Tatva-Artha

So, my D-Link wireless router recently died after 4 years of great service. Considering the popularity, I bought one of Linksys Wireless-N router. The set was nice and easy but I started noticing that the dropped internet wouldn’t connect automatically with the new router. I called AT&T customer service to find out if anything had changed recently. Nothing did.

So started my debug cycle. I had forgotten how to connect directly to modem. My Vista (great Microsoft OS) wouldn’t fetch an IP from modem upon direct connection. Finally, I started from scratch. I reset my modem (with a little pen push button at the bottom of my modem). Restarted the computer. I had to hit “repair” on all my internet adapters to get it to renew ip address from modem directly. Then, I went to http://192.168.0.1 for the modem’s control panel and entered my username/password to get it to connect to internet. Everything good. But I still have to get it working with my router so I can connect multiple computers wirelessly to internet.

First order of business was to ensure that modem is set to “Smart keep alive”, so it would connect automatically if the connection dropped for some reason. Sure enough, it was default to that. So, I took peace of mind and got onto hooking up router.  I noticed that there were 4 solid lights (including the “Internet” one; which was always OFF with the D-Link router, probably because my PPP0E was not on modem before) and one blinking (for “Activity”). I found this link and followed it. It asked me to select “Automatic Configuration – DHCP” and I did. I changed the router IP to 192.168.2.1 and subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. This caused all my computers to reget their IP and they renewed as 192.168.2.* instead of the default of 192.168.1.*.  My “Status”  on linksys config screen still kept showing WAN IP of 0.0.0.0 and none of my computers could connect to internet. I should have tried hitting “IP Address release/renew” but I didn’t read the manual far enough.

So, I went back to my theory that PPPoE has to be on router and not on modem. I went back to modem config (http://192.168.0.1) and changed PPP location from “PPP on the modem” to “PPP on the computer”. The description said that it works when you need PPPoE on the router. I noticed that this caused the “Internet” LED on model to go off (as it was originally with D-Link modem). Yes, I was returning to my original configuration but with a better understanding of how things are connected. With PPPoE on the router, I had to re-enter my username/password in Linksys config screen and sure it connected t internet as before. I am not sure this resolved my original problem with auto-reconnect when dropping connection. However, I was able to get my internet back on all computers.

I will have to watch this. If auto-reconnect is still a problem, I may have to return to “PPPoE on the modem”, reset Linksys internet type to “Automatic Configuration – DHCP” and then hit “IP Address release/renew” to see if modem takes the responsibility of reconnecting in case of dropped connection. There is a setting for Keep-Alive in Linksys’s PPPoE configuration but it doesn’t seem to work.

So, this is my journey and it is documented now. So, I can refer to this later. Good Luck!

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