Et al,
Sorry, I've been away for a few days, so I havent' followed this forum.
It appears that the issue is that either the router or the Palm Pilot is not able to perform
DNS (
Domain Name Service) which translates human readable web addresses (IE:
www.google.com) to machine readable IP addresses (IE: 64.233.183.104). Machines can't read, but they are really good with math and numbers!!
By default, when you install a home router it acts like a
DHCP (
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server. This protocol allows a host machine (router in this case) to hand out important information to the client (your PC, PDA, etc.) like:
- Client's IP address / mask (needed to communcate with
all other machines)
- IP address of the DNS server (otherwise translations won't happen)
- Default gateway (tells the client how to get to the network)
- other stuff, like lease time, primary/secondary WINS server, etc (not really important here).
If you set the PDA to use DHCP, then it gets this information from the router every time you initiate a connection. If either the router or the PDA is misconfigured, then some of this information may be missing and you can't communicate. This is likely to have happened in your case. My guess is that the router you had is not bad, it is just misconfigured. You would have to look at the manual for the router to know for sure.
To use DHCP in the PDA,click on the Network Icon in the menu bar, select the network in the list of available networks that appear,then click
Edit -->
Configure. Click
Details -->
Advanced. On the next screen, select
Automatic in both the
IP Address and
DNS Server fields.
This allows the the router to give this information to the PDA, and life is good.
If you want to see this information on the PC, goto START-->RUN, then type in CMD and hit Enter . this opens a DOS command line window. Type
ipconfig /all. To clear this information from the PC type,
ipconfg /release then do
ipconfig /all again... all fields are now empty. Now type
ipconfg /renew then do
ipconfig /all again... What happened is that your PC "requested" an address (nothing specific). And in turn the router acknowledged the request and "granted" the address information you see on the screen. The router is in control of handing out all local IP addresses.
Finally, you may have noticed, the DNS IP address is most likely in the service providers address domain, but how did the router get it since you probably didn't configure it? The simple answer is DHCP has a cascading effect. When the router powered up, it sent a DHCP request to the service provider network and some DHCP server there responded with the address information. And the router then passed some of that information along to your PDA when it issued a DHCP request. All was done under the covers, and you didn't really configure anything.
Hope this was helpful in understanding what is going on under the covers (and not too confusing).
Cheers,
John
Bought the girlfriend a T/X for xmas. We are running a linksys wireless network with a WRT54GSV4 wireless G router with WPA security. When we start the web function, it finds the network no problem. However, the browser can't load any pages. I've tried a bunch of my favs. The biggest problem is when we connect to the network via the T/X, we lose Internet and email capabilities on our home pcs. I must restart the home pc to regain Internet access. After several attempts I looked up the Palm support pages. Found absolutely no help. Will I need to switch my wireless over to a WEP security setting? Anyone have a similar problem or at least suggestions to help.