At wit's end -- connection but not connected.

Hi. Perhaps someone can help me with this.

My son is trying to connect to his mom's wireless network. When he is at my
house, he uses a Msoft MN-520 (?) PCMCIA card to connect to my wireless
network (MN 620?) and everything is fine. At his mom's house, she has a
Linksys wireless base station, but although his laptop sees the connection
and reports that he is connected, he can't access the Internet or e-mail or
anything else. I just talked to his brother, who has his own laptop, and he
was able to find and connect with the base station, so I know the router and
base station are working. And I know the PCMCIA card is working in the first
laptop because he can connect to my network when here.

I have tried everything I can think of, including turning on and off the
zero config service, setting up the network connection again -- but no luck.
What am I missing? Suggestions? The laptop says he is connected and the
signal strength is good, but that's as far as we can get. His laptop is a
Dell 5150 with a wireless card, as I said, and his brother's laptop is a
Lenovo with built-in wireless.

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> Hi. Perhaps someone can help me with this.
>
> My son is trying to connect to his mom's wireless network. When he is at my
> house, he uses a Msoft MN-520 (?) PCMCIA card to connect to my wireless
> network (MN 620?) and everything is fine. At his mom's house, she has a
> Linksys wireless base station, but although his laptop sees the connection
> and reports that he is connected, he can't access the Internet or e-mail or
> anything else. I just talked to his brother, who has his own laptop, and he
> was able to find and connect with the base station, so I know the router and
> base station are working. And I know the PCMCIA card is working in the first
> laptop because he can connect to my network when here.
>
> I have tried everything I can think of, including turning on and off the
> zero config service, setting up the network connection again -- but no luck.
> What am I missing? Suggestions? The laptop says he is connected and the
> signal strength is good, but that's as far as we can get. His laptop is a
> Dell 5150 with a wireless card, as I said, and his brother's laptop is a
> Lenovo with built-in wireless.

In the world of Windows XP wireless, "Connected" does not really mean
connected, and "good signal strength" does not mean that you actually
have a good signal. See, e.g., http://www.ezlan.net/wbars.html

Because your son can connect to your wifi access point, the issue is
unlikely to be a firewall on his laptop. More likely, this problem is
caused by some security setting on Mom's router. When your son "Views
available wireless networks" does Mom's network show as "secured" or
"unsecured"? If "secured" he should double check the encryption key.
If the network uses WEP encryption (it really should use WPA or WPA2),
then he needs to enter the HEX encryption key and not the "password"
that was used in the router to generate the HEX key. In addition to
encryption, the network may have been set up to permit only specific
clients, by MAC address. In this case, the router has to be configured
to permit his computer to connect.

If Mom set up her own wireless network, then she will know the answers
to the above. If not, your son may have to get her permission to access
the router's configuration pages to get the hex encryption key and/or
add his MAC address to the list of permitted clients.

--
Lem MS MVP -- Networking

To the moon and back with 64 Kbits of RAM and 512 Kbits of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

I don't think it's a matter of permission, given the fact that he has the
access code and has entered it correctly in his laptop.

I suspect that the Msoft card is incompatible with the Linksys router, for
whatever reason. The card is "b" and the network is "g." That ought not to be
a problem, but in the world of computers just about everything that can be a
a problem sooner or later becomes one,

Anyway, he's sitting there with a $1200 paperweight. And I am pretty much
out of ideas.

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I don't think it's a matter of permission, given the fact that he has the
> access code and has entered it correctly in his laptop.
>
> I suspect that the Msoft card is incompatible with the Linksys router, for
> whatever reason. The card is "b" and the network is "g." That ought not to be
> a problem, but in the world of computers just about everything that can be a
> a problem sooner or later becomes one,
>
> Anyway, he's sitting there with a $1200 paperweight. And I am pretty much
> out of ideas.
>
>
>
>
I don't think you mentioned the b/g discrepancy before. Make sure that
the router is not set to "g only." 802.11G is backwards compatible with
802.11B, but often wireless G routers can be configured to be either
"mixed" (b & g) or "G only" (which, at least in the early days of
802.11G, gave better performance).

--
Lem -- MS-MVP - Networking

To the moon and back with 64 Kbits of RAM and 512 Kbits of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer