winXP laptop can't connect to the internet via WLAN

[known life]

Hello.

My ISP (Alice in Germany) just sent me the required hardware to gain access to the Internet.

It is a Siemens Gigaset SE551 dsl/cable/wireless router which can be easily configured via a web interface from any computer within the network.

It has a normal router ip (192.168.2.1) and the two other computers have static IP's.
Both computers (an iBook and a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop) can access the web interface, but only the iBook can surf the WWW via wireless.
The Fujitsu-Siemens can only access the router interface via cable, but not the internet.
Even pinging the router and the iBook from the winXP laptop does work.

I'm not so firm anymore in configuring windows machines, because I changed platforms two years ago.
Is there any configuration I might have forgotten besides the static IP and router address?

Thanks a lot for reading and even answering.
gregor

 

[drag]

Try pinging your DNS server from the windows box and checking the DNS settings. Without proper DNS setup then your not going to be able to resolve names like www.google.com into ip addresses you machine will be able to find on the internet.

Also one of google's addresses is 64.233.167.104 so you can test by the 'ping' command weither or not your machine can actually reach the internet, but can't resolve names.

edit:
Also another command you can try is 'ipconfig'. That should display information on your network settings and such. Try to make sure that your ip address and such is similar to the one on your ibook. If Windows can't get a DHCP server response then it will just assign itself one automaticly, which wouldn't be what you want in this case. Of course if your not using DHCP and are assigning ip addresses manually then this isn't a problem. edit2: Oh, ya. Your using static ips, so this isn't a problem.

 

[known life]

Thanks.

I changed the DNS settings and now I can access the Internet, at least via cable.

If I try wireless, connecting doesn't work.
All I get is the reply that I should look again for this specific network I'm trying to log in (It is out of reach or something like that).
But after I press OKAY the network is still visible in this WirelessNetwork Dialog.


And strange as it is, I can't ping (whether Terminal nor Command Prompt) google, but my whole network.

Is there something I'm still overlooking? Or is a computer a frelling smeghead? Or even me? 🙂

 

[drag]

It could be a few different reasons. Flaky wifi drivers for instance (although I doubt that, especially if your able to use other wifi access points easily)

If your using one of those 'Wifi Access point and home router' doo-dads they are flaky in my experiance. On mine I have a problem were if everything is switched on I can't ping anything from my laptop to my LAN unless I have the machines ping the laptop first. That's just plain old buggy behavior. Bad switch, bad.

If your network is setup were you have your modem/router attatched to the internet, have a ethernet cable attatched to a switch, have the switch attatched to your desktop and wireless access point (assuming that it's seperate from your main router/modem), and then try to access gateway to the internet from your laptop over the wifi you may end up in a situation refered to sometimes as "double nat'ng"

On a home connection sharing router you have two main parts arranged internally. You have the 'router' portion, which is a two port NAT router. And then you have the 'switch' portion which is on the internal network which will have like 4 or 5 or more ports you can plug multiple computers into. The external port is usually labelled 'uplink' or something like that.

Now if you get one of those generic wifi access points they do something similar, except on the switch part they also add a wireless ethernet bridge and some other bits to make a wifit access point. Otherwise it's about the same.. Just a simple NAT router with a switch portion and a external port.

So if you have your 'uplink'/external port plugged into your LAN and your trying to access the internet then you will have your traffic travelling through 2 NAT routers. Now some times of 'nat' routers can handle this, but the cheap ones we all buy in the store aren't usually smart enough.

NAT stands for 'network address translation'. The basic idea is that you send traffic through the router. The router removes your internal IP address and add it's own external address. Then it keeps track of all the connections in a lookup table so that it knows which computer to route the traffic to. When you 'double nat' sometimes this messes all that up.


So if you have a seperate wifi router and a internet router then make sure that the wifi router is plugged into your network on the 'switch' portion and have it's dhcp stuff all turned off.

Hope all that makes sense. It's kinda difficult to explain and I don't know if it even applies to you. It only applies if you have a seperate internet router/switch and a wifi/router/switch device.

Of course this means that your internal LAN is wide open at the wifi point. You can secure it by encrypting traffic and stuff like that, but wifi security is a joke. (it will still be effective at keeping out the riff-raff though.) If your worried about it and realy want a secure setup then your going to have to invest in a more sophisticated router/firewall device that can setup DMZ zones and VPNs. Some cheapo routers I think can do this, but I prefer to use a old PC with at least 3 nic cards and IPcop linux firewall distro (also there are numerious other distros).