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EricRFMA's avatar
EricRFMA
Aspirant
Oct 20, 2010

WNCE2001 setup problems

Greetings, sources of all knowledge...!

Here's the scenario:

iMac G4 (700Mhz), read: Old. Mac OS X 10.4.11
Wireless networks (2 different ones were involved in this story)
Netgear WNCE2001

Preamble:

I got this gadget so I could give my mom an old iMac G4 and have her be able to connect to the wireless network in her house using the wireless router supplied to them by Verizon FIOS (model unknown at the moment).

I can connect to their network just fine using my laptop (Mac Book Pro, Mac OS 10.5).

Part 1:
At home, I successfully set up the WNCE2001 so that the iMac connected to my wireless network, with minor glitches. One odd thing (or maybe misunderstanding) was that I never was able to get to "advanced settings" by going to the URL specified in the instructions. Whenever I entered that URL, I always got to the starting page for the WNCE2001 setup. But I was able to access the network, so that wasn't a big stumbling block.

Part 2:
At my parent's house, things were different. I had all the settings for the wireless network on my laptop (which was happily connected to the wireless network with no problems), which I used to set up the WNCE2001. The WNCE2001 setup indicated there was 50-70% signal strength to the wireless network there. I went through the setup and eventually got to the "You are now connected to [network name]", and all was well and good.

However, trying to access a page on the internet from there yielded a "You are not connected to the internet" error. Indeed, the IP address at that time was self-assigned by the Mac.

Trying to get back to the initial setup page to the WNCE2001 again was difficult. I had to use various combinations of rebooting the Mac and resetting the WNCE2001 until finally the setup page came up again, and I went through the entire process again. During the setup, the IP address the Mac had was 192.168.1.100 (I believe), which it got from the WNCE2001 via DHCP. But as soon as setup was completed, apparently successfully, the IP address would go back to a self-assigned one and I'd have to try the whole process again, which never succeeded because the IP address always ended up a self-assigned one.

Other possibly relevant info:
Other wireless networks in the area were on the common channels of 6 & 11, so I changed ours to channel 4. That didn't help.

Encryption was enabled and was 128bit WPA2 (I believe... doing this by memory at the moment).

Since the WNCE2001 setup reports a successfully connection, I'm guessing that the problem is the IP address somehow gets changed after setup is complete.

But you folks would know better.

Hope someone can help...

Thanks!

-Eric

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