesitate. I've made a mess of things before by doing what seemed reasonable. I'm only an intermediate networking person.

 

[owensdj]

Why do you want to move her laptop to the 192.168.1xxx subnet? If the router is set to use the 192.168.0.xxx subnet then all of your devices need to also be on the 192.168.0.xxx subnet.

Does your office desktop also have a 192.168.0.xxx IP address? If so, you should be able to get them to network locally. You'll need to make sure both computers use the same Workgroup name. You may also not see one computer from the other unless the other computer has a share(file or print share). Even when everything is set up, you might not see one from the other due to a software firewall blocking port 139(NetBIOS).

 

[JackMDS]

Configuring a Laptop (or any computer) to connect to more than one Network.
http://www.ezlan.net/faq#fewtcp-ip

:sun:

 

[Felecha]

I still don't fully understand IP Addressing, so bear with me here.

The Linksys is set to 192.168.1.1. Used to be I set all my computers (when the kids were home we had 4) to dhcp and they all got 192.168.1.100, 101, etc.

The wireless router is on the end of an ethernet cable that ends in her office here at home. It looks like it's got 192.168.0.1 as its IP. I presume it's an assigned IP, not automatic, and since she connects with her wireless card and she shows 192.168.0.2, she's getting it from the wireless router (NetGear)

So I thought if I assigned the wireless router something with a 1, then hers would get a 1 from dhcp and we could all see each other. Isn't that what the subnet mask does, lets all those with the same first 3 octets see each other?

The Linksys is configured to assign starting at 100. I see in the NetGear configuration page on the browser, it starts assigning at 0.2. So if I changed it in the browser there to 192.168.1.2, and told it to start assigning at 192.168.1.10, it would put everyone in the same game.

And I understand the sharing thing and firewall stuff, thanks

 

[Felecha]

JackMDS

Sorry, I didn't read yours before I answered. Maybe that will work. I will look at hers when she gets home

 

[Felecha]

JackMDS -

I tried the link and no luck. I just don't understand enough about network architecture I guess

 

[Fardringle]

From reading your instructions, it sounds like your network is set up like this:

Your computer is plugged directly into the Linksys wired router.
Netgear wireless router is also plugged directly into the Linksys.
Wife's computer is plugged into (using wireless) the Netgear.

If this is the case, it would explain why you are getting different IP address subnets on the two computers, and with a configuration like this, you'll never be able to see her computer from your computer since the internal firewall in the Netgear will prevent you from getting in to your wife's completely separate network.

You can make it work one of these three ways:

1: Get rid of the Linksys completely and connect both computers to the Netgear and have the Netgear connect to your cable or DSL modem.

2: Set the Netgear to act as a wireless access point instead of a router and turn off DHCP in the Netgear so that both computers will get an IP address from the Linksys.

3: Connect the two routers together through the LAN ports on both routers (instead of the WAN/Internet port on the Netgear) and turn off DHCP on the Netgear so that the Netgear acts as a switch instead of a router.

 

[Felecha]

Well, that worked. Interesting how something can make sense and be wrong. I figured if everyone just had 192.168.1.xxx, they could see each other. But it apparently depends on who assigns you your IP? The wireless router was assigning her, the Linksys was assigning me, so the wireless didn't know about me and the Linksys didn't know about her?

OK, Everyone is visible, but darn!

I can get straight into my laptop from my desktop without any login required, and straight into hers from here. The laptop and hers require login to get into mine. I do not have a password on mine, and the message comes back "\\***** is not accessible. You might not have permission . . . "

Is there a setting on mine that I need to change?

 

[Felecha]

Well, that was probably it - I have a Guest account (I didn't set it up, Windows must have?). I opened it from Control Panel/User Accounts, and removed its password. That did it.

 

[nweaver]

to answer your ip address problems: most 192.168.x.x networks are class C, meaning that only the last octet is used for client nodes. so in the case of 192.168.1.1, you have 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.255 as addresses (not all are usable, different topic). When you go to 192.168.2.1, then you hit a different network, so your machine would go to the "default gateway" because it's not local, logiclly speaking. This is all determined by the subnet mask setting, basiclly 255. means "Network ID" and 0 means "Client ID". So if you have 192.168.1.12 as your IP, and 255.255.255.0 as your netmask, then it means that the 192.168.1 is your network number, and the 12 is your client number.

This goes deeper as you subnet (meaning subnet mask is a number between 0 and 255) and gets complicated fairly quickly. This should give a very high level view, and allow you to determine what parts of an address are network number as opposed to client/node number.