Running a Toshiba Satellite laptop, Windows 7 Home Premium on a DSL Wi-Fi
connection. I tried to secure your router per your book Internet Safety Book and
when I put my IP address into two different browsers, I finally gave up. They
never connect to anything. The internet connection is fine. Now, I need to look
at my router and decide if I need to change the password, etc. What am I
missing here?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #18, I try to diagnose a problem in securing a router and walk
through the steps needed to connect to that router through a browser
window.
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What am I missing?
I’m not exactly sure what step in the process you’re having trouble with. The phrase that concerns me in your question is, “…when I put my IP address into two different browsers.”
- You don’t put your IP address into the browser
- You put the IP address of your router and that’s typically 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1
It’s usually one of those two. I think I have an article on the site that talks about identifying the IP address of your router. It is usually the ‘gateway address’ if you ever do an IPconfig on your machine.
Find your gateway address
So I’ll back up.
Fire up a Windows command prompt. It’s over in Start > All Programs > Accessories > Windows command prompt.
Then, in the Windows command prompt, type:
- ipconfig /all
- (there is a space between config and /all)
- Hit enter
That’s going to dump out a bunch of information about your internet connection: your IP connection, your network connection.
One of the pieces of information there is going to be something called a ‘gateway address.’ If it starts with 192.168 (which I suspect it will), then that is very likely the IP address of your router.
- That then is the IP address you would use in the browser to gain access to your router.
Browse to your router’s IP address
So in the browser, in the address bar, you would type in, for example 192.168.1.1, and hit Enter.
The router will then, should then, respond.
Typically, it will ask you to login. That’s where you need to specify the administrative password for the router. Once having done that, it will give you its administrative interface.
So that’s my gut feel, based on the question, where things might be hanging up for you. Just make sure that you are using the right IP address and you should be fine …or at least get a little further in the process.
Next from Answercast 18 – Is it faster to write to a drive that has lots of space than to one with less space?
On my system, between the wireless, wired, virtual, IPv6-toIPv4 tunnel, and so on, “ipconfig /all” shows 10 interfaces, and scrolls most of the information off the screen before you can read it. Even piping to “more” is a bit overwhelming. It might be easier to use this command to narrow down the information you need to look at:
or maybe even
and look under the “gateway” column.
You really don’t need the space between the “g” and the “/”; this is windows, not linux.