DHCP Problems with Windows XP


I have a Mac OSX Server (10.4) connected to a switch with various Airport Express terminals around the place. Macs can connect to the network wirelessly (with 128 bit WEP) and WIRED totally fine... but when I try and connect a windows PC either using wireless or WIRED... an IP address isn't assigned. Windows just says "Limited or no connectivity"...

So it's not a wireless problem. Has anyone got ANY clue?!?!

Cheers guys.....


Mac of the SubGenius! :-)
Are you giving out encryption keys automatically? I'm not sure if the Macs can do thatautomatically, but I know that you might have to do it manually on the PC. You would have to enter the WEP key manually on the PC if it's not being given an encryption key automatically through a RADIUS server or some other means.


Person that uses a Mac
Assuming all the hardware and network is setup properly, sometimes Windows just gets "stuck". In which case, you can release/renew the IP using ipconfig on the command line.

Kees Buijs

damienbeau said:

Cheers guys.....
Which version of the XP are you using. Make sure you have SP2 installed. Also check the firewall which comes with XP together. This is somtimes set to allow not communication out of your XP system.

Try to disable the FIREWALL for testing.



I am having the exact same issue and have found several other descriptions of this problem but no solutions to the problem.

I have OSX server 10.4.11 on an XServe routing through an Airport base station configured as a network access point (DHCP disabled). All of my Macs can connect to the DHCP server just fine and receive an ip address with no problems. ALL of the Windows machines on the network (wired and wireless) will not receive an ip address from the server. The wireless machines will connect to the airport with no problems, but will fail to obtain an ip address, defaulting to a self assigned ip.

If I assign a manual ip within the proper range to the XP machines, they can connect to the network just fine, but we have some salesmen who use laptops that they have to constantly reconfigure between manual and DHCP addresses and we would like to stop this problem.

(edit: Oh yea, the XP boxes are all running the current SP)

Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

Thank you,