can no longer connect to the internet

[mewastaken]

hello there.

Thanks for taking the time to review my situation;

I have an iBook g4. I share a connection to the internet with my neighbor via his wireless router, as a trade for plowing his snow. when I initially set up the internet on my mac, it was very complicated to me as I had never worked on a mac and was not familiar with its functions. My neighbors connection was such that he did not need to enter a password to connect as a friend of his had set the system up to work that way, thus he was clueless as to what his password might be. with some luck I managed to figure out what it was, but to add to the confusion while setting my connection up, the internet connect asked me what type of 'encryption' the password was and I had no idea, i figured out by eventuall sucess; by repeating the supposed password under various encryptions (in the wireless security dropdown menu) that it was a WEP 40/128-bit hex and that I needed to add the first two digits of the supposed password at the end to make it an allowable number of digits... so long story short, I figured it out, and everything ran smooth for a long time. however, one day the internet didnt work and I took it in to the local computer gurus, whom managed to make it work again, though a week later it failed and even they could not get it to detect thier routers any longer; so they suggested we install a new airport card... ok. done. stll does not work. I have tried all that I can through the preferences and internet settings to try and fix this problem and I have had no luck. It was suggested that the antannae as it is fashioned around the screen, that constant opening and closing might have caused damage to it, however at this minute my signal shows full and I am many yards away from the router (by the way I am using my neighbors computer to connect to this forum)

If I go into system pref/ network: show network status it says next to airport that it is connected to network linksys. airport has a self assigned ip address and may not be able to connect to the internet. Also, just for the hell of it I plugged directly into the router and it said that ethernet is active but has a self assigned ip and may be unable to connect to the internet...

i just dont know what to do here, and not exactly looking forward to sending it to the apple people without a warranty... I don't have an arm and a leg to spare...

note: If i set airport tcp/ip settings to 'manually' in the configure IPv4 dropdown to the following settings:

ip address: 192.168.1.3 (as my neighbors is 192.168.1.103)
subnet: 255.255.255.0
router: 192.168.1.3

it then shows in the network status pane that airport is connected to the network linksys showing a green light as opposed to the yelow that it showed previously with the 'airport has a self assigned ip..." message. yet opening firefox still yeilds only a cannot find server messege.

If i plug in the ethernet cable and set the settings to the above manual settings I also get a green light with a message indicating that I am in fact connected; built in ethernet is currently active and has the ip address 192.168.1.3. you are connected to the internet via built in ethernet. and yet the same thing happens when I attempt to log on to the internet....


Any thooughts would be wonderful...
thanks so much

[Natobasso]

Create one Location (Apple Menu/Location) for the wireless and a different one for the wired (ethernet) connection. Switch between them if you want to go from wireless to wired or vice a versa.

You are probably confusing your mac into thinking it's searching for the wireless signal when the ethernet cable is plugged in...

Does your neighbor's internet service provide DHCP?