Our Agency’s wireless networks, located in multiple buildings, are set up with all the same settings, like name, WEP, password, etc. The only difference is the IP number that changes per location from 10.1.x.x to 10.2 or 10.6. The new Windows 7 laptops will not pick up the wireless when changing buildings/locations. We are forced to delete the previous working settings and allow Win 7 to find the “new” wireless. This new setting will work until we change buildings. Didn’t have this trouble with XP… This has become an issue with the non technical users and now IT isn’t looking too good as we try to switch over to Windows 7. Help. These are all HP 47xx laptops and 2102 Netbooks.

Is the IP manually set on the router itself? And is the new windows 7 laptop passphrase and ssid is the same as the router? Also is MAC address filtering enable? I would suggest to reset the router setting to default, next do a scan on your wireless network and see whether it detect, if it does, it has to do with some setting and config. You might consider enabling dhcp IP on the router instead of using static IP Lastly if the building/location is within a distance between the router and your notebook, you would need to get a access point or wifi repeater to imrprove the wireless signal

How tightly locked-down are the DHCP pools in each of your sites? Windows 7's implementation of DHCP will request its last known IP whenever it connects to a network and unless your DHCP servers are configured with a pool of address that excludes the IP requested by the client, they'll happily re-assign the IP the client wants. Regards, Jason

Hi, According the issue , you set the 6 wireless networks in the same SSID ,password . If client turn to another network, it won't recognize the change of the network environment. The DHCP request would not be sent.

First, let me apologize for not checking back on the forum until now. I just received my first Notice of Reply this morning. Daniel Ho: The routers are all set to DHCP. The passphrase and SSID are all set the same, although the SSID is set to not broadcast. No MAC filtering either. The signal coverage within the buildings is very good. Jason of Oz: No lock downs on the DHCP pool. In each of the 3 buildings there are only 10 to 15 devices accessing the wireless. This accounts for laptops, Netbook and phones. You mention that Win 7 will ask for the last known IP when connecting to a “known” wireless and that may be the issue we’re seeing. The IP will change from 10.1.x.x to 10.2.x.x or 10.6.x.x depending on the building you’re in. Should we exclude the other building IP’s from within each location? For example, exclude 10.1.x.x from within the 10.6.x.x building? willy_zeng: You probably hit the nail on the head. Windows 7 isn’t recognizing the change in environment. Since XP Pro didn’t seem to have this issue, this has become a PITA as we switch to Windows 7. Is there a way to force the DHCP request?Bivey

Have you checked each site's DHCP server (assuming each site has a DHCP server and you're not using DHCP relaying) to ensure it will only accept/allocate addresses in the sites's own 10.x.0.0/16 subnet? Say we're looking at site A, which uses 10.1.0.0/16. You're going to want to keep a few IPs available for static assignments so you might want to configure its DHCP pool to only allocate IPs between 10.1.1.0 and 10.1.255.254. This gives you 255 static IPs (10.1.0.1 to 10.1.0.255) to use and 65025 addresses to assign dynamically. Now say a laptop comes from site B, which was using 10.2.0.0/16 with a similar DHCP setup... lets say the IP assigned to it at site B was 10.2.1.1. The laptop will come into site A and try to connect to a network... same SSID and WEP/WPA/whatever so it'll get layer 1 and layer 2 connectivity pretty quick and then broadcast its DHCP discovery packet, in that packet it will request 10.2.1.1 again; assuming your DHCP server is authoritive*, it will respond with a DHCP offer for a different IP address from within its own pool. The client will receive that offer, and send a request to lease that IP, an acknowledgment is sent from server to client and your laptop will have a shiny new IP address. (* if the DHCP server is non-authoritive, it will ignore the request completely and the client will send a fresh request without specifying an IP when it thinks enough time has passed) Also, just an afterthought, how far apart are these sites? If site A and B were so close that users were able to move seamlessly between them without interupting their wireless connection, this might cause a problem as layer 1 and 2 would never be disrupted to cause a new DHCP request. If your sites are that close, you may want to rethink your addressing scheme. - Jason