DHCP not working on Belkin Router

[DanGent]

Tried to setup a Belkin Wireless G plus Router. 12 months old but never been taken out the box. Connected the laptop to the router by ethernet cable. Vista didnt recognise the network and on the Vista internet status page the world was greyed out (even though the routers internet light was green). Ipconfig/ all showed the ethernet card wasn't being given a local IP address and instead was getting one of the those 168.x.x.x. ones.

Went through the wizard on the CD that came with the router and it asked me to reboot the laptop (saying it would restart after reboot). It never restarted after a reboot so I thought I'd do it manually (always much better doing it manual anyway!). I had to go through the manual to find the router had the IP address
192.168.2.1
So I gave the laptop the static IP address 192.168.2.50. It could now see the router (when connected by ethernet cable) and the vista internet connection page showed the internet as a green globe. Google and etc all worked fine. Then when I tried to set the wireless network up, same thing happened. Had to give the wifi card the address 192.168.2.50 for it to work. When setting the IP addresses back to automatic (e.g. assigned by DHCP) they didnt work. Couldn't ping the router as private IP addresses weren't being assigned

So the laptop is working fine at the moment but it can't be taken anywhere that has a router on the 192.168.1.0 subnet (is that the right terminology?).

I messed around in the setup pages of the router turning DHCP off (it was already on). rebooting, turning back on, etc a few times. Still no luck.

Is this router broken in some way or am I doing something wrong?

Much thanks for your help,
Dan Gent

[Phage]

Hmmmm.
I had a very similar isssue when trying to use WPA and Vista on an old belkin router. It would work fine under WEP or WPA2, but not WPA. i.e. can see the router, but nothing worked, not DHCP nothing.
Known issue apparently there's a (very long) technet thread on the WPA / Vista issue. Does this sound similar ?

[DanGent]

its nothing to do with wireless encryptions as the problem happened first when I connected the laptop by ethernet cable to the router. I got the wifi working the same way as the ethernet, by setting a static IP for the wifi card.

I didn't think about it being Vista. Its too easy to blame everything on Vista ;^) I'll take a copy of Ubuntu round and boot it from that. See if the same thing happens.

Any one any experience with DHCP "not working" on routers? I imagine the whole things done in software and theres no dedicated hardware or anything like that to fail? I tried a reset to factory settings first as well.

[pardal51]

1) Disable IPV6;
2) Are you using firewall? I remember configuring a laptop with ZoneAlarm and it wouldn't work on DHCP

Hope this helps

[CyberChris]

Have you updated the firmware as this may be a known issue that was resolved some time ago?

[DanGent]

to pardal51
only firewall used is the windows one. i think i tried disabling it but I'll check by trying again. Disabling IPv6 is something I hadn't thought of doing. are there many problems with Vista using IPv6 along with IPv4 stuff like DHCP and NAT?

to CyberChris,
updating the firmware is my next step. Just need to go back round the house where this router is and note down the proper model number. made the school boy error of only writing down the generic model name off the front of the case ;^)

cheers for the help,
Dan Gent