Help with Virginmedia and Netgear setup..

[heath]

hello, i have broadband with vriginmedia/ntl and have setup up a netgear wpn824 wireless router wired to my ntl modem and pc and a netgear wg511 card for my laptop. Everything is almost there, ive setup the secuirty, mac, ssid, encryption and its works most but it sometimes won't connect to the websites or fails to load it even after having been working for a while. It can occur randomly and sometimes some sites will work but others will not. Other times i have to hit refresh a few times to get it to work. Sometimes i have to wait a few minutes.

After contacting netgears online support and phone all they could suggest was chaning the mtu and disabling spi, mtu was 1500 but i've played with 1400, 1350, 1300, 1250, and 1200 but still it will fail on sites from time to time. I've also tried router resets and reloading the lastest firmware. And changing to wep from wpa or off.

I then was advised to ring netgear to which some muppet tried to say my router sounded faulty even though its only the web browser that drops and not MSN, skype, bit torrent etc. They will stay on constantly, the laptop will connect to other wireless networks trouble free so the router issue is causing the websites on the latop to fail also.

Is there anything else i can try as i don't accept its broken when its only niggles. I heard about DNS settings could be do blame, whats this? Any suggestions? What do i try? thanks

are there any other networks on the same broadcast channel? might be worth changing that. Are you actually losing connection while your waiting? or is it just slow? Might be worth trying it broadcasting 802.11b instead of dual or G

[heath]

Yes there are a few networks and i did have it in the middle of them on 6 when they had 1 and 2 and sometimes some at the top end of the channels. I read this was worse then been on the same channel so tried putting on 1, 3 and 11 for a while. Same thing. I've not tried putting on just b though so will give that a go.

It doesn't lose connection as such from the router if you mean the laptop, its just suffering from the same thing as the pc wired to the router, it fails on webpages. Everything else internet wise works. Even speedtest.net shows good speed. The netgear assistant on the laptop will always show connected with good strenth but every so often sites won't load and its very annoying. Same for the pc. Sometimes its certain sites but others it won't load any site for a while and i have to wait til it comes back.

Basically i'm wanting to get it so i can browse the net as long as i need to both ends without worrying about when its going to start playing up. As it would if i were just using the cable modem on its own.

[GeoffW]

You are probably losing packets over the wifi link. So you can either try to reduce how many you lose by changing channels to one that has less interference, or you could try to use a more resilient browser.

There are 3 non interfering wifi channels, 1,6 and 11. If your wifi card has a site survey setting, look at what is around and set your router to one that's not used as much. You can use the channels in between, but it's best to look at what is around first.

For the browser, try using Firefox with the Fasterfox extension. This can send parallel requests to web sites so you'll improve your chances of a packet getting there.

[kevinf61]

Hi i have the same problem and i'm pretty sure its to do with DNS, for example if you type www.google.co.uk into the address bar you will get a time out/website not found, if ur using firefox you will see in the bottom left of the window "looking up www.google.co.uk" basically its trying to do a DNS lookup for the ip address for the site, however if you type if the ip address of the website [if you know] you might well find that you get access to it..why? 'cos the IP address is more or less absolute it doesn't rely on DNS.

If you go into a DOS cmd window and type ipconfig /all that will display all of the ip info for the local pc/laptop if ur using a router the router ip will show as the gateway,the dhcp server and the DNS server, the router will/should be configed to get DNS setting automatically from the ISP so far i've yet to get the the reason for the loss of DNS, does anyone know whats virginmedias DNS server IP address are? if you do the you can force these onto the router.

Originally Posted by kevinf61

Hi i have the same problem and i'm pretty sure its to do with DNS, for example if you type www.google.co.uk into the address bar you will get a time out/website not found, if ur using firefox you will see in the bottom left of the window "looking up www.google.co.uk" basically its trying to do a DNS lookup for the ip address for the site, however if you type if the ip address of the website [if you know] you might well find that you get access to it..why? 'cos the IP address is more or less absolute it doesn't rely on DNS.

If you go into a DOS cmd window and type ipconfig /all that will display all of the ip info for the local pc/laptop if ur using a router the router ip will show as the gateway,the dhcp server and the DNS server, the router will/should be configed to get DNS setting automatically from the ISP so far i've yet to get the the reason for the loss of DNS, does anyone know whats virginmedias DNS server IP address are? if you do the you can force these onto the router.

VM's DNS servers are

194.168.4.100
194.168.8.100

btw