Connection problems

[tulwinn]

Hi, Ive been having some problems with my connection lately and would like advice on whether my problems sounds like its me or my isp.

Every download I try stalls, sometimes at about 300k or at 1,000kish, I can get around this with getright, but things such as windows update stall and wont resume. Obviously Id like to figure out whats wrong, before i start posting traceroutes etc on my isps site I wanted to see if anyone recognised the problem at all and if thee may be a simple soultion.

I am on a small lan with a Windows 98 machine which is linked to mine which has two lan cards, one for my cable modem and one to the hub, I have TCP/IP and netBeu on teh network though Ive tried removing and reinstalling them.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

Jonathan

[MosDef112]

Okay.. Let's check some settings..

You share your Internet line to your LAN via proxy? NAT? What software do you use for your proxy or NAT server on that Windows 98 box? What is the IP range you use for your private LAN (ie. 192.168.1.0, 10.0.0.0)? Do you have a default gateway specified on the NIC attached to your private LAN? If so, does it point to itself, or a different server on your LAN?

The more specs we know, the more we can help.

[tulwinn]

Thanks,

Ive tried a few of things to fix this, removing and reinstalling the proxy so last time i let it set everything itself, which is why the ips are unusual (I think)

The Windows 2000 machine.
Its an AMD Athlon 750 with a KA7-100 motherboard,
Im using Sygate for Home Office 3.5 to share the line. TCP/IP is set to obtain address automatically though Ive tried specifiying them before. Sygate has my ip as 169.254.87.168, netmask 255.255.0.0.

The windows 98 machine is a Pentium II ,has an ip set to 169.254.202.80 with a gateway and DNS set to my ip 169.254.87.168.
It has an Allied Telesyn AT-2500 NIC card in it. It can connect to the internet but has the same problem as the 2000 machine.

Ive tried swapping the cards around into different machines so I dont thinks its them.

My brother is getting an NIC card for his laptop so I am going to set his up seperatly and plug his machine straight into the Modem to try and test the modem but thats not for a few days.

Thanks

Jonathan

[MosDef112]

Okay.. Several things wrong with your setup. You should never let Windows 98 automatically assign an IP to your machine unless it's fetching it from a DHCP server. That 169.*.*.* address you see is an auto-configuration IP address, or a null IP it uses in the absence of a DHCP server. I would recommend setting it up as follows:

Whichever machine it is that has the two NIC's, one of which is connected to the cable modem, I would configure the following:

NIC connected to the cable modem: Set it to obtain IP address automatically from DHCP server. You really don't want to hard code it, the IP may change from time to time, and it really won't make a difference with respect to improved connectivity.

NIC connected to your LAN: Set a hard coded IP address, with no gateway. I would use 10.19.11.1 as the IP. Also, do not enable DNS, it already obtains DNS server settings from your cable modem's DHCP server.

Workstations on your LAN: Set a hard coded IP address within the network range of the IP you hard coded in the first machine, so it would be something like 10.19.11.25. Set the gateway to 10.19.11.1. Since you're not using NAT, you do not need to configure DNS servers on your workstations.

This will definitely work, and you should follow this scheme with any other workstations you add to your LAN.

[tulwinn]

I was just giving your advice a try but I hit a small snag. When setting up the card attached to the lan on the Windows 2000 machine, I added the ip and the radio button for DNS auto enables, I cant tell it not to use DNS, should i just leave that blank?

[MosDef112]

You can tell it to point to 10.19.11.1 for your DNS server, or you could leave it blank.