Did you find me Walt?

I ran WINIPCFG, and I noticed I had two PPP Adapters, one Network anywhere (10/100 network card), and one Belkin wireless card. I saw that one PPP adapter had what appeared to be a normal IP and DNS 255.255.etc, and the other IP was:

2005/02/22 22:23:21 0.0.0.0:0 () 0.0.0.0:0 Port 0 (UDP)
I figured having two PPP adapters was a problem (although I don't know what they are)

I'm using WIN98. I went to Control panel, Network, and removed everything.

Upon reboot I reinstalled the drivers for the Network now card and the software and driver for the Belkin wireless network. I've confirmed that the Belkin connection works by using RealVNC to contact a different computer. I had to reinstall Junos' dial up network to get back onto the web.

The Network Everywhere has an Adapter address, IP autoconfig address, subnet Mask, and DHCP server number.

The Belkin has an adapter address, IP address, Subnet mask, Default gateway and DHCP server numbers

THe PPP adapter has numbers in the same columns as the Belkin

I have reloaded Mcafee, changed 4.19 to 4.23, and I have re enabled network access. I'll keep an eye out for the pesky "no'finished'file" message.

tony

Morning Walt,

Last nite, I saw the "no finished file" message came back. I disabled the network at bedtime and It ran great all nite.

What's my next step. Obviously, the PPP adapter thing didn't fix it.

thanks
tony

> Did you find me Walt?

Yup. Thanks for the update. Hopefully the servers will accept this reply instead of the "down for maintenance" message got earlier.

You have two PPP ports, one is for your normal dialup connection, the other is for a secure connection thru tunneling. You can see it in Network Properties, in the Network Components Installed box. One line says "Dial-up Adapter", the other says "Dial-up Adapter (VPN Support). You can use that to make a secure connection to your XP boxes.

Your DNS problem is that its getting set up from your wireless gateway/router. Normally thats not a problem since the router is used to connect you to internet. But in your case theres no internet connection so its causing problems.

Two ways to deal with this. You can change the router so it works like an access point or you can change Win98 so it doesn't use the router for DNS. I don't actually recommend changing the router because you'll impact all your other systems (you said they're working) and it means you'll have to "fix" it again if you get a DSL/Cable internet connection.

So what you need to do is reconfigure your Win98 machine to use a static IP address. Thats the only way it won't pick up the DNS info from the router.

First, go into the routers configuration and find out what the DHCP range is. Usually Belkin routers start at 2 and go for 100 addresses. That means it assigns IP addresses from 192.168.2.2 thru 192.168.2.101. Your Belkin instructions should tell you how to get the info. I have the Belkin manuals but don't know which model you have so can't point you to specific pages. (the model is the F5D..... number on the bottom)

You need to know the DHCP range as those address all belong to the router. You need to pick one thats outside that range. Log into the router and check it, instructions are in the manual. Write down what it has for the starting address and range.

Run winipcfg on your PC and write down some of the information. This is for the Belkin wireless card. You need:

Host name
IP address
netmask
gateway address

First, use the IP address and the DHCP range to pick a new address for the network card. You keep the first three numbers and change the fourth so its outside the range used by the router.

Example - if the router is still set to the defaults you'll have:

IP addess - 192.168.2.10 (using .10, could be anything between .2 and .101)
netmask - 255.255.255.0
gateway adderss - 192.168.2.1 (thats the routers address)
Routers DHCP starting address and range - 192.168.2.2-192.168.2.101

And I'm using the hostname of win98.isp.net for my example.

The first three numbers for the new IP address must be the same as the old IP address. You only change the last number. 201 is outside the addresses used by the router, using that in the new IP address gives you 192.168.2.201.

Now go into Network Properties (Network control panel applet, )select the TCP-IP->Belkin...... component and click "Properties".

Select "Specify an IP address". Enter the new IP address (192.168.2.201 in my example). Enter the netmask you wrote down. Default is 255.255.255.0

Now switch to the WINS Configuration tab. Make sure "disable WINS" is selected.

Switch to the Gateway tab. Enter the gateway address you wrote down in "new gateway" and click "add". If it looks wrong, remove it and try again - it should look the same as you saw in winipcfg.

Switch to the DNS Configuration tab. Select "Enable DNS", enter the first part of the hostname you wrote down in the "host:" field. Using my example thats "Win98". Enter the rest of the hostname in the "Domain:" field. Leave everything else blank

Actually, you can put anything you want in the hostname field. Just that if it changes then BOINC will set up a new host for you and you'll have to merge hosts. Your choice.

Now click all the OK buttons to get back to Windows and reboot when it asks.

Before dialing into your ISP, run winipcfg to make sure you don't have anything set for DNS. Then run it again after you connect to your ISP, you should now have DNS set. Thats from the dial-up connection.

When you're disconnected from the internet, you'll see the same "cannot resolve hostname" messages, but they won't time out and BOINC won't "lock up".

Walt