Actiontec mi424wr router: assigning invalid automatic IP's(?)

jvgallagher

OK this is weird. Gradually over the past few days the computers on my home network have had their local area network connections disrupted. I have a Netgear internet switch connected to LAN port 4 of my Actiontec router and all the household computers are wired to the switch. All the computers were set to have their IP's assigned automatically.

First the wireless connection on my laptop dropped. So I just turned off the wireless card and connected via the ethernet. Then the LAN ethernet connection on my laptop was dropped and when I investigated, it had a strange IP address (usually it is 192.168.1.#) but this time it was something completely different. So I assigned it a static IP. That worked fine.

Then, the next day all the other computers dropped their lan connections. I assumed it was because of having weird IP addresses. I didn't bother to check what all their IP addresses were, I just went and assigned them all static IP's as a practical way to get everyone up and running again.

So, there are two questions:

1) Why is this happening and how can I trouble shoot the Actiontec router to see why it is giving off invalid IP addresses? (As a possibly pertinant side note: I ran a program called Simple Port Forwarding a day or so before all my troubles began - is this known to cause problems?)

2) For some reason I cannot port forward to the static IP's, at least I don't think so since The result is "unresovled" when I click "resolve now" in the port forwarding screen. There is a caveat here: I can revolve the port forwarding if I assign the static IP as the same IP that is associated with the computer name. That is before all this started, my laptop ip ended in 17. When I gave it a static ip of something different, the port forwarding would not resolve, but it did resolve when I changed the static ip to 17. The general problem is that now I don't remember what all the ip numbers of all the other computer connections were.

So, the second question is how do I port forward to a general static IP?

Thanks for your help. - JV Gallagher

VikeFan1961

The first thing you need to do is log into your Actiontec router and reset it to the default settings. Do this under the Advance option menu. This shuold clear up the IP rotation issue.

Do not run the Simple Port Forward program with the systems you are forwarding to set to DHCP. The program will create some nasty routing issues which you ran into. In order to properly port forward the computers involved need to be set up with static IP addresses and not just host names. They can be defined in the router as static DHCP, as opposed to the typical dynamic, or you can alter the DHCP IP range to create a group od static IP addresses and assign each system that you want to port forward to inside this range.

Once you have your systems and the router set up for static adressing you should be able to rerun the Simple Port Forward program to set up the forwarding you desire. Or you could set it up using the Actiontec's Firewall/Port Forwarding menu to do the same thing.