ST706 setup with ethernet cable

[Zyte]

I'm using a Speedtouch ST706 with latest firmware.

Me and my housemates are sharing wireless internet, and no major problems in the past. So far so good.
Since i'm playing some quake live again i want to connect using my network cable to remove the 5sec lagbursts caused by Wifi.

When i do however, i cannot get access to internet. The router does acknowledge my cable is connected since the LED does blink. My computer does so too.. I get connected to our network, however instead of Local and Internet is says "Local Only"

When i check in the router bios (or menu?), i can see all the clients connected to wireless including me ofc, but i do not see my laptop in the ETHERNET section.
Is there some type of option i am looking over here? Do i need to enable an ethernet option in some way?

Resetting in the router menu didn't work, as well as switching the thing off and on again. Also doesn't matter if i disconnect for wifi, still local only.

Anyone here have a guess? thanks in advance.

[Zyte]

vista 32bit btw.

[Zyte]

Modest bump. Tried removing the 'wifi-hickups' by checking out some other wifi anti lag programs, no dice..

[AmIdYfReAk]

Thompson Speedtouch ST706?

i'm not sure to be honest, it should just work.

i have a Thomspon 516 so i only have one Ethernet port, no wireless, but the same gateway crap.

Anyway, When you connect your lappie to the thomson Via Ethernet, when it pulls an IP, does it get a correct gateway?

Also, if you got to your TCP/IP properties for the Wired NIC, it dosnt have a static IP set to it? does it?

also, wireless shouldn't cause spikes.

[obsidian]

If you're getting large lagbursts every 60 seconds or so (test by opening Command Prompt and type "ping 192.168.1.1 -t" or whatever your router IP is and see if you get spikes every 60 seconds), it's probably Windows wireless polling for new networks in a stupid way. This problem persists with both Windows XP and Vista with the Wireless Zero Configuration service and the WLAN Autoconfig service respectively. What it is doing is polling for new networks every 60 seconds, trying to see if there is a stronger signal elsewhere. This may be beneficial sometimes when you're in a public area on a laptop, but at home or at work where you are likely connected to a single network, it is completely redundant. Unfortunately there is no way to control the service and tell it to stop polling every 60 seconds because you're already connected to the one network that you want to use so shut the fuck up.

You might have better luck with third party drivers and utilities that disables Windows wireless services and uses their own, less stupid services. I've used Linksys' wireless drivers with their hardware and I don't get any lag. Other manufacturers may also have their own utilities. Any other cards that rely on the OS to handle things will likely still lag. If you read into the problem, you'll find that some people will recommend getting a certain wireless hardware will "fix" the issue - though it's not so much the hardware as the bundled software that came with it. I haven't tried it myself, but you could also give Vista Anti-Lag a try and see if that helps.

Anyway, typical Microsoft with shitty software that they refuse to fix even after a couple of major software versions.

[Foo]

Obsidian is right about the wireless lag bursts - disabling Wireless Zero Configuration will stop that issue.

As for the wired connection, there's a bug in Vista where it won't talk through a router if the router has Stateful Packet Inspection enabled.

If you can find an on/off switch for SPI in the routers settings, turn it off. If you can't, you're either out of luck, or there miiiight be a vista patch available.

Try googling: Vista "Local Only" Bug

[Zyte]

Wow my bad, it is indeed a Thomson router.

I was aware that Wireless Zero Configuration caused the bursts, i had this problem before on XP. When i disabled it though, after i was connected of course, i had to reboot. So, when i did, i couldn't connect afterwards since WZC was disabled

So like you suggested obsidian i tried some apps and stumbled upon 'boingo' which was free and worked great back then. Not so much on vista though. I also tried Vista Anti-Lag, read some good things about it but it didn't do it's job for me, especially not in quake. I might have to try looking for a manufacturer's driver like you said thanks.

But i got so sick of it that i dug up my old network cable, hoping to evade this wifi crap alltogether.. it's just a bitch this doesn't work either right now. And it's not that im good with this shit, i remember me and a mate took almost a day to connect two laptops using a crossover cable.. So thanks for your help, but i have to ask some for clarification: Amidy how can i check what gateway i get when it pulls an ip? Also in command prompt? Also thanks Foo i'll go and look if i can find such an option.

Today btw, when i plugged it in to see whats up, it said unidentified network instead of our shared network name, which was the case last time. Still local only though.

[Zyte]

Disregard that last post. Now connected via cable. feels good man.

Did an ipconfig, then checked my settings like amidy suggested, and seems IPv6 was still enabled. Also the DNS server adress with IPv4 wasn't obtained automatically. Don't know what solved it but whatever.

Thanks for the input.. One final question since amidy mentioned it. Is it generally better to use a static ip adress? What's the use for that when having no problems? Cheers!

[obsidian]

It's easier to have the router create the IP address for each computer dynamically, just as long as you know that your computer's address on the network may change. On the other hand, you may find that you have more than one computer on the network that you would like to have access to or any additional software that needs to find that other computer, having the IP addresses constantly assigned to the computer makes things much easier.

If you use anything over a network or any kind of server/filesharing, a static DHCP would help: remote access, any kind of file server or NAS, bittorrent clients, game servers, printer sharing, etc.

[AmIdYfReAk]

Obsidian is correct, but from my experience the days of those issues are gone.

Almost every router/gateway that I've worked with will continue to assign a computer the same IP when its on DHCP..

As for the Bittorrent and etc, UPNP has taken care of that stuff... so no worries there.

[obsidian]

I've found that a router/gateway will continue to assign a computer with the same IP most of the time which works for most of the time except on that odd occasion where it decides to do something totally different and then you are left to scratch your head as to why nothing works.

But yeah, not much need to do it but I just like to so that I could "cover all the bases" so to speak.

[AmIdYfReAk]

3 years, my desktop and media-center has the same IP, on the same router, two different houses, two different setups. all set to DHCP.

And on the flip side of the coin, if the computer that you assigned a static IP to is off, the DHCP server will assign the IP out to another Nic, causing issues when you turn the main box back on.

[Zyte]

Thanks for clearing that up