I moved house a week or so ago, and one of the first things I did was get broadband up and running. We'd opted to change from our old telecoms provider and go for a cable connection (Telewest Blueyonder) - which now works perfectly, but caused me a few hours of stress before I could get it going with my existing setup.
I did a lot of surfing the net (thanks to my neighbour's unsecured wireless connection) to try and find out what the problem was, and there didn't seem to many answers out there: so I thought I'd post my problem - and the solution - here.
The network at my old house was run using a slinky Netgear modem and a Belkin wireless router, which worked fine for me and were fairly much plug-and-play. My Powerbook and my desktop PC both used it pretty much consistently, although there were a few teething problems and the installation of Tiger seemed to cause a couple of issues too.
When I switched to cable, I had to ditch my trusty modem for a Motorola Surfboard. All went well when I tested the connection over ethernet... but when I connected it to the Belkin router, they didn't get on at all.
My router seemed to be broadcasting well - I could *see* the network, and join it... but I couldn't access any internet content. The modem was working fine, so I thought the problem might be with DNS.
It wasn't.
I tried rebooting the router and modem several times, powering them down and trying to configure them in different ways.
Nothing worked.
Then it hit me that the problem was, actually, far simpler than I'd thought.
It turned out that the Motorola modem didn't recognise the router's MAC address (that's Media Access Control. That meant that while the modem was working fine and the router was broadcasting, they weren't actually talking to each other (so the network was devoid of anything).
The answer was to clone the MAC address of one of my computers onto the router, thus fooling the modem into talking to it. This was easily done through the router's web-based control panel, and seconds later I was surfing happily.
Problem solved!
