home wifi network issues

Hello -

I am a fairly technically oriented person, but very new to
networking. I have a few issues I thought I'd seek some guidance on.

By far the most irritating issue is that occasionally, my wireless
signal simply no longer works. I never am able to figure out what the
real problem is, but whatever it is, it goes away if I unplug my
routers and plug them back in after a few seconds. Needless to say,
this is particularly troubling if it happens when I am not at home to
unplug / plug back in the routers.

Another thing that has happened lately is that the signal drops
momentarily and then comes back on its own. This one is not a huge
deal, but I work at home via a VPN connection and it breaks that
connection, so it's a bit annoying.

Finally, something that has been happening just lately is that I am
getting IP address conflicts. I do not know how to properly prevent
these from happening. I tried "hard-wiring" each machine its own IP
address, but that made the machines not be able to get on the network
at all!

Here's my setup:

-Signal comes in the house from ISP and into Linksys' Vonage router
-Vonage router has one "machine" on it (the Linksys wifi router)
-Linksys 54G Wifi router has three machines accessing it wirelessly,
and one machine accessing it via a wired connection (two of the
three wifi machines have the linksys wifi reciever USB device, the
other (laptop) has a Netgear wifi card).

I don't know what other info to provide. I know this is sparse, but
please ask questions and I will answer them to the best of my ability.

Thanks in advance -

Brian McCabe

On 14 Jul 2006 11:38:37 -0700, (E-Mail Removed) wrote in
<(E-Mail Removed) .com>:

>Hello -
>
> I am a fairly technically oriented person, but very new to
>networking. I have a few issues I thought I'd seek some guidance on.
>
> By far the most irritating issue is that occasionally, my wireless
>signal simply no longer works. I never am able to figure out what the
>real problem is, but whatever it is, it goes away if I unplug my
>routers and plug them back in after a few seconds. Needless to say,
>this is particularly troubling if it happens when I am not at home to
>unplug / plug back in the routers.

Possible interference. See the wikis below.

> Another thing that has happened lately is that the signal drops
>momentarily and then comes back on its own. This one is not a huge
>deal, but I work at home via a VPN connection and it breaks that
>connection, so it's a bit annoying.

Ditto.

> Finally, something that has been happening just lately is that I am
>getting IP address conflicts. I do not know how to properly prevent
>these from happening. I tried "hard-wiring" each machine its own IP
>address, but that made the machines not be able to get on the network
>at all!

Shouldn't happen with DHCP.

> Here's my setup:
>
> -Signal comes in the house from ISP and into Linksys' Vonage router
> -Vonage router has one "machine" on it (the Linksys wifi router)
> -Linksys 54G Wifi router has three machines accessing it wirelessly,
>and one machine accessing it via a wired connection (two of the
>three wifi machines have the linksys wifi reciever USB device, the
>other (laptop) has a Netgear wifi card).
>
>I don't know what other info to provide. I know this is sparse, but
>please ask questions and I will answer them to the best of my ability.

Don't put a router behind a router -- that's double NAT and asking for
trouble. Configure the Linksys as an access point as described in the
How To wiki below.

--
Best regards, FAQ for Wireless Internet: <http://Wireless.wikia.com>
John Navas FAQ for Wi-Fi: <http://wireless.wikia.com/wiki/Wi-Fi>
Wi-Fi How To: <http://wireless.wikia.com/wiki/Wi-Fi_How_To>
Fixes to Wi-Fi Problems: <http://wireless.wikia.com/wiki/Wi-Fi_Fixes>

Hi Brian,

You may wish to investigate Vonage Forums:

http://www.vonage-forum.com/forum1.html

as well as

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/vonage

Linksys Knowledge Base:

http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/...p_sid=rDr4Fyci

and Linksys Live Online 24 Hour Support:

http://linksys.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/...ve_request.php

Sincerely,

Brad Reese
BradReese.Com - Cisco Technical Forums
http://www.bradreese.com/cisco-technical-newsgroups.htm
1293 Hendersonville Road, Suite 17
Asheville, North Carolina USA 28803
USA & Canada: 877-549-2680
International: 828-277-7272
Fax: 775-254-3558
AIM: R2MGrant
Global Cisco Systems Pre-Sales Support
http://www.bradreese.com/contact-us.htm#GLOBAL

thanks to both of you for posting some good resources.

I was able to eliminate the recent development of IP address conflicts
by manually assigning IPs to my machines. For some reason I was under
the impression that this was more complicated than it turned out to be.
Since I did this, I shut off DHCP (suprisingly, it was happening with
DHCP on). The problem has not reoccurred.

I also realligned my routers so that my wifi is the uppermost in the
heirarchy. I had been told that the Vonage router HAD to be at the top,
but that was bad info. Now, I have a "flat" network with 6 machines (4
PCs, one PDA and one Vonage router) sharing the wifi (the Vonage router
and one of the PCs are wired). This has eliminated the incredibly
annoying issue of the network connection simply dropping out altogether
until I unplugged /plugged back in the routers. It has also eliminated
the issue of the connection dropping and reestablishing by itself,
which I can now safely attribute to the Vonage router spontaneously
rebooting for no reason. If it were to happen now, I would lose my
phone but not all WWW connectivity.

Thanks again, and I will bookmark the resources you posted for future
reference -

Brian Mc