How Very Odd!

Calendar November 13, 2006 | Posted by Aubrey Turner

I just took delivery of a new laptop for work.  It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p.

What’s very odd is that whenever I boot it, just before it connects to my wireless network, it does something that kills the router.  Everything else still works inside my home network.  I can ping everything *except* the router and while the router’s switch appears to continue to function, the WAN light stops flashing and stays steady. 

I have to go in the other room and unplug the router for a second before it’ll start working again.

It’s like the laptop is sending some kind of packet ‘o doom to the router or something.  Perhaps a malformed DHCP request? 

The AP is actually a Belkin Pre-N router running in AP mode and the router (a DLink DI-604+) handles the DHCP request. 

This should be interesting to debug, other than I don’t have the time or patience to be mucking with it right now.

I guess I just won’t be rebooting the laptop anytime soon… 

Category Categories: Technology

2 Comments

  1. Outlaw3 says:
    November 18, 2006 at 8:09 pm

    I guess jokes about Chinese laptops calling home or trying to take over the internet are past the point of helpful.

    Wish I could remember where I was reading about the pre-N standard the other day, but could be something related to pre-N and compatibility with the laptop not being pre-N, but some other N-like standard. Can you force it to connect in a/b/g just to see if it is working right to start with?

  2. Aubrey Turner says:
    November 18, 2006 at 9:06 pm

    Interesting point.  I hadn’t thought of that being an issue.  I think the laptop’s built-in wireless is A/B/G, so it shouldn’t be trying anything with the N standard.

    What’s interesting is that the Pre-N router, which is running as just an AP is fine.  It’s the stupid D-Link wired router (provided by Verizon) that goes belly-up.

    But if it’s something with the wireless, connecting it via the Ethernet port and turning off the WLAN adapter would hopefully be a good first test.  I’ll have to give that a try tomorrow .  Up to now I’ve just turned the laptop off and have been ignoring the problem.  But I’ll have to give the old one back soon, so I can’t put it off forever.