Delicate home networking situation needs resolution fast!

[nthexwn]

Hi there,

I recently moved into a house with 6 other people. We all have computers and share a cable internet connection. The connection is routed through a Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless B router. Some of us connect to the router with Cat-5 and some of us use wireless adapters. About once every day or two for the past several weeks we've lost our connection entirely. After some poking around, I believe the problem lies with our router. We'll likely be buying a new one in the near future, but there's another issue that I'm unsure of...

After power cycling the modem/router to reset the connection, my computer seems to be the only one that will consistently reconnect. Most of my housemate's computers will display the "limited or no networking connectivity" error. I can't explain why this is happening since everything seems to be hooked up correctly, but they insist that everything was working fine before I moved in and that there's something I'm doing on my computer that's causing their connections to fail. A few days ago I even got slammed into the wall while trying to troubleshoot this because one of my housemates was so furious!

I'm pretty sure buying a new router (probably a D-Link) will keep our connection from dropping so frequently, but I have a sinking feeling that nobody else will be able to connect and I'll still be receiving the blame. I don't have many chances to troubleshoot their systems directly and the little bit of time that I've spent in front of them has revealed nothing. All of the Windows networking settings appear to be set up correctly and as I mentioned earlier, the cords are plugged in correctly. I have an A+ certification and several years of experience working on individual systems, but I really don't know how to solve this problem for them. Since I'm probably the most tech-savvy person in the household, if I'm unable to find a solution, I doubt they'll be able to either, and if I can't fix these issues for them then they'll burn me at the stake since "everything was working fine" until I moved in!

Any suggestions are appreciated!
-Alex

 

[Nodsu]

Do you run any P2P software? Those things crash routers for breakfast (and for lunch and for dinner..)

Of course the router firmware is the latest available from Linksys, right?!

On the router, disable all functiuonality you don't need. If the your user base is constant, then you might consider using ststic IP addresses and disabling DHCP. Disable the packet filter and intrusion detection. Disable uPnP (some people may rely on it though).

 

[nthexwn]

I've installed the latest firmware from Linksys. I also disabled UPNP on the router as well as under services.msc on most of the computers in the house. I've also heard that the SSDP service can cause the same sort of polling problems as UPNP so I've disabled that service as well. I disabled the router's filtering and blocking features too. I personally stopped using p2p programs a long time ago but I can't guarantee the same for everybody else. Even if they were using those programs, I'd have trouble convincing them to stop using them since "everything was working fine before so why should I have to?" I'm a bit uneasy turning off the local DHCP and using static IP addresses because I've never done that before and am not 100 percent sure how it works. Could somebody maybe talk me through this?

 

[Samstoned]

your setup per nic card
first go to router get the staus info
WAN DNS ip numbers write them down and save
then on each machine
do:
start right click network connections go properties
right click on the connection icon properties
go to tcp/ip highlight and below click properties
tick use following address
1st card
192.168.1.100 nic ip change the last 2 or 3 digits for each card <255
255.255.255.0 mask
192.168.1.1 default gateway ??

dns
**>**>**>**
** .**.**.** <<<,,,,-------the WAN dns that you wrote down
now click advanced go to wins tab
below tick enable netbios
hope I left nothing out
oh by the way without dhcp and with a dynamic config it will be hard for the router to assign address's
thats why you need to set static