Win 98 Networking problem

[aeroc]

I run a workgroup here at home consisting of my Win2K system, 2-Win 98 systems, and a Win 95 system. I use DHCP from my firewall/router. My son disconnected his machine from the network and connected it to his sisters Win 95 machine. He must have changed something but cannot tell me what. He has no network visibility and an ipconfig /all yields a IP Address of 164.X.X.X a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and no default gateway.

The setting under the network icon in the control panel are set for DHCP, default gateway of 172.31.14.1 and WINS from DHCP.

What happened? I have tried ipconfig /renew_all, ipconfig /release_all etc etc to no avail. Where is it picking up these bogus values? How do I get this thing straightened out?

Thanks!

 

[angerdriven]

did he connect it directly to her system port to port? if so then there is nothing feeding it dhcp information. you would then need to manually configure ips and subnets on those systems and, use a crossover cable between the two.

 

[TheCandyman]

First off, can you ping the computer at all from another computer? Second, when you do ipconfig /all it shows the IP 164.x.x.x, to the left of the number, does it say IP or Auto IP?? If it's Auto (or something close, it's been a while) then it's not connecting to your DHCP and the computer is assigning it's self a random IP address(Don't worry thats normal). If thats the case, check your numbers in your Gateway connection on that machine. Let me know what happends...

 

[aeroc]

Thanks for your advice! I appreciate your help! As it turns out he reconnected it to the network. That's when the trouble began. As I was futzing around with it I rebooted the machine and got an error dialog about the card. That made me suspicious. I noticed no link light on the card. So I wiggled the cable. The card wiggled! He had, for some unknown reason, remove the screw holding the NIC card in. In messing with the cable he knocked the card loose enough that it was intermitent. Putting the card firmaly back in and putting the screw back in has cured the problem!

It's always something simple!

Thanks again!