Mar 18

WRITTEN BY: Peter Martin
Friday, March 18, 2011 

Setting up Wireless Cards (Routers, Bridges, AP’s etc) via Ethernet Cable.

1)  Switch on your wireless unit, plug in an Ethernet cable (RJ45) to the LAN port  and establish a connection to your PC as below.

 

 

 

2) Click on Properties

 
2) Click on Internet Protocol

 
3) You should see

 

This may work as shown with automatic (DHCP) settings, but often it is necessary to define a IP address manually to start with.

 

Look in the manual for the wireless unit. There should be a default IP address.
Such as: 192.168.1.1   or  192.168.2.254

If you are using a wireless card that has already been configured you will need to find out how that has been done and what the IP address has been set to. (If you can temporarily connect via the wireless card of your computer, you can often obtain useful information using the ‘ipconfig/all’ command as shown below)

Choose an IP address in the same subnet as the IP of the wireless card.

Example: the wireless IP is 192.168.2.254
We’ll choose the IP address to be 192.168.2.X where X=1 to 253

 

we can’t use X=254 because that is already used. If there are other devices on the network such as 192.168.2.50 we couldn’t use that either. Just have  a guess at this stage.

Type the IP address of the wireless card into your browser (internet explorer, Firefox etc):

You should see something similar to:

 

You may be asked for a user name and password at this point.

You can now set up the wireless unit via the browser user interface. Of course the look of this interface will be different for different equipment.

Note: if you change the IP address of the unit you will lose connection to it afterwards. You’ll need to retype the new IP address into your browser. If the subnet has changed too you’ll need to setup your network card again to be on the same subnet.

When everything is set it is usually better to go back to  “Obtain an IP address Automatically” and “ Obtain DNS Server Addresses Automatically”. (DHCP)

Comments:

If you are setting up a wireless unit to be a client on an existing wireless network, find out what IP addresses are used in the network and choose the same subnet for your client wireless if setting  manually.

It is often better to set up manually to start with and change to DHCP later.

Useful Tools

Angry IP (Freeware)

Scans through IP addresses and lets you know what’s connected.

 

You can also look at your Windows Connection Status box

 

 

Or use ipconfig/all command in Command Prompt.

Start > Run > cmd

 

Try pinging other IP addresses:

 
 
 
You can also “ping” web addresses. Once you know the IP address associated with the webaddress  or URL  you can  ping that too.

 

Its worth just remembering google’s IP address of 66.249.89.104  If it appears that you have no internet connection try typing this into your browser.

This will show up  problems with the DNS (Dynamic name server) settings which translates names to IP addresses.