IP Address Conflict

[KrescentMoon]

Hi everyone. ^^; Although it's rather unusual of me for posting a thread in CAA, but I wanted to ask something for a friend who is experiencing internet problems. It's driving her insane, and I thought I'd try asking here since I'm more than sure there are tech wizards in the area.

Anyway, here's the rundown. My friend and her sister are in the same network, her mother uses a laptop, and a cousin who came to visit last week works on another laptop; they're online together most of the time. Everything has gone smoothly before until today. Her internet goes haywire, logs her out of anything, a warning message saying "There is an IP address conflict with another system on the network" appears, and "everything dies."

You would think the cause is her cousin's unit coming into connection, but this never happened the other times she's been there. My friend's computer is the only one affected with the problem. I remember having the same dilemma, but I forgot how it was fixed....

And that's why I come to you guys. :x I hope it's only a minor disconfiguration and repairable. Thanks for your time and help!

[Slater]

try configuring the router so that the IP range is reasonable enough for 3 people.

[KrescentMoon]

How would one go about doing that? D:

Oh, and you know what, it just occurred to me that her computer might have a virus, doh. I just remembered that I had to download a patch to fix it, but that was over 4 years ago. :/

[Kaligraphic]

Try this:

In the start menu, hit run, put in:

Code: Select all

ipconfig /release *

and hit enter. That'll bring up a window that scroll stuff and disappears, but after it goes, bring up the run box again and type in:

Code: Select all

ipconfig /renew *

and hit ok again. This time it'll take a moment, but that should clear it right up.

-----

Slater, I suspect that the problem laptop may be using an IP address provided by another network. Windows doesn't always check with the dhcp server on a change of ssid - yeah, it's kind of stupid that you have to manually get a new IP address sometimes, but hey, that's Windows for you.

[Slater]

I'd like to see what happens when we switch to 6-number IP addresses. I hear that we've already exhausted the 2billion available IPs already

[Kaligraphic]

We haven't completely exhausted the available IP addresses, but we have a distribution that was set before anyone really had any idea just how big this Internet thing would get. MIT, for example, has a full class A assignment, which is more than many countries. IPv6 will give us a chance to redistribute IP addresses in a way that reflects present network realities, and, perhaps, to take a look at how the Internet is likely to grow from here. Still, we'll need to replace a lot of routers if we want to do more than just tunnel between IPv6 pockets in a fundamentally IPv4 network.

[Mithrandir]

How would one go about doing that? D:

See Kaligraphic's post for step-by-step instructions. The error you are describing usually occures when either:

1. You have more than one machine configured to use the same IP address and you are assigning them statically.
2. You have an older machine that was put to "sleep" and didn't "release" it's IP address.

Let us know if you still have trouble and we can keep trying things.

[KrescentMoon]

Well, I just managed to contact her today. She tried what you instructed me to do, Kaligraphic, and so far the error hasn't showed up. However, now she can't sign onto MSN. She gets an error about key ports, and this:

"Failed to connect to the service. This could be due to improper proxy or firewall settings."

I told her it could just be MSN's problem rather than her computer since Hotmail is notorious for such things.. e_e