Diary of a Techie

My brother caught up with me over the weekend and it seems that our techies at Bitstop wasn’t able to help him with a particularly vexing issue he has been having with his PLDT MyDSL broadband internet. His setup included a Linksys Wifi router that lets him connect wirelessly to the internet. Over the last 2 weeks, it suddenly stopped working.

Then when my techies went over, they were able to make the PLDT MyDSL work by hooking up a switch and connecting the rest of the PCs in the LAN to it. Of course, without the WiFi router, my brother couldn’t connect wirelessly. So they suspected that the fault was with the Wifi Router and made my brother purchase a new Wifi.

When the new Wifi router came in, they hook it up and still got the SAME error. The issue is that when they hookedup a Wifi router, they couldn’t access the internet. However, they can verify that the PLDT MyDSL was working because they could access the internet if they connected a PC/laptop directly to the PLDT router/device.

So I asked that my same techies go over to my brother’s house and revisit all the settings.
I asked my techie to connect a laptop directly to PLDT’s MyDSL router/device. Then I asked him to issue the command on the command prompt:

IPCONFIG /all

Here is what I got:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :

Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1E-68-4F-B5-D3
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.34
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Monday, July 25, 2011 11:30:02 AM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Thursday, July 28, 2011 11:30:02 AM

The above details tell us the following:

1. The PLDT device is serving DHCP (dynamic host configuration Protocol) packets. This means that the default setting in most PCs (DHCP assigned IP address) would work. The PLDT device will be assigning the proper IP address to whatever device was connected to it.
2. The PLDT device has the IP address 192.168.1.1 assigned to itself. This is the gateway to the internet.
3. The PLDT device has DNS (Domain name service) running.

So the next step is to verify the IP address of the TPLINK router. And here is what I was told. The TPLINK device LAN IP was set to 192.168.1.1.
That was all I needed to figure out what was wrong with the setup.

The two devices (PLDT MYDSL router and the TPLINK router) were both using the SAME IP address. No wonder it wasn’t working when you connect the TPLINK to the PLDT device! There can only be one device using the IP address in the LAN.

So the solution to this ‘vexing’ case was to assign TPLINK with another network IP address. I chose 192.168.2.1
Case solved.

Filed under: Computing