Teknoids

On the theory that fixing something that ain't broke is the least
expensive way to innovate, I decided to add a wireless repeater to my
home network this weekend. The ill-founded notion was that spending 80
bucks at Office Depot and 15 minutes of time would be a sure way to
raise wireless performance in certain parts of my house to blazing
speed. The cockatiels get so depressed and surly when their gaming
stuff runs slowly over the network (see, eg.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbruce/195269151/)

I could have moved the AP, which is in the worst possible place in the
house short of being actually embedded in a couple cubic yards of
concrete, but that would have involved poking around in a bunch of
fiberglas insulation up in the attic to locate the channel that the
electricians left when they wired 5 new smoke detectors in four rooms
during a renovation a few years ago and then running a bunch of wahr (as
it's called in Tejas) down to the cable entry point in the basement.
(The fact that all five of these smoke detectors are both legally
required and within 6 feet of each other is a tribute both to the blind
use of code enforcement as a full-employment act for contractors and to
the nature of life in a college town, but that's another story).

Anyway, I thought I'd buy myself out of this for 80 bucks. With a free
20-dollar gift card. Ha. The minute I got this sucker plugged in and
configured I started getting conflicting-IP-address blips from XP on the
two machines that run it (Linux boxes and older machines don't care).
Google turned up the usual assortment of 2,476 sneering pasty-faced
teenagers who can't get dates saying, basically, "find out what IP
addresses your machines have and fix it, lam3r" but being the wily old
Internet guy I am I had already checked all the machines' static stuff
and the connection table on the router and guess what? No duplicate IP
addresses. A little more digging turned up the idea that, when repeater
and main wireless source overlap, each gets arp'ed when XP does its
gratuitous-arp thing, and since this looks to the XP machine as if there
are identical IP addresses mapped to different MAC addresses (it's
seeing both router caches, apparently with the MAC address of the
router, though I'm not sure about that, merely repeating what I remember
of the post I found), XP thinks it has a conflict and all sorts of
Keystone Kops network behavior ensues. There was a suggestion for
fixing this with a registry hack on the DHCP-dependent machines, but it
does not seem to work on my XP Home (ok, so I *am* a lam3r) laptop.
That is, I've done the hack and I've still got the problem. The
repeater is a D-Link DWL-G710, currently unplugged.

A search on Teknoids.net was pretty unsatisfying -- it doesn't do phrase
searches, and ignores "ip" because it's too short to be a search term,
which makes "xp ip address conflict" kind of an all-embracing thing (so
3lm3r's a lam3r too). So I'm asking: any of you other lam3rz got h3lp
for this? Could I fix it by getting one of those Alienware boxes for
the cockati3ls?

Best,
Tb.
Just say, All those sneering teenagers are going to be sneering law
students before long, etc

--
_________________________________________
Thomas R. Bruce (trb2@cornell.edu)
Director,Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School
http://www.law.cornell.edu