Our office Macs won't connect to new NetGear wireless router

September 24, 2004 1:37 PM

I just installed a new NetGear wireless router in the office. We are going to use the firewall on that router for the whole office. But, I can't get the Mac's in the office to connect. (More inside of course...)

So, I set the Mac's to DHCP and it looks like they are getting an IP from the router. But, they still won't connect. The OS X Powerbook has no problem connecting to the wireless, but the older Mac's, OS 10 and 9, won't connect. All the Windows machines switched from static to fixed IP's fine. Obviously I'm not a Macintosh person. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

posted by trbrts to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What IP address do the Macs end up with? If it's 169.x.x.x, that means it's not really getting an address from the DHCP server.
posted by kindall at 2:03 PM on September 24, 2004

I'm not sure what you mean by they won't connect. You say they are getting IP addresses right? And those IP addresses don't appear to be in an editable field do they? If that's the case, then it looks like they are connecting, so what symptoms are you seeing to lead you to believe they aren't?

On the OS 9 machines in particular, one thing you can try to to go into System Folder > Preferences > and throw away TCP/IP Preferences. The system should automatically generate that file again. You shouldn't need to restart, but I would anyway -- just cause.

Now, go in and set it to DHCP. Are you still having the same problem?
posted by willnot at 2:03 PM on September 24, 2004

Well, I say it looks like they are getting a IP from the firewall because it is 192.168.0.8 which is in the range the firewall is set to give.

I'll give willnot's suggestion a go, right now.
posted by trbrts at 2:12 PM on September 24, 2004

OK. Problem solved. We had to go into advanced mode (I don't know why it just doesn't automatically show advanced mode) and tell it where the IP of the DNS server. Thanks for the help fellas.
posted by trbrts at 3:14 PM on September 24, 2004

Yeah, the DNS thing was going to be my next suggestion -- apparently Windows boxes can pick it up over DHCP, but Macs sometimes have trouble doing that, apparently depending on the DHCP server.
posted by kindall at 4:04 PM on September 24, 2004