Installing a wireless router.

[Ruud]

I never used these things but sinds my girlfriend needs to use the internet for her school at the same time I need it I bought myself a wireless router. After installing everything the way discribed in the manual I do get a internet connection but only trought a ethernet cable connected from the wireless router to my laptop. According to the router there should be a wireless coneection active but both my girlfriends and my laptop can't seem to find it. I tried resetting the router but I have absolutely no idea what the problem could be so I'm asking for advise before messing up anything. Laptop: Acer Aspire 3050 & Acer Aspire 5050.Router: Belkin wireless G router (G 802.11g).

[justsomeguy]

I can't find a user's manual on the Belkin website, but you'll want to plug in via the cable and make sure the router is configured for wireless and secured. To do that you typically open a web browser and go to one of these addresses:http://192.168.0.1/http://192.168.1.1/Try clicking on both of those and see if either of them load. If neither works, check the user's manual to see what you need to do to get to the admin area for the router. If one of them does work, it will ask you for a password. Check the manual for the right user name and password to enter (typically either "admin/password" or "admin" without a password). Once you're logged in, first change the default password to something you can remember. You never want to use default settings with a wireless router, you don't want someone else connecting to it, changing the password, and blocking your computer, copying your files, or monitoring your network traffic. Find the wireless configuration area and make sure that wireless is enabled. You will also want to set up whatever wireless security features the router has to require a key to connect to the router. It will probably be something like a WEP key or something similar. Once you have the router set up you will need to change the settings on your laptop to use the key to connect to the network. How you do that depends on the laptop, I'm not familiar with Acer laptops. Once both the router and the laptop have the same settings everything should work fine. You could just turn on wireless settings and leave off the security part, but if you have an unsecured wireless network you're pretty much asking people driving by with laptops ("wardrivers") to find your open network and listen to your traffic. If you do any banking online, or enter any passwords or anything on any website at all, you don't really want that to happen.

[Ruud]

Both adresses give me a "Failed to connect to the server" error. But what you mentioned I need to do there was allresdy done during the installation proces, giving the wireless network a name, a admin and user password and also securing it with WPA.I allready read through the usermanual in the section "troubleshooting" but could not find the answer. However there was nowhere any mention of any setting on the laptop that would need to be changed.I forgot to mention I allready tried it with my firewall off, the wierd thing I find is that I am able of connecting to the internet trough a ethernet cable but that it only refuses to reconise the wireless option.

[boen_robot]

Both adresses give me a "Failed to connect to the server" error. But what you mentioned I need to do there was allresdy done during the installation proces, giving the wireless network a name, a admin and user password and also securing it with WPA.I allready read through the usermanual in the section "troubleshooting" but could not find the answer. However there was nowhere any mention of any setting on the laptop that would need to be changed.I forgot to mention I allready tried it with my firewall off, the wierd thing I find is that I am able of connecting to the internet trough a ethernet cable but that it only refuses to reconise the wireless option.

The laptop(s) are in the same room as the router, right? If there's a wall (especially a ferro-concrete one) the connection will go down to point where the laptops' wireless cards will ignore it.On your laptops, what do you use? A utility of the wireless, or the windows manager? Regardless of what your answer is, try with the other one i.e. if you use a utility, use Windows and vise versa. Sometimes one can have problems which the other solves.

[Ruud]

Thanks for the help, I called the technical support center of the router and they helped me getting it to work.I needed to connect to 192.168.2.1 that was why the other adresses didn't work and there I needed to change the "wireless channel" and the "protection mode", it seems that some channels get interrupted in certain area's and I needed to set a defaut channel instead of leaving it on "auto".

[justsomeguy]

Good thing you called, I never would have suggested changing the channel. I haven't been a big fan of Belkin products in general, the router might be a little "quirky". Years ago it was revealed that some Belkin routers would randomly redirect a request to a Belkin advertisement page. This is a major no-no for networking equipment. If that router was inside a hospital or a police station or a government office and that traffic just happened to be vitally important to something (e.g. controlling a robotic surgery) you probably wouldn't want the router to purposely trash the packet. Not the best idea on Belkin's part.