Odd DHCP problem
I just had a strange problem connecting to the internet via Airport while staying in a hotel. The service was advertised as free for guests.
Airport connected fine but it could not get an IP address. About 20 seconds after airport connected I would get an dialog with a red stop sign icon saying that the given IP address was already in use by another user and it gave the MAC address of that computer.
I tried a variety of things with not luck. I called the help line and we tried various things. The tech said he could see my computer trying to connect and couldn't understand why it didn't work. He had me switch to manual mode and gave me a specific IP address, router, DNS server etc. to use. This came up with the same error. We gave up.
Soon after I discovered that if I tried connecting manually, then dismissed the error, then connected by DHCP it would connect successfully.
It always complained that the same MAC address was using the IP address. It wasn't mine. The tech said it was not one on his network. This and the time it took to generate the error makes me think that this error was wrongly displayed. That is, something else went wrong but this message was displayed.
The main reason I bring this up is that I had the same problem about a year ago in a different hotel with a different provider. That time I was connecting via Ethernet. After getting that error again and again I switched to a windows pc and it connected fine.
I can only guess that there is some setting on the providers router that causes this. Since I saw it twice it seems to be a real thing and not just a buggy router. Any thoughts?
I'm running 10.3.3 on a G4 powerbook. The provider this time is elevenwireless.com.
Airport connected fine but it could not get an IP address. About 20 seconds after airport connected I would get an dialog with a red stop sign icon saying that the given IP address was already in use by another user and it gave the MAC address of that computer.
I tried a variety of things with not luck. I called the help line and we tried various things. The tech said he could see my computer trying to connect and couldn't understand why it didn't work. He had me switch to manual mode and gave me a specific IP address, router, DNS server etc. to use. This came up with the same error. We gave up.
Soon after I discovered that if I tried connecting manually, then dismissed the error, then connected by DHCP it would connect successfully.
It always complained that the same MAC address was using the IP address. It wasn't mine. The tech said it was not one on his network. This and the time it took to generate the error makes me think that this error was wrongly displayed. That is, something else went wrong but this message was displayed.
The main reason I bring this up is that I had the same problem about a year ago in a different hotel with a different provider. That time I was connecting via Ethernet. After getting that error again and again I switched to a windows pc and it connected fine.
I can only guess that there is some setting on the providers router that causes this. Since I saw it twice it seems to be a real thing and not just a buggy router. Any thoughts?
I'm running 10.3.3 on a G4 powerbook. The provider this time is elevenwireless.com.