#Wireless router#
Today I faced an interesting problem. A friend bought a new linksys 802.11g wireless router. He connected that to his airtel (indian telecom & isp) broadband connection. After making the necessary connections, he found that wireless network was working fine but he was unable to access internet. The router did not give any error message. So it was not clear as to what the problem was. The router was set on automatic IP assignment. It was also getting the IP from the airtel broadband modem (beetel make). However, I found that it was unable to get the gateway address. this was surprising. I tried to renew the IP but again it picked up all settings ie. IP, DNS but not the gateway.
Earlier I hadworked with DLink wireless routers. The factory gateway IP setting for them is 192.168.0.1. However, for Linksys the gateway is 192.168.1.1. I then decided to check the gateway for the airtel modem. I did this by connecting my laptop to the airtel modem directly. The laptop was set on DHCP and so it picked up th settings quickly. I ran ipconfig on windows command prompt found that airtel modem's gateway is also 192.168.1.1. So this was the problem.
the linksys router did not pick up airtel modem ip as gateway because its ip was also 192.168.1.1.
I therefore changed the wireless router's ip to 192.168.0.1, rebooted it and within seconds I was able to access the internet wirelessly on my laptop.
learning : when connecting two routers make sure that their factory set ip's are different. I know that this is very basic but at times one tends to forget to check the same.
The linksys router cost my friend Rs. 2650 with three years warranty. Bought from Nehru Place, new delhi, india.