Linksys BEFSR41 confusion

[Sunny D]

I am writing this forum as a last ditch effort to simply set up my router. I am new at this so please be kind.

I have it connected to my cable modem according to the directions. BTW, this computer is using Win98 with a Realtek Ethernet. I have my network settings at static and entered the appropriate information (with the help of another person using the same set up), but cannot even get on-line with just the router going through the cable modem, to the Linksys setup.

When I plug in my second machine (which uses WinME and has a Linksys NIC) into the Cat5 wall jack (we have rooms in our house that are wire for networking) and then connect it to an additional port on the router the Full/Col and the 100 light blink steadily.

If I reverse the setup, put the modem and router on the WinME machine, and then plug the Win98 into another port on the router, the lights are correctly lit, and can go to the htp://192.168.1.1 and set up the router but it will not go online!

I have tried setting them up with a static address and also letting it obtain the IP automatically and nothing works once the router is on.

We have pinged the router and sometimes it goes through but most of the time it times out. I found this info on the net a few days ago and tried it on the WinME machine but can't figure out how to do it on the Win98:

"""""The linksys does work fairly well. A word of caution though to those who use it: make sure you don't have auto-sensing enabled on your NICS. Change your NIC settings to 100 MBPS full duplex if you don't want to have any problems with it. The Linksys will eventually fail in negotiating duplex settings. I had a max speed of 30 kB/s when it failed then it went back up to 150+ kB/s. My internal Lan is now working at 100 MBPS.""""""


What am I doing wrong?? We have Comcast Cable if that makes a difference in the setup or the router. This was suppose to be easy. :-(

[Greenstead]

I'm not completely clear on your problems from the description.
There may be more than one problem confusing things.

1. Realtek NICs are a common problem. Two problems can happen. One is the speed auto sensing (as you say you should force it to a suitable speed setting). Two is they can be a problem when used in PCI slot 1 where they may experience a conflict with the Video IRQs. Move it to slot 2 if you can (or get another make of NIC - anything but Realtek or 3com).

2. Some ISPs require you register the MAC address of the device connected to the modem (i.e. the PC, or in your case the Router). Or, if you change the device connected to the modem you must repower the modem to get it to see the new device.

3. If you are finding you can sometimes ping an internet IP and sometimes it times out then it could be a problem with the signal strength of the cable from your ISP - they should be able to do a test to check that.

4. If you have set the NICs manually then you may not get the DNS addresses you need which is what converts the url into an internet IP address. That would cause that you could ping internet IP addresses but not access with the url in IE.

If you need advice with the settings for WIN98 try looking at the links on the top of this page for Networking and HowTo.

[LinkSys101]

connect bot 98 and ME into the router and do an ipconfig/all on both computers. try to check if both of them is getting a class c ip which is 192.168.x.xx

Go to the router set-up page and go to the DHCP tab. check the number of DHCP users it should be on double digits.

after that go to the advance tab and as soon as you hit that you will be deffinitely be under the filter set-up page and look for the MTU.

enable the MTU and on the size type 1492.

Dont forget to do a power cycle, by powering off everything for 1 minute heres the procedure

in doing this procedure which is the power cycle try this one:

Computer --->router---->modem

after 1 minute power on the modem and make sure that you are getting a solid lights from the modem before you power on the rest. do this order

modem--->router--->computer


:cool: