Member Avatar for g2daizh

Hi i'm having some trouble connecting to the internet in my apartment complex. Its a wired ethernet connection that plugs into the wall. I was connected on saturday and when i came back to the apartment on sunday afternoon the connection wouldnt work. My girlfriends computer works in the same connection, same chord, but when i plug my computer in it says i have local access only. We both run on windows vista.

I've tried to restart it, repair with windows diagnostics, disable/reenable the connection and nothing is working. I'm sure it's not the apartment complex's fault since the other computer works. I'm just wondering why one computer has local only access while the other one works.

Any help would be great. Thank you.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by blud
Member Avatar for blud

This is generally caused when the computer isn't able to obtain an 'IP Address' from the DHCP server. Basically, the device that is providing access to the internet through that cable hands out IP addresses based on the Hardware ID that your computer identifies itself as.

If your running windows, open a 'Command Prompt' and do 'ipconfig /all'

If it shows your IP Address as a 169.x ip, then it is unable to obtain an ip address, which *can* be on the complex's end if they run the DHCP Server, since your MAC address (Hardware ID) could be blocked by their server. One way to troubleshoot this, is connect your girlfriends computer to the cable, and do the same command 'ipconfig /all', and write down all of the information. Then disconnect her computer, and try to manually configure your ethernet card to use that information. If it works, it is a problem with the DHCP leases, and you should contact the provider, if it doesn't, then we can try some other troubleshooting steps, but we'll need the output of that 'ipconfig /all' command.

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