Router causing connectivity strangeness, need help.

[SurfD]

Well, one of the roomies in the building I am in wanted internet, so I told him I would give him a line off of my Cable connection for 20 bucks a month.

Of course, not having a router was a bit of a problem, so I went out and got myself a brand spankin new Linksys WRT54G.

Hooked her up, everything seemed to go smooth as silk.  No problems to speak of, other then one bizare new glitch: I can no longer connect to my email accounts.

I am on Rogers Cable, which doesent use a address based POP3 based system.  Under the Account propertys for my main account in Outlook Express my incoming mail server is "pop" and my outgoing server is "smtp".

Now, every time I try to connect to my email server I get the following:

The host 'pop' could not be found. Please verify that you have entered the server name correctly. Account: 'XXXXXX', Server: 'pop', Protocol: POP3, Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Socket Error: 11001, Error Number: 0x800CCC0D

I am 100% certain the router is causing it, because simply swapping plugs from the Router to the Cable modem causes the problem to go away, but cant figure out why.

Anyone got any suggestions?  Do I need to foreward ports, disable/enable a specific feature, what?

[schild]

I would put money on the fact you don't have port forwarding for email applications. Find out what port Rogers uses for email (or on your side, outlook), trigger it in your router to point at your computer and your problem should be fixed.

[Pig Destroyer]

Port 110 = Pop 3

Linksys routers are notorious for just up and dying in some wierd way.  the same thing happened to my brother where he could not connect to EVE online anymore one day for no apparent reason.  He bought a Netgear router and the issue was fixed.  This was after of course replacing the Linksys.

[schild]

I've gone through more routers than I've gone through optical mice (and I played a lot of Diablo II). Yea, routers suck, of all varities. If I ever have one that lasts more than a year I'll say it's a gift from the immortals.

[SurfD]

Hmm, wish I had known that sooner, still I will try playing around a bit longer.  Per Schilds advice:

I popped open the Command Prompt, did an IPCONFIG and was told my PC is IP : 192.168.1.100  (so sue me, I cant remember the Win Command for it)

I then opened the port forwarding section of my routers setup and entered in Port Range Start: 110, End 110, type Both (options were TCP, UDP, BOTH), Ip address,  192.168.1.100.

I then saved settings and opened outlook and the problem still occurs.

Any other ideas? Should I reboot first? I would hate to think that the router would be bad.

[Rof]

I'm not an expert at this stuff, but could it be that you're now doing NAT (network address translation) with your router in place, whereas before you weren't?

Looking at the error you get, it's saying "The host 'pop' could not be found". I think that means it's trying to resolve "pop" as the complete address. That's suspiscious.

That might mean that when it tries to resolve "pop" or "smtp" into an IP address it no longer can find them (but it worked OK without the router). Is there a longer address for the mail servers, such as "pop.rogers.com" or similar? Try using that in Outlook as the server address.


If you can't find the server addresses, try this:
Go back to your old config (no router, cable modem only).
Make sure your mail works.
From a DOS or command window, do:

tracert pop

The first line of that should be:
Tracing route to pop.XXXXXX   [A.B.C.D]

If you're lucky, the XXXXX bit should be the domain of the pop server. If not, you might be able to use the IP address (A.B.C.D) directly.

You can repeat for "tracert smtp".

[Lanei]

The problem isn't port forwarding, or any settings on the router.

When you look up an unqualified domain name, your computer is supposed to append a default domain suffix to it.  Windows figures out what this default suffix is by performing a reverse lookup on the address it is assigned.  So when you connect directly to the cable modem, that gets filled in, and all is right with the world.  When you are not connected directly, it reverse lookups 192.168.1.x and gets back a null response because that is a non-routable IP designed for use behind NAT devices.

Two fixes:
1) find the fully qualified host name of the POP and SMTP servers, and configure them properly in your client.  This info should be available from your provider somewhere on a main page, a support page, or in a knowledgebase.

2) Find out the default suffix, and configure windows manually to use it.
You should be able to find it either by doing the reverse lookup on the IP assigned to the WAN interface of the router, or by connecting directly to the cable modem, and looking at the place you'd configure it manually while windows has it configured right (this might not work).
In either case, the proper place in win 2k or XP is in the TCP/IP properties of your Local Area Network connection.  (right click network neighborhood->properties. right click LAN connection-> properties.  TCP/IP ->properties. Advanced button, DNS tab.  DNS suffix for this connection field, OR the 'append these suffixes in order' box)

[SirBruce]

Lanei beat me to it.

It was pretty obvious to me it was a DNS problem but it wasn't until he mentioned he was using a different internal network address now that it became clear.

Bruce

[SurfD]

2) Find out the default suffix, and configure windows manually to use it.
You should be able to find it either by doing the reverse lookup on the IP assigned to the WAN interface of the router, or by connecting directly to the cable modem, and looking at the place you'd configure it manually while windows has it configured right (this might not work).

DAMN man, I consider myself moderately literate in this kind of stuff, but you totally lost me with that one.

I understand how to do a ping lookup for a given address while directly connected to my cable modem.  But how the heck do I go about doing a reverse lookup on the IP assigned to the Wan interface of the router (and what information from the results am I supposed to pick out of the lookup results to input as the Default DNS suffix?)

A check of my routers setup pages gives me 3 different IP addresses, and I am not sure which is my WAN Interface IP.

My router's IP is 192.168.1.1

Under the General Status tab, Internet Settings, I have an IP of 24.43.192.154, Default Gateway 24.43.192.1

I am going to guess that since the 192.186.1.1 is standard to all routers as default that the other IP is the one I want to use.  So what do I do with it?

[Lanei]

DAMN man, I consider myself moderately literate in this kind of stuff, but you totally lost me with that one.

Sorry, should have provided a bit more context.
The 'status' page on your router's web interface is the most useful one for the linksys usually.  As an overview, the WAN (wide area network) side of the router pretends to be a client to the cable modem, and the router provides to the LAN side (your machines) what the modem and stuff upstream of it would normally providce to a single pc connected to the modem, such as an IP address, DNS server info, etc.

I understand how to do a ping lookup for a given address while directly connected to my cable modem.  But how the heck do I go about doing a reverse lookup on the IP assigned to the Wan interface of the router (and what information from the results am I supposed to pick out of the lookup results to input as the Default DNS suffix?)

You'll want to go into a DOS prompt and type 'nslookup <the IP address>'
Example below, since you included your IP.

A check of my routers setup pages gives me 3 different IP addresses, and I am not sure which is my WAN Interface IP.

My router's IP is 192.168.1.1

Under the General Status tab, Internet Settings, I have an IP of 24.43.192.154, Default Gateway 24.43.192.1

I am going to guess that since the 192.186.1.1 is standard to all routers as default that the other IP is the one I want to use.  So what do I do with it?

Your LAN side IP is default at 192.168.1.1  it's a very small security measure, mostly only useful if your router also has a wireless access point, to change which subnet it is on to something else.

Your router hands out IP addresses starting at .100 to its clients.  An important thing to note if you do set up port forwarding is that if all the clients are brought down and restarted, the IP addresses assigned to them MAY change.  The way to avoid this is to manually assign static IP addresses to the clients you wish to forward ports to.  

Code:

Name:    CPE00045a8474bf-CM014100203167.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com
Address:  24.43.192.154

Your default DNS suffix should probably be just 'rogers.com' or possibly 'cable.rogers.com'
It'll probably be useful to plug one of those in (to your windows settings) anyway, though from a bit of poking around on their support site they look to be DNS aliases that will change based on where you are in the rogers network.

This means the above alone may not fix the problem.

They look to support home networks, after a fashion, and offer this little doohickey that'll give you the right fully qualified address for your mail servers.  It looks like you'll need to run IE to use it, and from home of course.

http://www.rogershelp.com/help/content/how/home_network/email_homenetwork.shtml

Hope this helps

[SurfD]

Thank you, I checked their website, but was somewhat tired, and not thorough in my search, so i did not find that tool.

The tool solved my problem in about 30 seconds :P

[Alluvian]

Yeah, this exact same thing happened on my system when I first went with a router.  As suggested above I had to append the .cfl.rr (or whatever it is) to the pop and smtp entries in my outlook configuration (and xnews).

[Jain Zar]

I had one because X Box Live wouldnt work without it.  It was so much trouble I gave up.

[Arcadian Del Sol]

Port 110 = Pop 3

Linksys routers are notorious for just up and dying in some wierd way.  the same thing happened to my brother where he could not connect to EVE online anymore one day for no apparent reason.  He bought a Netgear router and the issue was fixed.  This was after of course replacing the Linksys.

I had a Linksys BFR4something (4 ports, not wireless) that kinda sort up and died, meaning it appeared to work, but something failed and it wouldn't let certain programs access the web, and would lock itself up periodically.

D-Link seems to be the new king.

[Alkiera]

I know of at least 4 other people locally who use Linksys routers of various kinds, and haven't had problems with them, aside from the typical 'forgot to open incoming port' when running game servers.  YMMV, in all things.

--
Alkiera

[Kenrick]

I just got roadrunner installed yesterday and am using it through a new linksys WRT54G.  It didn't degrade the bandwidth at all and I am not having any problems whatsoever.  Havent tried any games yet though.  Getting download speeds up to 450kb/s.

[Sky]

I've been running a SMC router/switch on a roadrunner line for several years now without any problems at all.

*knocks on wood*