Probably already done, but have you tried rebooting everything?
If you have, then if you have a router, this seems like a transient error
rather than a change or anything; i.e. if you had a router in b/w the cable
modem and the PCs, the cable modem (and thus Comcast) would only see the mac
address of the router, so there's no obvious reason it should be requiring
the mac address of one of the PCs (did you ever have that PC connected to
the cable modem w/o the router in the past?)...
So when you say the "cable modem will only connect one PC to the web and
none of the others?" is that through the router or directly from the cable
modem to the PC, i.e. putting the PC on a public IP? Could NAT have somehow
been disabled on your router? It's also possible that your router has just
died/broken; I had a Netgear do that to me a few years back...
Oh ok, I see from your last sentence you've taken the cable modem and
connected it directly to all your PCs (bypassing the router right?), but
only one PC will connect when you do that; hmm, so I ask again, have you
tried rebooting the cable modem (and everything else)?
If so, and only that one PC can connect, assuming it's b/c it wants that mac
address, then you should be able to do mac masquerading on your router; i.e.
change the mac address on the WAN port to that of the PC that works, and
then see if everything starts working again...that's the only other thing I
can think of at this point!
Did any of that make sense? :P
BINO
-----Original Message-----
From: hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com
[mailto:hardware-boun...@hardwaregroup.com] On Behalf Of Stan Zaske
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2009 6:51 PM
To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com
Subject: [H] Comcast blues
Have any of you ever run into a situation where your router's WAN port
seems to stop working but your ethernet connections among 4 PC's are
fine? Then after some more investigation it seems that your cable modem
will only connect one PC to the web and none of the others? The only
thing I can figure is that my router is fine but Comcast has locked
(possibly) my service to the MAC address of this one box and will only
connect to it but none of the others. Is my thinking straight on this or
can any of you come up with an alternate scenario? It seems might
strange to me that I can take the ethernet cable from my Mororola cable
modem and switch it from one box to another and only the one will
connect. What the heck is going on?
