Same IP address

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Every once in a while, I'll get a message on my computer telling me there's an IP address conflict - someone/thing has the same IP addy as me. I don't think much of it, except to stop what I'm doing and reboot. My computer has random IP addy picking, name-thing...you know!

There are a laptop upstairs and a regular PC downstairs with mine. I'm hooked to the Internet with a wireless router (which makes me uncomfortable ) to the modem/'Net stuff upstairs. Hubby told me the conflict is either with one of the computers in house or something in the neighborhood.

How worried should I be when that conflict message pops up? Should I do something else besides just rebooting?

 

I would try to find out what causes it. But as it is, more (technical) information would be needed to assess the situation.

Maybe you could do this anyway:
The next time you see the message go to command prompt (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt) and type "ipconfig" (without the ""). Note down the IP address, then repeat this for the other computers that are on and see if they have the same IP address.

If none of your computers have the same IP address I would be slightly worried. If they have, it should be easy to fix.


Lastly, do you use encryption with the wireless connection? If not (or if you use WEP), change it to use WPA/WPA2 security protocol immediately!

 

The wireless router should do this job for you, unless you have the DHCP service on it turned of (that is the "give everyone a unique adress thing").

If you know how to configure your wireless router, you can make it pretty safe. I use wireless as well, and have both MAC adress filtering (an adress which is unique for every network card) and WPA security (which means I need a password to log on to the network). This was very easy to set up on my router, which is a cheap SMC model.

 

AFAIK, no one in this house has the same IP address. Also, I don't have a firewall that I know of and I don't know anything about the router (what Mollusken talked about). Now I'm scared. I just had 5 messages pop up in less than a minute about an IP addy conflict. I've asked hubby about it, (he's the tech geek) but since it doesn't happen to him, he doesn't care.

Just when I find nice things to do online, I get some weird thing happening to **** it up.

 

I suggest you show your husband next time, so he can fix it, even though you said he doesn't care about it... I'm sure he'd care if someone is stealing your internet via wireless hacking...