Netgear HDX101 Problems

gjc-ortho

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Dear All,

Just acquired a pair of these that are supposed to be "plug & play"; my arse!

Using them with a Netgear DG834GT router and windows XP. As soon as I run the configuration utility I'm then unable to access the router/internet. The only setting I have out of the ordinary is that I have set the PC to have a fixed IP address as I use it as a server for mu XBMC.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Cheers all
 
I consider myself quite expert in powerline, however the specification for this particular one baffles me.

We sell a whole range of this type of adaptor, there are 3 standards namely HomePlug, UPA, and HD-PLC, each use different chipsets, none will interoperate.

Netgear display the UPA label, but describe a HomePlug device?, with a UPA device the set up is by internal webserver, with HomePlug it is by utility.

All the ones we supply are certainly Plug n Play, none of them require an IP address to function (they use MAC routing) so your fixed IP is not a problem.

You should be able to just plug them in and it should work, the utilities just allow you to see the actual speed between them an change the default passwords etc.

Normally I quite like Netgear products but with this they don't seem to know what they are selling!
 
stratagem,

Thanks for the reply mate. They do work but with speeds of about 200Kb/s. When I run the utility it completely upsets the router and I'm unable to even access the router web utility. The netgear utility for the plugs seem to suggest that they are connected at 140Mb/s!!

The only other thing I can think of is that I also have a wireless network set up and for that I use MAC addresses as the security rather than WEP.

Could this be the thing that is at fault?

Cheers all
 
As far as speed goes, the only thing that tends to stop powerline performing well is a lot of noise on the AC mains.

Plug them straight in to the wall socket if you can, not on an extention strip, especially not a surge protected one (these have a capacitor across the circuit which attenuates the powerline signal).

Other sources of noise can be switched mode PSU's ie the black transformer bricks that power many things like mobile phone chargers (and routers), these are only usually a problem when plugged into the same socket point.

Having said all that, a reported speed of 140Mbps should be fine.

MAC address filtering shouldn't be a problem, this is just for the wireless, the powerline circuit just appears as a wired connection.

The only way I can think of stopping your router this way is an IP address clash, poweline adaptors don't use IP address's except the UPA versions that have an inbuilt webserver so that you can set up with a browser.

This is where I get confused on the Netgear, ie has it got a webserver or not? if it has the instructions would tell you about it, if it hasn't there can be no IP address issue with the adaptors.

The only thing I can suggest is to check all your fixed addresses and make sure they are outside of the routers DHCP range.

Finally the utility may not work over wireless, so assume the PC is wired to router and Xbox via powerline.
 
The only thing I can suggest is to check all your fixed addresses and make sure they are outside of the routers DHCP range.

Now, I maybe being stupid! I've got the router set as 192.168.0.1, the main pc as 192.168.0.3,the xbox as 192.168.0.10 and the laptop as 192.168.0.3; could this be the problem.

After running the utility that came with the plugs I'm completely unable to access the internet.

Thanks for the continuing help.

Cheers
 
Could be a typo, but you have your laptop on the same address as the PC.

I tend to let the router provide DHCP address's from say 2 - 50, and then set my fixed address above and outside of this range.
 
Definitely a typo! I've also changed the fixed addresses such that they now all lie outside the DHCP range.

These bloody things are getting more and more annoying!

Every time I try to run the configuration tool I have to reboot the computer to get access to the internet again; it appears that the configuration tool is altering the main pc's IP address and even if I change it back to normal I can't get back online.

The other thing is that when I don't use the configuration tool the throughput is less than 20 Kb/s, this isn't even enough to stream music:mad:

If I run the configuration tool, it completely upsets the router, it won't let me configure the remote plug but it states that they are connected at 130MB/s!!

Thanks for the continuing help.
 
Very odd, you shouldn't need to use the configuration at all, unless you have other existing powerline adaptors on your network.

Do you have other powerline adaptors? eg 14 or 85Mbps versions.

Otherwise there is nothing wrong that I can see with the rest of your setup and these units should be completely transparent as far as your router is concerned, it should just think it has Xbox or whatever connected by Ethernet cable.

I wish I could be point you to the problem, but you're doing nothing wrong, I guess you can see why we decided not to sell this particular brand.

Don't give up on the technology though, if you abandon all hope and send these back try one of our packs eg:.

http://www.broadbandcarrier.net/panasonic_hd-plc.htm

Mentioned here:

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=267498&page=7&highlight=HD-plc
 
Thanks for all the help mate, but I think that these little devils aren't going to play ball!
 
I notice there is a post (last post) in the forum I pointed to above who is running 4 of these, perhaps he can comment.
 
I've finally managed to get the configuration tool working after completely quitting my Sygate firewall; there seems to lie the problem! As soon as the firewall is re-established I can't even access the internet.

Any further suggestions greatly appreciated.
 

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