Hanging out at my neighborhood coffee shop this evening and had some trouble getting online with their wifi. I could connect to the wifi but I wasn’t getting an IP address. I’ve found that it’s pretty common for coffee shops to have this problem; my theory is they aren’t making their DHCP lease times short enough, so throughout a day all the leases get used up but they aren’t released fast enough. I think a lease time of ten minutes would make sense for a public wifi hotspot; most routers default to something like one day. So after the 250-ish addresses in a usual /24 subnet have been assigned, the late folks are out of luck (this tech talk is hot, right?).
Another patron here with similar network geek tendencies was thinking along the same lines, so he went and checked the addresses that had been assigned to the folks who were already connected. Armed with that information we tried manually configuring our IP addresses in the same subnet and got ourselves online. I found it amusing that he and I both had public DNS addresses memorized, which we used to complete the settings.
#
Non-geek girl think geek talk hot.
Impressive!
#
That really *is* cool. I often run across that problem, but hope it won’t matter now that I have access through my phone’s data plan as a backup. ;)
#
I’d love to have the phone data backup option. I’d like to have one “phone data plan” that I could use on multiple devices, maybe via a USB dongle thingy? It would be really cool if I could have a plan that would let me switch back and forth from a phone to a USB device; I don’t want to pay for a data plan for every laptop/phone/iPod/whatever that I may have with me at any given time.
#
hey! fascinating. I’ve recently had this problem with a few wireless networks I use, and no one can ever tell me why I don’t get an IP address.