Techie Haven

Archive for the ‘Troubleshooting’ Category

Just some advice if you find yourself unable to print from Internet Explorer…

1.      Click Start, please type “inetcpl.cpl” (without quotation marks) in the Start Search bar and press Enter to open the Internet options window.
2.      Switch to the Advanced tab.
3.      Click the Reset Internet Explorer Settings button. (uncheck “delete personal settings”)
4.      Click Reset to confirm the operation.
5.      Click Close when the resetting process finished.
6.      Uncheck Enable third-party browser extensions option in the Settings box. (The scrollable window in the middle, it’s one of the many lines of settings)
7.      Click Apply, click OK.

9/10 times following these instructions will also fix other issues with Internet Explorer. Do note it deletes quite a bit of history information as well including cookies and stored passwords etc IF YOU HAVE “DELETE PERSONAL SETTINGS” CHECKED. So make sure it is unchecked unless you truly want to start IE from a clean slate.

Today I saw some limited action (after spending the morning looking over a NAS proposal, a story for another day) looking into why our building across the parking lot lost internet connectivity.

The building is connected to Bright House back in my building through the use of a couple of routers and media converters (fiber to cat). Each floor has their own router.

First step as I headed in was the simplest. Reboot a PC. Sure there are a number of other things I could have done first but one thing I have always found is do the simplest things first and work toward the more advanced. I had already verified that the internet was available in my building so instantly an issue with the Bright House modem was ruled out.

A restart of the PC still left me with no internet available. Next was to go into the command prompt (type CMD in search from the windows icon in the toolbar or found in accessories).

Type ipconfig /all

This gives the IP address of the PC network adapter. I was looking for 192.168.x.y but alas I had a private IP. (169.254.x.y)

That immediately let me know that the DHCP of one of my 3 routers was not communicating to the PC (There is a more technical way to put this but I plan on my blog to be fairly layman in explanation). To refresh my memory, just in case the logical was not true, I entered into the config of both routers in the building to confirm DHCP was not enabled (To do this I set a static IP address in my network so I could communicate to the local routers). It was not, which meant there was an issue with communicating to the main router in my building connected to the Bright House modem (I has assumed that this router was handling DHCP requests). Since DHCP had not failed in my building it pointed to the fiber connection or media converters (which happen to be notorious for failing on me for some reason).

I moved the fiber from one converter to another and it instantly restored the connection between the 2 buildings. Problem solved. I made sure to mark the failed media converter for testing at a later date so we wouldn’t blindly use it thinking it was functional down the road.

Fun stuff, tomorrow I will post about a change I had to make to a run once script in Windows 7 and the mistake I made.