169.254 ip range and internet connection

I think you should check with your network administrator about that address. It is highly unlikely that your IP address is supposed to be 169.254.X.X. This is the link-local address range which the computer usually uses if it fails to find an address through DHCP. For more information you can read this http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3927

Message was edited by: Noah Robbin

The 169.254.x.y range has been reserved for use as APIPA, Automatic Private IP Address, addresses. APIPA is supposed to be used when the system can't pick up a DHCP server. Your Mac thinks that there's no DHCP server. It can connect just the same, but you will have to set up NAT, DNS and DHCP by hand.

It would greatly simplify things if a range which was NOT reserved for use for troubleshooting network problems was in use. The 169.254.x.y range is a Class B network; if your system really needs 65,000 available addresses, it would be just as simple to standardise on one of the existing private Class B networks, such as 172.16.x.y. (Class A private network: 10.x.x.y, where 'x' is a number 0 to 255, and 'y' is a number 1 to 254. Class B private networks: 172.16.x.y to 172.31.x.y. Class C private networks, 192.168.x.y.) The single Class A private network can have 16,777,214 IPs, each of the 16 Class B networks can have 65,354 IPs, and each of the 256 Class C private networks can have 254 IPs. Because they are private, anyone can use them without affecting anyone else. Also because they are private, they are NOT ROUTED OVER THE INTERNET unless connected to a gateway which provides NAT, DHCP, and DNS. You have set up a private Class B network... and it is behaving as expected. It's not being routed over the internet unless something provides NAT, DHCP, and DNS.

It is probable that when the network was set up, whoever set it up using the APIPA range also set up NAT, DNS, and DHCP for the machines he knew about... which did not include yours.

May I suggest that you get a cheap router, turn on DHCP on it, and park it between your Internet gateway and your network, and then assign fixed IPs _in a normal private network range_ to items such as printers and servers and let DHCP handle everything else? Even low-end consumer routers can set DHCP pools and handle DHCP reservations. It'd take a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size of the network, to reconfigure everything, but then your problems will go away, and all new systems can be set up in seconds.

And, best of all, if you see an APIPA address on a machine on your network, you will know that there's a network problem. That's what APIPA is there for...

Message was edited by: Charles Dyer

Can you confirm that the ip address, network mask, default gateway and dns server are set correctly on your Mac (you will need to set these manually)?

Message was edited by: Noah Robbin

Knowing of some of the security incompatibility issues with old routers and Leopard, I suspect you will have some problems, possibly even beyond the strange IP address.

You can test this at home by purposely setting up your router and computer manually, to use this address range and see what happens.

Again, Leopard does not play well with older routers even when they have the "latest" firmware for that router.

Bertrand POURCEL wrote:
Yes, all the network settings are done manually.

And no, it's not possible to install a new router with DHCP. There's 50 PCs and 3 Windows Servers over the network 😉

It takes less than 30 seconds to update a Windows machine's IP from fixed to DHCP, and perhaps a minute to either reserve an IP or to set the DHCP pool to exclude certain IPs and then to set those IPs as fixed on the servers. You could be up and running using DHCP in under a half hour. The odds are excellent that you have already spent more time than that dealing with the current problem.

If you're running Vista, the steps are:

1 open Network and Sharing Center
2 click on 'View Status' of your network connection
3 click on 'Properties'
4 dismiss UAC pop-up
5 double-click on 'Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) Properties'
6 click on the 'Obtain an IP address automatically' radio button
7 click OK

You're done.

If you're running XP, the steps are:

1 open Control Panels
2 double-click Network Connections
3 right-click Local Area Connection and select 'Properties'
4 double-click 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)'
5 click on the 'Obtain an IP address automatically' radio button
6 click OK

you're done.

Doing this 53 times may be tedious, but will not take a significant amount of time.

Most routers from Belkin, Netgear, Linksys, and Apple will allow you to reserve an IP for a specific machine. Required steps are:

1 get the MAC address of the machine in question, either from the command line or the status dialog; see above to see how to get to the status dialog. You can get the MAC address while setting up DHCP.

2 launch the router control HTML page (or, in the case of Apple, AirPort Utility) and go to the section of the admin page which sets reservations.

3 enter the MAC address for the desired machine. The system will reserve a particular IP just for that machine. It will never be handed out to any other machine.

4 reboot the router

you're done.

The only machines which need reserved IPs are the servers and the printers, so you need do this only for the three servers plus whatever printers you have.

Let me be explicit: if you keep using APIPA for your network range, you will continue to have problems. You can continue using APIPA for something it was not intended for, and continue having to patch things after the fact, or you can move to one of the private network ranges (probably a Class C, as you only have 53 nodes, not counting printers) and eliminate the problem at the source. If you insist on using APIPA, you will have to update the NAT, DNS, and DHCP lists yourself, on each new machine added to the network. And you will not know when there's a network connectivity problem as you will have fixed IPs which show an APIPA address as a normal setting, instead of DHCP-set IPs which show an APIPA address only when there is a problem.

It's your choice. I'd spend the half-hour, but that's me.

I have to agree with the Charles, you should really invest the time to switch to one of the correct private address ranges. You will only have trouble going forward. The number of network devices is not so great that the problem is impossible at the moment.

That being said, can you ping the gateway at all?