Powerline and Gigabit

[neil40]

Hi

I was helping someone try to set up a 3rd powerline with a new Windows 7 PC that has a Gigabit LAN adapter
The scenario is that he already had the twin set (don't know the exact models) and one PC with XP and a 100 Bit LAN card.
This all works fine

He added a 3rd powerline, all lights are on green - the lan light flashes, but the PC refuses to get a DHCP address, or work if I fix the IP address.
I even tried throttling the LAN adapter back to 100 BIT, it just resorts to the 169.x.x.x type address.

Is Gigabit incompatible? Any advice welcomed.
Thanks

[fordem]

No gigabit is not incompatible, you just won't get gigabit speed transfers.

The first thing you need to do is verify that he has a powerline connection - move the gigabit equipped PC to the location of the other PC and connect it in place of that PC - see if it works, if it doesn't you possibly have a problem with the PC itself or the cable.

Powerline networking is very sensitive to interference within the environment, and will sometimes fail to connect ot will connect and not pass data at a reasonable speed.

The 169.254.x.x addresses are what are known as APIPA addresses - automatic private ip addresses - and are the result of a PC trying to get an address by DHCP and failing to get a response from the DHCP server, no connection is one common cause.

[jmizoguchi]

any NIC will auto negotiate the speed so either it negotiates at 100base-t or like you did with changing the speed should have helped.

I see many post on devices does not get IP behind the power line.

I would try static IP on win7 pc since you are getting 169 as per detail description of APIPA.

[neil40]

jmizoguchi wrote:
any NIC will auto negotiate the speed so either it negotiates at 100base-t or like you did with changing the speed should have helped. I see many post on devices does not get IP behind the power line. I would try static IP on win7 pc since you are getting 169 as per detail description of APIPA.

Even with a fixed IP it didn't see the Internet etc, just showed a yellow triangle on the network graph symbol in the taskbar

[jmizoguchi]

so you are not even getting "local only" status either right.
not able to ping router etc..

possible incompatible issues. other option is to use switch between the pc and power line device and see