D-Link ExtremeG not setting up

[Firewire]

Okay, so my family gets tired of tripping over a long CAT5 cable running into my room, they invested in a 802.11g PCI adapter for my desktop, a PCMCIA card for my laptop and an access point, all of the D-Link AirPlus ExtremeG brand. Now, I've gone through CCNA, and even though I didn't pass the exam, I like to consider myself decent at networking, enough to know that what I was doing should basically work, unless I overlooked something. Anyway...

I follow the D-Link instructions and install the drivers first (which I notice doesn't really install the drivers, it seems), installing my lappy card and my PCI card after shutting down, then rebooting. The laptop card is fine, but the PCI card seems to cause Windows XP to suddenly reboot without warning after a minute or so of loading into the GUI. I remove the card, it stops rebooting. Problem solved, temporarily.

Now, I try to install the access point, which is a royal pain in the ***. It says I can directly use my computer to hook up to it through a straight-through cable instead of through a crossover into my Linksys Cable/DSL router. So, I hook the thing up to my lappy and set up a static IP on my computer in the same range, because the access point is really picky about needing a static ip address in the same range. At this time, it was 192.168.0.50 for the AP and 192.168.0.1 for the ethernet port on my lappy. I get in, cool, I do some basic setting up, SSID, WEP (which is messed up, cause the access point doesn't tell you when your key is not appropriate), and I turn off SSID broadcasting for some increased security. I also change the static IP address of the router, so that it would fit into the range that the Linksys router DHCP's addresses with, to 192.168.1.50. Oh yes, I also turned off DHCP server for the access point.

I try the thing out after hooking it up through a crossover cable into the router (as the manual perscribed, though I woulda thought it needs a straight-through, since they're different devices), and I notice that the lappy card suddenly has an IP address, and not one in the range that the router issues them in (it was 61.68.something.something, while the router issues them out in the 192.168.1.* range). It wasn't right, but whatever. I try to surf, no joy. I try to access the AP with it's new static IP address, no joy. so, I bring the sucker back to my laptop and try to set it up again. No joy, I can't get into the thing anymore, not even with the new ip address. I reset the AP to it's default settings, I still can't get into the thing anymore, even after setting up a static address again.

Someone please help me lower my stress level. I'd appreciate it.

Stats:
(PC)
WinXP Pro
Athlon 1.5Ghz
512DDR SDRAM
Shuttle Spacewalker mobo, AK31
Sony DRU-510A
Plextor CD-RW 8x4x32
WD 120GB and 40GB
SB Live! Gamer

(Laptop)
P4 2.3Ghz
256MB RAM
WinXP Pro
Teac DW-224E (DVD/CD-RW)
40GB HDD
And a functioning D-Link ExtremeG PCMCIA card

Firewire

[VHockey86]

its getting late so forgive my laziness, so I'm just going to throw a few things out.

If you remove the access point from the linksys router and hardwire the laptop do you still have internet functionality? Do you have all comps setup to static address or are you using DHCP?.

Have you checked the channels on the wireless card to make sure it matches the broadcast of the AP? Also, for setup purposes I would leave most wireless settings at default (turn SSID on, turn off WEP, etc), this way you elimiatre a few potential problems from the troublehsooting loop.

This is indeed merely an access point, not a router right? Otherwise you would need to make sure its set to an infrastructure/route mode rather than as a gateway.

As for the wireless card on the PC... have you tried a different pci slot? Might be an IRQ conflict thats crashing your system. Have you tried booting into safe mode with the card?

What linksys router is it? As for the crossover issue. If you go basically from router to router/router to hub/router to switch etc, anything like that, its basically the same thing as hooking two PC's NICs directly together, you need to use a crossover cable. There is an excpetion however if you have a router with an "uplink" port. These uplink ports are essentially a crossover port, but you use a patch cable with them (or you could use a crossover cable to a PC, and essentialy crossover a crossover connection and thus get a straight through connection).

I've prolly siad alot of general crap that you already know, not trying to be insulting in any way.

And most of all... Welcome to Techimo!

[Firewire]

Okay, so I did some work on the lappy and the AP today. I'll save the PCI card for tomorrow.

Got the AP and the lappy card to finally work together. Used the Factory Reset button on the AP to get it back to basics and then used a cable to do a lappy-AP connection. D-Link provides nice little config utilities that look similar for both the AP and the card, so I just changed settings slowly in both of the config programs. Managed to get them talking to each other. I could even access the AP's onboard HTML setup program from the laptop card. So, moved the AP out to where I wanted to position it in another part of the house and hooked it up to the router. I used a spare straight-through cable instead of the crossover cable they instructed to use with the router and I set the AP to DHCP for its address from the router and to DHCP all wireless cards. I can now surf the net with my laptop.

I'm hoping for similar results tomorrow.

And thanks for the welcome! It's not inappropriate, since it's been a LONG while since I participated on this board, but if you take a look at my username and "registered since" part, you'll see that I've been here since Oct 01, about the same time phenious came on, since he's the one who got me to come here. I've been lurking since. I really need to stop by more often.