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DHCP-Windows XP Home Edition

sanjuro

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Sep 13, 2004
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I woke up yesterday morning to find that my computer was not accessing the internet.

After checking all the physical connections and power cycling the switch, I started playing around with the Network Interface, trying to set the addresses automatically. Finally after no success, I put it back to automatic dns and dhcp, and went to sleep.

It is working now, but I was wondering why my pc was so flakey? Was it me or the computer?
 

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
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It was the computer. I did tech support for a local ISP for a while. The first thing we checked was the IP and DNS config when there was an issue. Sometimes, even if they were right to start with, switching them around solved the problem.

I'm not entirely sure why it is, and I've never found a satisfactory explanation. But there it is.
 

sanjuro

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Sep 13, 2004
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Thanks for your answer. I figured if I kept mucking with it, it would fix it. It is troublesome though that something I did not touch would fail. Usually the first problem with any computer is something I changed beforehand.
 

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
22,092
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sanjuro said:
Thanks for your answer. I figured if I kept mucking with it, it would fix it. It is troublesome though that something I did not touch would fail. Usually the first problem with any computer is something I changed beforehand.
Network settings are about the only thing that I find that fail consistantly without having changed anything. Occasionally something else will muck itself up, but not as much as those.
 

sanjuro

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Sep 13, 2004
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binary visions said:
Network settings are about the only thing that I find that fail consistantly without having changed anything. Occasionally something else will muck itself up, but not as much as those.
On Unix systems, which I am more familar with, if a NIC has gone done, either the cable was yanked out or the card went bad.

Usually routing is the issue I deal with, which could be a problem for any computer.
 

Kornphlake

Turbo Monkey
Oct 8, 2002
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Portland, OR
ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew can solve a load of problems. There is a known issue in windows XP if you put the system in standby then wake it up it looses the ip address for some reason, even if the address is static. I guess the problem is more pronounced with certain hardware, overall windows, especially home versions, is pretty flakey when it comes to networking.
 

sanjuro

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Sep 13, 2004
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Kornphlake said:
ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew can solve a load of problems. There is a known issue in windows XP if you put the system in standby then wake it up it looses the ip address for some reason, even if the address is static. I guess the problem is more pronounced with certain hardware, overall windows, especially home versions, is pretty flakey when it comes to networking.
Ipconfig is the only windows command I know, because I have a dhcp problem at work when it would release my laptop's ip address, but not update it quickly enough. There was an admin program which communicated to my laptop, but when the hostname and ip address were not in sync, there was a problem.

I believe it is a problem on the switch side, since other computers on my switch are having the same problem, and a power cycle on the switch seemed to resolve the problem.