Inaccessible sites and no DHCP with Linksys router

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
I recently bought a new router, a Linksys WRT45G. I have it set up with a cable modem, and there are several computers on the network, mostly using ethernet.

For a while, everything Just Worked. I had machines connected wirelessly, and machines connected with ethernet. They all connected with no effort using DHCP.

Now, DHCP doesn't work at all with ethernet, and I occasionally need to manually renew the lease in System Preferences with WiFi.

So now I'm using manual configuration instead of DHCP. Linksys says to enter the router's address in the "DNS Servers" field in System Preferences. When I do this, I can't access Wikipedia (but almost everything else works just fine). When I change it to my ISP's DNS server addresses, which the router is using internally anyway, Wikipedia works just fine. Why is this?


About an hour ago, I suddenly lost the ability to connect to about half the sites in my bookmarks. I reset the router, but the problem remained. Only after reverting to the router's factory-default settings could I regain access to these sites. (But DHCP still does not work.)

I've tried several standard fixes (many times each): rebooting computers, deleting preference files (including those in "/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration"), restarting the router, etc. The three affected computers are all running Tiger; I think one is running 10.4.7 while the others have 10.4.8. I've also updated the firmware to the latest version from Linksys. Nothing's helped.

So, I have two main questions:
How can I get DHCP working again?
How can I get it to stop killing access to certain sites every week?!

If I can't get DHCP working, that's really okay, as long as the manual configuration works consistently.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm out of ideas.
 
If you didn't tinker with anything (and if you've got a good admin password on the router), then maybe the router's going bad? Another likely thing is that your ISP is doing "upgrades" that messes with things temporarily. Any way to test another router?

fwiw, with the Linksys I'm using (same model as yours) I've always had to manually put in the ISP's DNS servers; the router never seemed smart enough to handle this on its own. At that, though, the router's always been able to give DHCP-based IPs to computers and these computers never had a problem if the ISP's DNS IPs were entered into the router's config. ... almost makes me want to pull that clunky OpenBSD box out of the basement ...
 
It's possible the latest problem with inaccessible sites was with my ISP. Next time I have a problem like that, I'll hook up my old SMC router and see if it works.

I don't know if it's just "gone bad". It's only a few weeks old, so that doesn't seem likely. But it DID work perfectly for a little while. The problems all started when I first tried to assign a static IP to one of my machines, so I could forward ports. The first thing I tried was using "DHCP with static IP" in System Preferences. That didn't work, and ever since then, regular DHCP hasn't worked either (over ethernet, that is). I've reset the router, restored default settings, and tried with two other computers, but DHCP just won't work anymore. It doesn't make any sense to me that that could be the trigger, but it seems like a strange coincidence, too.

When you say you've had to manually put in the DNS servers, do you mean in System Preferences, or in the router's configuration? Because my router picks up my ISP's DNS servers just fine — it displays them on the status page. But for some reason I still need to enter them in System Preferences. Next time I have problems, I'll try entering them manually into the router as well.

Right now everything's more or less fine (except that DHCP doesn't work, but I can live with that).
 
I am using the exact same router - and I've had no problems in several years. You may want to call Linksys.
 
Hold the reset button in and until you see the router reset twice about 30 to 45 secs. This will reset the router to factory defaults. You will have no user name and the password should be admin on the factor settins. I have been running Linksys routers for years and have not had this issues.
 
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