[Techtalk] network help, please

[Maria Blackmore]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, John White wrote:

> I have a home network problem that's run me out of ideas. It has 6 nodes,
> 4 downstairs, 2 upstairs. All downstairs nodes (Linux, Sun, Win98SE) are
> directly connected to a Linksys switch without a problem. The 2 upstairs
> are Win98SE boxes with Linksys USB Wireless NICs talking to the Linksys
> switch downstairs. They both run the same Wireless driver version and,
> up until a couple weeks ago, also ran without a problem. Now, one of them
> still works fine and the other only works behind the switch.

Can you be more specific about "only works behind the switch" please?

Which side is "behind" :)
and which switch?

Do you have a wireless base station connected to the linksys?

don't be afraid of ASCII art diagrams :)

or even draw a normal diagram and put it up on a website as a jpg or png
or something

> I can see and access all other internal machines, so NetBEUI must be
> working,

are you sure it's using NetBEUI not NetBIOS over TCP/IP?

can you access files ok?

including large files (several MB)?

> but when I try to fire up any program that goes out to the world
> (Netscape, IE, Kazaa, etc.), the program dies with a page fault,
> making me think it's TCP/IP related.

hmm

ok

what about ping?

what do your routing and ARP tables look like?

how do they compare with ones from the sun or linux machines downstairs?

> Ifconfig tells me exactly what I think it should.

ifconfig on a windows 98 machine? :)

novel ;)

> Removing and reloading NIC drivers made no apparent difference.

Does this include reinstalling the TCP/IP components?

I guess you could remove the NIC and anything else using TCP/IP on the
machine, remove any left over TCP/IP drivers from the machine by hand, and
then reinstall them all ...

> USB on the working PC is through a PCI card, and on the
> bad PC, it's built-in and enabled. No apparent weirdness in the Device
> Manager. The only thing I've seen on the bad PC that looks odd is when
> it boots and shows which interrupts are assigned to what contoller,
> the Serial Bus Controller is listed twice on the same interrupt. I've
> tried disabling it in BIOS, rebooting to check that it really went
> away, then re-enabling it. But, when it comes back into the interrupt
> list, it's still there twice, even if the Device Manager only shows it
> once. I don't know if this bears on my immediate problem, though. I
> don't remember if it showed up twice when it was working.

Does the machine have four built in USB ports?  rather I should ask, does
the motherboard support four on board USB ports?

The reason I'm asking is because there will be one USB controller in the
machine for every two USB ports.  So if you have four USB ports on the
motherboard then it's perfectly normal to have two USB controllers, and
makes sense for them to share an IRQ (level detect IRQs are good :)

> Any thoughts? Need more info?

See above :)

-- 
Maria
Life is like a joss stick