I have a good customer that has called me out may times (mostly to help with several of his wireless internet computers).

Its 4:30 pm, Saturday and he calls asking for help… I’ve had a long day, so I say it will have to be Tuesday (or maybe on Monday, depending on how existing jobs progress). After offering me something “extra”, I reluctantly get in the car and head out.

Each time I visit, he learns a little more, and this time he was hoping to be able to setup a laptop himself.

When I visit, I see he has manually set the IP addresses (he tends to do that, thinking that DHCP could be causing problems).

I turn on “Obtain an IP address automatically”, and it seems to work… but he then says that he disabled MAC address filtering (on the router), in order to try and get things working…

After some mucking around on the wireless router, I eventually turn on mac filtering again.

I then do an ipconfig /all, and I pick the wireless MACaddress. At this point, the customer has an “aha!” moment: he was using the wired ethernet MAC address, which is very different from the wireless MAC address. Simple things like this can be a real minefield for anyone trying to setup wireless networks on their own.

I enter the correct MAC address into the router “MAC address filter” list, and then everything works very nicely.

A weary Computer Aid engineer heads home (to update his blog 🙂 )