On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 23:28:27 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 10/07/2019 09:28, T i m wrote:
On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 02:08:17 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

For those still following along, I will give a quick summary of what we
know now...

So this is not a WEP/WPA issue.

And some were so convinced it was. ;-)

actually connected without any difficulty.

What it does have is a DHCP problem after having authenticated on the
wifi.

And we know DHCP works over Ethernet.

If I manually assign an IP in the correct subnet, then it works
ok.

Inc DNS etc?

I manually set DNS - none of the DHCP parameters were being set. It was
timing out and defaulting to a APIPA style 169.254.n.n address, with no
default gateway or DNS server addresses.

Understood, but I was more asking if the DNS was actually functioning
(even if it had to be / once set manually), eg, you could access sites
via their names, not directly with the ip address?

is not a useable solution for the use case required.

Mobile netbook ... I'd still be interested to see if it connects
wirelessly to *another* network.

Indeed, but waiting on a suitable neighbour to return from hols before
we can check that.

Ok.

(Mobile is pre smartphone era)


The router configuration and DHCP setup is fine (and other wifi devices
have connected and DHCPed ok)

I'd be interested to see if that netbook could connect to that router
with Linux. ;-)

Interesting, but not useful.

Useful in that you know the hardware does work and it could still be a
fixable 'soft' problem?

(its a fairly common Atheros AR2427 wifi adaptor)

Noted. (As mentioned elsewhere, I might have tried an Intel WiFi
adaptor in there, because I can (and not so easy to do remotely)). ;-)

This could be related to the issues addressed in KB953761 (DHCP options
not recognised, when sever includes option 43). However that hotfix does
not seem to have done it initially at least, although I am currently
clarifying an issue on that.

And it did connect to that router previously, possibly before VM
rolled out an update?

Yup.

Strange then that it now can't ... like it was a 'soft' issue. I
wonder how we could try to test for that. ;-)

Can I think you for doing what this group was known for, helping
people in the real use of the word. ;-)

This is one of those cases where its less effort to try and fix it, than
to try and explain how to fix it. (especially when there are competing
methodologies!)

Agreed. I did exactly the same today (after doing some decorating
tools shopping for daughter and walking the dogs (~5 miles in this
heat)). A good but elderly friend phoned yesterday to ask for help on
one of the PC's I built for him ages ago. 'The screen had gone black
and all the icons gone', whilst he was looking if his (desktop) PC,
(right beside the router) had WiFi?? [1]

Long short, somehow he'd put it in tablet mode with it defaulting to
that mode at signin ... How do they do it!?

Oh well, we had a good chat (and my Mrs his Mrs) at the same time and
got a nice cup of tea. ;-)


p.s. Just a thought given your findings, was there a 3rd party
Firewall on there?

Looks like just the standard WinXP SP3 one.

Did you try disabling it (OOI)?

Cheers, T i m

[1] Turns out he had bought an Amazon Echo and doesn't have a
Smartphone (so I used mine for setting it up after I sorted the
desktop issue). ;-)

He had downloaded a Windows App that he seemed to think should do it
but ironically, not to his WiFi equipped laptop. ;-)