Thought Patterns

If you have a Netgear WNR2000 router like I do you might find that some computers and devices won’t connect to the internet. You maybe receive messages like the following:

Windows: Limited or no Connectivity

or

OS X: Alert: No internet connection

I had this problem for weeks, I tried updating the firmware to the latest version but this had no effect. The only way I could fix the problem was by restarting the router. The router would then assign an IP addresses but then a few hours later the computers would drop off the wireless and then when they try to reconnect the router would not assign them an IP.

After reading countless posts on the internet I found the solution to my problem in a post on the Netgear forums.

So what’s the solution?

Well it turns out that one of the settings for the DHCP service on the router defaults to the wrong value. Under the LAN Setup section of the routers web administration interface The RIP Version setting was set to Disabled for me and according to the documentation the default should be RIP-2, see below snippet from the routers own documentation:

RIP Version. This controls the format and the broadcasting method of the RIP packets that the router sends. (It recognizes both formats when receiving.) By default, this is set to RIP-2.

RIP-1 is universally supported. RIP-2 carries more information

Changing the value of the RIP Version from Disabled to RIP_2B under the LAN Setup section fixed the issue for me. Hope this helps.

Cameron Networking, Operating Systems DHCP, Netgear, WNR2000