DHCP issue with older netbook

[elorimer]

I have an Asus netbook from 2008, an eee 1000h on xp. It has always been very useful to me because it is has an ethernet port and is portable. I've used it multiple times to restore various Asus routers. I have given it a reserved ip address on my current router.

My router here is a 86U on .19. I dug out the netbook to connect and found that I had no issue connecting wirelessly to a guest network, but when I connected to my main wireless network it configured an autoconfig address of 169.254.whatever, so it couldn't connect to anything.

I can see in the network map on another computer, when I try to repair the connection, the netbook disconnecting, and reconnecting. The router shows this computer being assigned the reserved address. On the computer, it is still the autoconfig address.

I updated it from xp to w10 using a USB stick, and it connected easily to the guest network. I updated that windows install using that, and then tried to reconnect to the main wireless network, and got the same autoconfig address.

This isn't, I think, a router issue, but I'm curious about what one would do to track down why a guest connection would have no issue and a non-guest would have this issue.

 

[dosborne]

Instead of worrying and trying to fix something that is potentially just an old driver (and may not be fixable), why not just assign a static IP since that is what the reserved address would do anyway?

 

[elorimer]

Still weird. I don't understand how a guest network would behave different to any other network from the client side. As far as the client knows, isn't it just another network connection with differences in what it can reach from there?

I did give it a static IP and it still can't reach even the webui. The only difference I can see is that the network profile is missing on the normal wifi connection, and present for the guest connection. Without the static IP, the guest connection pulls a DHCP connection, and the normal wifi connection doesn't.