четверг, 12 марта 2015 г.

Win8 WiFi "limited" issue and old DLink router



Hi,

You all probably already saw a lot of different fixes for the "limited" WiFi in Windows 8. TCP/IP stack reinstallations, WiFi network re-adding and many more. Well, they didn't work for me.

The reason for my troubles was DHCP from my old Dlink router. For some reasons when my router were allocating addresses dynamically with pre-set lease time, my Win8 devices were loosing connection from time to time and WiFi state were switching to "limited" state. A workaround was to restart the router, this worked for me, but then I decided to understand the source of the problem.

It turned out that DHCP renew command didn't work. My thought is that my old router has its own internal sense of current date, time and timezone :) I didn't need to fix that because my router is not a time source. And I think what is happening is that the router had it's own sense of lease time and its own sense of when IP address is expired or not, probably this doesn't work well with Windows 8.

To fix that I've added fixed, static DHCP mapping for Windows 8 devices and it worked! Now I don't have issues with Windows8 WiFi devices and I don't need to change my router (originally I thought it's a bug in the firmware and due to my router being too old I thought I had to change it)