That Tech Blog

I recently moved into a new house. I made all the necessary arrangements to get ATT SBC Yahoo DSL turned on when I arrived. I had a small problem that delayed the DSL, but soon my Siemens SpeedStream 4100 Ethernet ADSL modem arrived via our friendly FedEx truck. The DSL modem arrived none too soon. If I’d had to endure a few more days of dial-up I might have gone back to watching TV…no, wait, no cable yet either. With modem, patch cables, and Netgear wireless router in hand, now I could begin setting up my network.

I decided not to use the setup CD that came with the modem since I don’t like extra software on my computer and I was going to be using the Netgear router anyway, not just a single computer. I hooked everything up and I was having all kinds of strange problems. (At my old house I had cable internet via Charter Communications and my Netgear router and Linksys cable modem worked fine there.) If I didn’t have the DSL modem plugged into the router I could ping the router, but if they were patched together I couldn’t ping the router. I swapped cables, I tried connecting wirelessly with my Dell laptop, I tried my spare Netgear router, but nothing worked.

I looked again at the bottom of my Siemens DSL modem and read the fine print…Ah Ha, the IP address of the modem was 192.168.0.1, the same as my router - I had an obvious IP conflict. With my Linksys cable modem hooked up to Charter Internet I saw no such problem because the cable modem takes the public IP address, something like 71.9.94.234, and passes that through to the “Internet” or WAN port on the Netgear router.

I wasn’t sure if there was a way to change the IP on the DSL modem so I decided to change the address of my router instead. The default IP for my model of Netgear wireless router is 192.168.1.1 but I had changed it a year ago to 192.168.0.1 since that was the default of my old Netgear RT314 router. Now that I had my wireless router set to 192.168.5.1 I was in business, or so I thought.

Since I hadn’t used my setup CD I hadn’t set up my account with ATT SBC Yahoo. I made a phone call to their tech support and spoke to a very helpful technician. She understood my not wanting to install the software from the setup CD onto my computer and walked me through the steps to get my account set up. After a little while I was online surfing at high speed.

I went to check my e-mail and saw that I had to reconfigure Microsoft Outlook, but that’s a posting for another day.