Network problem with Linksys WET54G

[Mike Sharkey]

I have been wrestling with a network problem for a day or so and I hoping that sharper minds than mine will be able to help!

For the past couple of years my setup has been as follows:
Two Philips Series 1 units, Turbonet/Terbonet cards in each, one running the 1.6 image and the other the 1.5 image. The Tivos together with an xBox1 are connected to a switch which is connected to a Linksys WET54G wireless bridge. The bridge communicates to a Netcomm N5WPlus4W modem/router which has both wired & wireless clients using static IP addresses on the LAN side. The wireless network uses WPA security with a shared key.
This has worked very well ever since I set it up.

Recently I have upgraded the router (to take advantage of VOIP) to a Billion 7401VGP R3 router. Everything seemed to be OK... the computers on the network all working, VOIP working etc until I discovered the Tivos were failing to make the daily calls. On checking I found that I had forgotten to change the gateway from the Netcomm's 192.168.1.1 to the Billion's 192.168.1.254. To my surprise I still could not get the Tivos or the xBox to connect to the outside world.

I tried bypassing the Wireless Bridge and that worked. I was able to make the calls.
My problem now is 'why won't the Bridge work as it did before'?

With the Bridge connected, I carried out the network checks and from either Tivo I can ping any IP address on the LAN side except the router gateway.

The gateway for all LAN clients including the Tivos, xBox and Bridge is the router's IP address.
I can ping this address from any of the computers wired or wireless on the LAN........just not from the Tivos or xBox via the Bridge.

I would be grateful for any comments or ideas!

[Skolink]

192.168.1.254 might be a special address reserved/filtered by the bridge (even thought it is supposed to be a transparent L2 bridge). Try a different address for your new router. What address does the bridge itself have (for http configuration)?

[Mike Sharkey]

That's certainly a possibility.
The factory IP address for the bridge was 192.168.1.226. I gave it a static address 192.168.1.5.
There is nothing in the documentation to suggest that 192.168.1.254 might be reserved. The bridge is Ver 3 and has the latest firmware v2.07

Thanks for your comments
Mike

[petestrash]

Does the router show the bridge as being connected?

Can you ping from a PC to a TiVo?

Peter

[Mike Sharkey]

Hi Peter,

I can ping from any PC to every other device on the LAN including the two Tivos, the xbox, the Bridge and the router gateway. When I Telnet into either Tivo I can ping back to the bridge and the PCs. The only ping that does not get through is the one to the router gateway.

The network is set up with static addresses on all devices, MAC filtering on the router and WPA on the wireless network. DHCP is disabled. The router ARP table shows the bridge as being connected.

Mike

[petestrash]

Did you try changing the bridge IP as Skolink suggested?

Peter.

[Skolink]

...MAC filtering on the router...

I think that is your problem. Add the MAC addresses of the TiVos and Xbox to the allowed MAC address table (even though they are not 'wireless' devices driectly connected to the AP.

[Mike Sharkey]

Well, I have had some success! Here's what I did and the result:

I added the Tivo MAC addresses to the wireless filter list (they were already in the ethernet filter list) - made no difference

I changed the router IP address to 192.168.1.1 - made no difference

I changed the Tivos, the xbox and the Bridge to DHCP - the Tivo2 (with the 1.6 image) now works as does the xbox. The Tivo with the 1.5 image still won't ping the gateway despite the fact that the network tests look ok (see attachment). Maybe I'm not doing that bit correctly?

What I did was open nic_config_tivo
select 3
I left the first two settings blank
entered 192.168.1.1 as the gateway
select 0
reboot

Anything else I can do to avoid having to take the drive out and re-image?

The really strange thing is that if I try and reset the Tivo2 network config back to static, I'm back to square 1 - can't ping the gateway. Why should it only work in DHCP mode?

I feel as if I'm nearly there but there are still some things I can't fathom!

Thanks for your help so far!

Mike

[Mike Sharkey]

Hallelujah! I've got it!

I noticed that in the ARP table of connected devices, all the DHCP devices downstream of the bridge were showing up with the bridge MAC address.

In the Static ARP table I had linked the Tivo static IP addresses to their own MAC addresses. As soon as I deleted those entries, Tivo1 came online!

Now to see what happens if I try and enter four static IP addresses all with the same MAC address!

Thanks again.

Mike

[Mike Sharkey]

Everything seems to be OK now. I reverted to the 192.168.1.254 router address which caused a slight problem with the daily call.

/etc/resolv.conf had the nameserver as 192.168.1.1
When I tried to edit the file I kept getting the warning 'this is a read only file'.
I thought making the rw command made all files read-write?

As a work around I tried Filezilla but was foiled again!
I kept getting 'Failed to retrieve Directory Listing' so was not able to move the file to the PC.

What am I doing wrong?

In the meantime I changed the oztivo.conf file to show 65.49.60.197 rather than www.oztivo.net so the daily call is happening, but I would still like to fix resolv.conf

Mike

[petestrash]

Both the drive and the file need to writeable.

rw will make the drive read/write

and chmod 666 resolv.conf will make the file writeable

Also make sure you are editing /hack/etc/resolv.conf

/etc/resolv.conf is just a symlink on most of our images.

Peter.

[Skolink]

In the Static ARP table I had linked the Tivo static IP addresses to their own MAC addresses.Mike
Static ARP entries, that's what I'd call over-configuration!

[Mike Sharkey]

Static ARP entries, that's what I'd call over-configuration!

You're right! I think it must be a form of OCD! I'm working on it!

Thanks to both Skolink and Peter for your assistance. It's good to know that help is never far away.

Mike