My parents' laptop was marooned in one room of their house, chained by a wired connection to the DSL modem. I decided that adding a wireless router (Linksys WRT160N in this case) would be great to untether the machine. I expected the installation to be limited to daisy-chaining the new router between the DSL modem and the laptop, setting up a few things (admin password, SSID, wireless security and band options) and enjoying wireless connection in 5 minutes. And to do it all from 400 miles away. Piece of cake!
This could be a long blog post because my projected 5 minutes rapidly expanded into 5 hours, but I'll keep it short. Trouble manifested itself when after several failed attempts we reverted to old wired setup (new router not connected) and I noticed the laptop reporting being connected to a gateway at 192.168.1.1 - weird! Did I mention that the laptop runs Vista and I wanted to mock around with it as little as possible? So why would a DSL modem be at 192.168.1.1??? As usual, an extended Googling session brought clarity to this murky issue. Verizon's DSL modem - Westell 6100F in our case - turns out to be a router/modem combo! This box was acting as a router and the modem, and when new Linksys entered the picture, we had two devices - both routers! - competing for 192.168.1.1 address. No wonder things weren't working right.
I found excellent instructions on how to turn Westell's router functionality off, placing it in "bridged" mode, and effectively making it into dumb modem. Scary thoughts crossed my mind; "bridging" sounded eerily similar to "bricking," and being 400 miles away, last thing I wanted was a bricked Verizon's box! Nonetheless, after some deep breathing, we carried out the instructions. A few tense moments ensued when Westell in its new bridged mode was not connecting to the Internet. Turns out my parents particular flavor of Verizon's DSL uses PPPoE and newly dumbed-down Westell was no longer providing the necessary authentication information. Luckily, at this point configuration of Linksys proceeded smoothly and it was all too happy to take over the necessary PPPoE duties and we were online in no time.
Moral of the story? There can be only one 192.168.1.1! One for each private network, that is.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
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1 comment:
I have the same modem and router and couldn't get the internet to work when I tried hooking it up. I tried to do the directions on the website you linked too, but haven't got working yet. I screwed up my modem when I changed the settings and had to reset it.
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