Sudden loss of DHCP... :-(

[Andrew Steele]

I have a small home network which connects to the oustide
world via a Linksys router and cable modem.

Suddenly one machine has lost its connectivity to the
Internet.

All the other machines I can connect are still working
without trouble.

The problem machine has a P4 processor and its ethernet
card is integral with the motherboard. It is working fine
in every way except for the ethernet connection.

The PC gains an ip address in the 169.*.*.* range. The
router lights indicated a possible connection failure
between the PC and router.

I have disabled the connection within Win 2000 and
installed a spare PCI network card but with no change.
However, all the lights are now on so the router appears
to be happy with the connection but no communication is
taking place between the PC and router.

Win 2000 is reporting a 100Mbyte connection to the network
card but router shows no connection in its logs.

I manually assigned an IP address to the PC and could then
PING IP addresses on the Internet. However, even manually
assigning a DNS entry I could not access web URLs etc by
name.

I checked the system Event log and this shows the
following DHCP error at system start:

'Your computer was unable to automatically configure the
IP parameters for the network card with the network
address (MAC address of new card) The following error
occurred during configuration: The requested service
provider could not be loaded or initialised'

The event Event ID is 1006.

Looking back in the system event logs it would appear the
problem beganimmediately after two PCs were allocated the
same IP address. It now continues even though no other
devices are switched on.

I am totally bemused by this error. Any suggestions would
be very, very, gratefully received.

Andrew Steele

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Try:

1. On the problem machine, use Device Manager to disable the on-board NIC.
Leave the static address and DNS setting on the new NIC and reboot.

2. On all other network machines, run ipconfig /release.

3. On the Linksys router check to see if you have any leases with duplicate
names or MAC addresses. Delete all current DHCP leases - you may have to
turn off the DHCP server function and then re-enable and reconfigure it.

4. Configure the problem machine's new NIC to obtain an IP address and DNS
automatically. If this doesn't work, recheck Event Viewer for errors.

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[Mike Busch]

First thing i would do is pull the power to my router.
Let it sit with no power cord attached for a couple of
minutes. Then plug it back in, then reboot your
machine. Once booted back up see if you can get to the
internet. If not open a command prompt(Start->Run->cmd)
and type "ipconfig /all". Make sure the IP info you are
getting there is the exact same as it is on the
functioning computers(which also might need to be
rebooted after power cycling the router). If it's not
the same, then do an "ipconfig /renew" and see if that
corrects the problem.

Other things to check, is there any firewall software
running on your machine? Try disablingit and see if that
fixes the problem.

I don't think you have a hardware issue, but if none of
this other stuff works try swapping the port on the
router your troubled machine goes to with that of a
machine running fine. See if the problem stays with the
machine or the port.

Mike

 

[Andrew Steele]

Thanks for the suggestions - both Doug and Mike. Sadly,
it doesn't appear to have resolved the issue.

I'm still getting the same errors.

Andrew

 

[Andrew Steele]

I am pleased to discover that the problem arose as a
result of a badly behaved LSP file linked to a previously
uninstalled program. I guess, as the machine in question
is rarely rebooted the issue didn't arise until after a re-
boot on Sunday.

I found reference to a program called LSPFix. Located it
from a Google search. The program ran easily removed the
bad file and everything lept back into life.

Thanks for all the advice received.

Andrew

<a href="http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm">LSPFix program</a>