[Monolith]

Obi Wan very kindly gave me a router a few months back which functions like a dream other than for one problem.  If I turn my ibook on when my housemate is on the network on his PC, it always boots me off the network. If I go and unplug then plug back in the power supply to the router, it always lets me back on and all is restored.

Am I likely to have done something wrong when I set the router up or is it perhaps a setting on his PC? Either way it's profusely annoying!

[slackline]

Obi Wan very kindly gave me a router a few months back which functions like a dream other than for one problem.  If I turn my ibook on when my housemate is on the network on his PC, it always boots me off the network. If I go and unplug then plug back in the power supply to the router, it always lets me back on and all is restored.

Am I likely to have done something wrong when I set the router up or is it perhaps a setting on his PC? Either way it's profusely annoying!

Check how many DHCP leases the router is giving out, it may be set up to only allow X number of clients, and when your housemate connects it tries to get the X +1 IP address.  Since they're all being used, it boots your ibook off and gives it to your housemate (which I have to admit would be a very strange way of doing it, but its worth checking).

Details of what router it is (make and model) would further assist in trouble shooting.

slack

[Monolith]

Cheers mate. I'll check out settings this afternoon and feed back!

[Monolith]

I've logged into the router but it's all a minefield of nonsensical information to me I'm afraid. I looked under DHCP settings and it showed me something along the lines of there being two computers on the network with separate IP address'. Could I do a 'restore factory settings' or something else basic to correct this problem?

The router is a 3Com 'OfficeConnect ADSL wireless 11g firewall router'. I imagine this reference could be a product code?:

3CRWE754G72-A

No worries if it's too complex to workout online,  I'll try and enlist someone local in the knowledge.

Cheers!

[slackline]

Found the manual here (worth d/ling and keeping a copy).

Flick to page 36 and it tells you about the LAN setup and that you can specify how many IP address' are available, the following pages indicate how to go about changing these.  Check that the start and finish numbers allow enough connections for all of the clients that you have (i.e. your ibook, your housemates comp, whatever else you might have connecting).

You might also want to modify the lease time as this may be why your getting kicked off.

Check that the list of client computers that are currently connected are those that should be (i.e. your ibook and your housemates comp and any other devices that you have), it may be that someone is piggybacking on your network and has played with your settings.

Under OSX fire up a terminal and type 'ifconfig' (without quotes and you'll get some information about the network devices in your computer.  There should be a HWaddr field (which tells you the MAC address of the device) and the series of letters and numbers should match those listed in the connected devices (this is based on the assumption that OSX is derived from BSD which is very similar to GNU/Linux).  Under windows start up a command prompt and type 'ipconfig /all' and you'll get similar information, check that the MAC address here matches that which is connected to the router.

Beyond that I'm not too sure without having access I'm afraid.

slack

[Monolith]

Wow. That's awesome thanks. I need to rest my brain before embarking on that lot but imagine I can tackle it later. I saw that 'half a day' (or something to such effect) was the setting for the lease time. Will look into it.

Thanks very much for your help mate.

edit: have just changed that lease time to forever.