So, previously I mentioned a job that involved a new PC. When I arrived on site at the clients location, I checked the situation and quickly found out the PC had no Internet access. It wasn’t receiving an IP address from the router. Funny that, everything was configured properly and the PC was plugged into the first port on the router.
I plugged in my laptop, and set it for DHCP. Everything worked for me at IP level, but I had no internet connection. I moved the clients CAT5 cable to another port on the router and it instantly got an IP.
Hmm. The WAN connection was up on the external modem and it was plugged into the WAN port on the router. Everything should be OK. I tried the clients laptop and it connected to the router just fine wirelessly but agiin, no internet.
I checked the cables and they were all fine. At this point the client noticed the cables and commented that they were the wrong way around. I swapped them out of curiosity and the network kicked it complete with broadband. Wait a minute, what just happened?
Checking the router again I see that the WAN connection to the internet was connected to PORT1 on the LAN side and the new PC was conencted to the WAN port on the router! This isn’t right! That can’t happen! But it did.
I cannot explain, to this day, how this worked. The router must have been scrambled or had a bad firmware, or something. There’s no way this should have worked but it did. We decided not to diagnose this any further and got on with the jobs at hand. Whatever that D-Link router was up to I don’t know, I wish I knew as this one will spin in my head for some time to come!
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