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How exactly do Pocket WiFi devices work?

Why can't I connect devices to my wifi?

  • Last week I had to upgrade my cable modem. Most of my wifi devices were perfectly happy, but my scale and printer refuse to connect to wifi now. Initially after getting off the phone with Comcast, I wasn't able to connect to the internet through wifi or when connected to the router with an ethernet cable. When I went through the cable modem setup with them, I had my laptop connected directly to the cable modem. I finally got that issue resolved by cloning my laptop MAC address to the router, but at one point I reverted the router to factory defaults. Now, I can connect from my laptop (Win7), my work laptop (also Win7), my phone (Apple iPhone), and my Roku, but I'm unable to connect either my Fitbit Aria scale, or my Brother wifi printer. Both devices can see the network, they just can't connect. The printer setup gives me a message that it couldn't connect to the network; the scale just displays "WIFI ERR" after failing to join the network. (After the reset, I set the SSID and password back to the previous values and the devices that worked didn't even require me to re-enter the password.) I'm wondering if there's a router setting that I cleared out when I did the reset that may be causing this.

  • Answer:

    How old is the WRT54G? As in, what revision? If it's old enough you should be able to drop Tomato on it; most of the issues I have seen with routers seem to come down to crap firmware. I have a couple of 54Gs that are running strong after years with Tomato. If you set it up using the same SSID and password as before things should work. It might help, and can't hurt. I haven't bricked a 54G yet trying to upload firmware. Either way, when you have items that will not connect, but can see the network, the first suspect is going to be network mode. a-b-g mixed? g only? What are your devices? I eventually went to a newer router because most everything I have now is N... But I keep the 54G running as a secondary to handle the older devices (like our Wii) that can't connect to a pure N network.

Blue Jello Elf at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Also, the router is a (quite old) Linksys WRT54G.

Blue Jello Elf

Were those devices set to a static ip or a dynamic one? Is it possible that they aren't seeing the IP they need?

bonehead

caution live frogs, you're a genius! I had actually read online that the scale was b-only and tried changing the router from mixed to b, but that didn't work. I tried switching the router to g-only and the scale and printer setups both worked first time! I probably changed that setting in 2007 and promptly forgot about it.

Blue Jello Elf

[Ask a new question if you've got a new question, folks.]

jessamyn

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