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Figured there may be some Dakka folks out there much more well versed in PC know how than myself, and searching for Network issues on the net seems to bring up thousands of useless issues and fixes. So hoping by asking here, someone might know a) what the issue is, and b) hopefully how to fix it.

Basically Have two PCs ethernet wired to a BT home hub (ADSL router) they where fine when both XP, Aurelia got a Windows 7 PC a couple of years back and since them we have had occasional situations where I would be on the Net and she couldn't connect, or vica versa. The only way to fix was both PC's restarting and rebooting the hub. It seems to have gotten worse as the time as passed, going from an occasional issue, to several times a week.

Since today we have got two new PC's both with Windows 7, and we had hoped the problem would have been fixed. However we are still blocking each other, it now seems every time.

According to all our Network settings we are sharing access and our PCs can see one another. The other issue it raises is it will block one player from logging into WoW or other MMO if one of us is already in. We then have to reboot everything, and the person blocked has to log in first, and both of us then can connect, it basically seems to make no sense.

Part of me does wonder if its provider related and we are being strangled on our net access causing the problem, as some days there is no issues, and others it can by mine blocking, or hers as I noted above, there seems no set issue other than at at least five or six times a week we are having this problem.


Anyone got any ideas?

No idea.

Currently have two computers in the house.
One XP, one W7.
Both cabled into modem/router.

No issues with either.

Given that this didn't become a problem until you both upgraded to Windows 7, I'm guessing it's a software problem.

I had a similar issue recently. We have an old router that we stopped using because it kept dropping my desktop. We bought a new one, but the new one kept dropping the wife's laptop. We solved the problem by just using both routers.

Apparently there is a common problem where the router's firewall conflicts with your PC's firewall. I suggest turning off any firewall programs (including Windows Firewall) and restarting them until you figure out where the problem lies.

edit:
A good way to test if you're connect to the internet is to open up command (start->run->"cmd" ) and try to ping a website ("ping www.google.com" ; "ping 74.125.224.72". When I had the firewall conflict, I was able to ping 74.125.224.72, but was unable to ping www.google.com.

To test if you're connected to the router, you can try pinging the router, likely 192.168.1.1

I suspect your router may be bad, it sounds like DHCP is assigning the same IP address more than once. I think the Windows 7 upgrades are coincidental - no networking changes you make on one defaultly-configured client should be able to affect another client. Do you ever see an alert on the bottom right that shows a message like "There is an IP address conflict with another system on the network"?

Alternately, rather than replacing the router, you might want to try setting each computer to having a static IP and see if this fixes it. On Win 7:

Start
Control Panel
Network & Sharing Center
Changer Adapter Settings in the top left
(Find the adapter in question, you may have more than one), right click and hit "properties"
Highlight Internet Protocol Version 4, hit Properties
Change "Obtain IP address automatically" to "Use the following address". For the sake of this experiment, change your IP to 192.168.1.100, leave the subnet mask to whatever it autopopulates to, and change your default gateway to whatever the IP address of your router is (almost certainly, as Biccat said, 192.168.1.1). You can leave the DNS settings alone.

Repeat these steps on the other PC, but change the IP address to 192.168.1.101

Does this fix the problem?

I was thinking the same thing Ouze said. Also, both computers aren't named the same thing are they? If your router is doing something bizarre like handing out IP addresses by Windows computer name as opposed to MAC address or something like that, you could have issues.

Ouze's fix should workaround my above hypothetical situation though.

Yeah, tried all the things above. Sadly the fixed IP didn't work. It seemed to for a moment, then we realised it had switched the dominant PC again. So Aurelia's was blocking me again.

Also Biccat reminded us to check our ports, and we opened up a number that where not set for Battlenet and the WoW downloader, and still no joy.

Turning the firewalls on and off made no effect either sadly, tried all the settings, no difference.

I also rang BT but they had no real fixes, doesn't help with the language barrier, but its seems their best call was switching the ethernet cables between PC's and swapping the ends of the internet cable. They figured sending us the new BT homebub3 might sort the problem, but otherwise they seemed to have no ideas.

Will see when it arrives.

Open up a command window and type in "ipconfig". Then type in "arp -a". Finally, type in "hostname". Do this on both computers, and then post what it responds with.

There's GOTTA be something wacky going on with the hostnames or MAC addresses or something. I cannot think of any other explanation for why one would affect the other.

Okies, sadly at work, but will give Aurelia a ring shortly and ask her to give that a go.

Also for further info for those trying to help (which is much appreciated by the way) when the block happens, there are no warning messages other can't connect to the net, or can't find webpage.

With WoW, the blocked player is fine if they have entered the game first, however if they try to change server or the blocking PC joins WoW before their character has entered the realm, it blocks them and then they can't get back on the server they where on.
They can however log in and out of characters on the one realm if they where logged in before the other PC joins.

Its just odd.

daedalus wrote:Open up a command window and type in "ipconfig". Then type in "arp -a". Finally, type in "hostname". Do this on both computers, and then post what it responds with.

There's GOTTA be something wacky going on with the hostnames or MAC addresses or something. I cannot think of any other explanation for why one would affect the other.

looks like you are in good hands with daedalus here. Another good tip would be to type the following:

ipconfig /all > C:\info.txt

That will allow you to open the file 'info.txt' and copy/paste it into dakka. Same idea with arp -a:

arp -a > C:\arp.txt

I suspect that you may have cloned mac addresses, bad arp tables, messed up DHCP or your router may be set up incorrectly. Several of these can be fixed by trying a settings reset on the router.
One last thing, you said 'According to all our Network settings we are sharing access'... Do you mean that Internet Connection Sharing or whatever it is called in windows 7 is setup? That would be bad. I never get that thing to work right.

Good call pretre. I didn't realize you could direct stdout to file in Windows. I'm a Linux guy myself.

daedalus wrote:Good call pretre. I didn't realize you could direct stdout to file in Windows. I'm a Linux guy myself.

hehe. DOS is basically Unix for dummies. A lot of the stuff you can do in the *nixes, you can do in DOS if you remember how. Although, I get really annoyed when I type ifconfig or ls in DOS and it doesn't work.

Personally, I run FreeB for my mail/web server at home, but have never gotten away from Win machines. Back when I started, you had to know DOS in order to use PCs and they've never done away with it being useful, so that helps.

Sounds like duplicate IP addresses. Dunno what you should do, but that should at least give you somewhere to get started as far as Google goes.

Sorry about delay in getting back, been downloading GW2 and at work a lot past couple of days.

I can send the cmd data via pm if anyone is willing to take a look but uncertain about putting on a open forum.

However while checking around earlier, we noticed that in the router properties it is signing us both in via the same IP number and port number.

Would that be the issue, and how would you add another Service option?

Shouldn't be an issue to post publicly as there's not much anyone can do with your NATed IP or MAC address from outside your local network, but you can PM me if it makes you feel more comfortable.

If you're getting the same IP information in the router properties, then it sounds like that's a smoking gun right there. Odd thing is that it should automatically give each person a different IP address. Can you give us the model of your router? I want to look up the manual for it.

Cheers daedalus, will sort it out in a short while and pm you the extra info from the cmd just in case.

Its connecting us both via libtorrent/0.16.0.0 at 192.168.1.66 using port 6881

It says we can add a new service but we have no idea how, or if thats as easy as it sounds.

As to the make.

Its a BT Home Hub 2.0 model 2.0A


Once again, thanks for any assistance you can bring to the table, really appreciate people sharing their time to try and help out.

Yeah, I go back to my earlier comment of resetting the settings on the router. Sounds like something got borked up.

Hmm. BT's manual is light on screenshots or specific help on the router configuration. I'd imagine most of that is online help hosted directly on the configuration page. :(

From your description though, it looks like you're looking at the port forwarding page. Opening up 6881-6889 should boost performance in downloading WoW patches (well, for one of you), but it shouldn't necessarily prevent one or the other of you from gaining access at any given time.

If it's giving you both 192.168.1.66 as your IP address, then that could explain your problems there, though usually Windows is pretty good about catching stuff like that, at least, it is here in the office. I could try it later with my gaming box and see what happens. At any rate, the ipconfig from both computers should give an indication as to what the next step is. I'll post more when I hear back from you.

Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote:....................As to the make.

Its a BT Home Hub 2.0 model 2.0A.....................

I can't talk of the OS/IP/2xPC/WoW related problems as I'm not that adept or familiar with them, but I did have a BT Homehub 2 that kept cutting out the connection at random points. This was invariably (but not always) at start up, necessitating a reboot of the router. I did try looking into various settings ad PC related factors as the router seemed to be running okay and always appeared on the available network lists.

In the end I called BT and got the router replaced with the V3 model and the latest software that came with it. No problems since and the Xbox connection is infinitely better .

Cheers Daedalus, apologies for the delay there, but apparently I can use that cut and paste feature for some reason, access denied?

Regardless, have hand typed out the results from both PC's and about to PM them to you.


@notprop - well they are sending me a Home hub 3, so maybe it'll sort the issue as well, but I lose my free weekend/evening calls if I use it, so would like to give the Home hub 2 one last chance.

Is that a result of not being able to get net based calls through the V3 router? They mentioned something about that to me but we don't use it so no biggie here. Or is that BT being fething rubbish again and trying to reduce your service?

One thing to note, if they send you a new router they will want the old one sent back or they will charge you. I didn't realise the free returns label was part of the postage label they send you the new router in and chucked it. The fethers nearly charged me for not returning the old one because they didn't have it in X days, so be careful.

Ah nice for the tip, and yeah, its because the V3 can't process the free calls part of the package or some rollocks. Basically cutting a service via the backdoor methinks.

I'm on the Anytime package and haven't had the calls cut, so you should still retain your Weekend and Evening calls. BT are always pulling gak, the customer service is terrible.

I do seem to remember throwing a few Feths down the phone at them at the time and putting OffCom into every other sentence. It would be a pretty crap piece of kit if their standard tariffs don't run with it, it sounds like BS to me mate.

Will give them a ring to confirm my status if I have to use the home hob 3.

Oh and aye, their IT repair advice is next to useless.

Well, MDS just sent me his info. Unfortunately, everything there looks good on the surface. Insignificant bits redacted:

PC1:
Ip Address: x.x.x.65
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: x.x.x.254

PC2:
Ip Address: x.x.x.66
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: x.x.x.254

Arp tables looked proper. I saw a handful of multicast addresses in there, but that's not a big deal, especially since Bittorrent will use those for WoW patching.

Only thing I see worth noticing is this:

Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* 11:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . . . . :
IPv6 Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 2001:0:x:x:x:x:x:570c
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . . . . . . : fe80::10f6:x:x:x%13
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .: ::

Now, the 'x's are my doing; the IP address that was in there looked legit for IPv6. My question is does anyone have any insight into why there's a IPv6 Tunnel set up? Is that BT weirdness? I don't have that on my Win7 computer. It doesn't even have a default gateway, so I don't THINK it's relevant, but it's a curiosity to me.

Honestly, at this point, I'm kind of leaning toward the router which is probably not what you wanted to hear. Short of having someone very technically inclined set up a sniffer on your computers and analyze the network traffic, not really sure there's going to be an obvious answer. Here's my train of thought though: Problem started when you got a new computer. Since then, you've gotten two new computers. That rules out just about anything on a hardware level on the computers. At this point it's either Windows 7, or it's the router.

One last thing. It seems a brief internet search indicates that those 6to4 tunnels aren't really necessary. I found the following for removing them:

Yeah I had the same problem and it drove me insane! I think that it has to do something with using different networks all day long.
The steps I took to resolve this was:
1. Opened up network connections and disable IPv6
2. Opened up device manager (start > type "devmgmt.msc"
- View > Show Hidden Devices
- went under network adapters and deleted all the ones called Microsoft 6to4 adapter
That took care of the problem for me. Good luck!

Source: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistanetworking/thread/32b0c129-fa2d-431a-a275-4288c729605a/

You might give that a shot and see if it's improves matters. I'd try that, and then try the new router they're sending you, and see if you have a difference.

Let us know how it goes either way.

Cheers, and many thanks for looking into this for me, and to everyone else who gave suggestions, and in general tried to lend a hand.

Will have a proper look at this info in the morning when I am more awake, see if it can help while we wait for the hub. Regardless, you got one hell of a lot further than I would have done, my tech savvie is, well poor.

Thank you good sir.