Seiford

I'm having trouble trying to Sync using my WiFi card in my Axim.

I have the Linksys WCF12 and it seems to be working just fine. I can browse the internet and ping things.

My home network uses a Linksys Access point and a Netgear router. My home network is using a 10.0.0.x addressing scheme.

I believe my Dell Axim is somehow caching old IP addresses for my laptop. When I use vxUtil to lookup the IP address of my laptop, it displays three IP address. 192.168.159.1, 192.168.198.1, and 10.0.0.100. the last address is actually the correct one for my laptop. If I try to ping my laptop by name, it uses the first IP address and I get no response. If I ping 10.0.0.100 by IP address, it will ping fine. Of course when trying to sync with ActiveSync, it uses the name and goes to the wrong IP address.

Does anyone know how to purge old IP addresses out of the DNS cache?

I tried deleting the partnership and recreating it, no luck. I upgraded to ActiveSync 3.7, same problem.

Gigi

I don't know anything about purging old IP addresses, but I have a set up similar to yours (i.e., Linksys card and Netgear router) and also had problems syncing but could access the Internet, etc.. I just went to Settings ---> Connections ---> Connections and changed my settings to Work, Work, and Work.

Hope that helps.

Seiford

I'm afraid that didn't work.

I believe that my Axim is remembering IP addresses from when I had my Axim and my laptop plugged into other networks.

I had this working at one time on my home network. Then I tried syncing when both devices were connected to a network at my work. Since then, it has never worked again.

v8sho

On the desktop computer, you first have to setup a partnership through your USB cable, then you have to tell Activesync on the desktop computer that you want to sync through a network connection as well as the USB cable.

The Axim activesync also maintains a list of the names of the computers that it has partnerships with. You may have to point to the correct name in the Axim before it will sync.

(I'm sorry you are having problems. I have sync'd my Axim to 4 different combinations of desktop computers and cable or WiFi networks, but have not been able to make an internet connection with any of them. It seems that most people have the exact opposite situation.)

Mr Plow

The problem you are having is name resolution. Activesync uses the PCs name but cannot resolve the IP address. I use "Pocket Hosts" to solve the problem.

The problem you are describing won't happen in larger networks that have DNS and / or WINS since these two do the name resolution for you.

Pocket Hosts is the answer for networks without WINS or DNS.

Seiford

I have done a little more digging and I think I know more about the problem.

My home network uses a Windows 2000 server for DNS and DHCP. Name resolution works fine from other computers on the network (I can ping my laptop by machine name from other computers).

I have no problem syncing via USB. In fact, that appears to be the cause of the problem!

From what I have been able to determine, when I sync via USB, the Axim remembers the IP addresses of all three network cards in my laptop. When I try to sync using WiFi, instead of using DNS to resolve the host name to an IP address, it is using the first IP address in the list it remembered from the last USB sync.

I am going to uninstall the two other network adapters in my laptop (they are virtual adapters installed by VMware) and sync via USB to see if the Axim has only the real network adapter's IP address in the list.

If this is really the cause, they ActiveSync over Wifi is going to be a problem as I move around to different networks. Each time the IP address on my laptop changes, I'd need to sync via USB to download the new IP address to the Axim. One of the reasons I want to sync via Wifi is so that I don't need a USB cable when traveling.

ikehiker

I use IP Manager to manage the IP numbers. It’s a very useful program for managing multiple network connections but it is payware. I'm pretty sure they have a trial version you can download. If you want to give it a try and have trouble figuring any aspects out, let me know.

I’ve recently seen reference to the freeware program Mr Plow mentioned, Pocket Hosts available from the Handango web site. I haven’t tried it but it does look like it will do what you originally were asking about.

Seiford

I gave Pocket Hosts a try and I have a solution that works.

I manually added the host name and IP address for my laptop using Pocket Hosts and I am able to connect and sync over WiFi.

To summarize, here is what I learned about name resolution with Pocket PC 2002.

The order in which Pcoket PC 2002 uses to find the IP address for a host is as follows:

1. local hosts file (using add-on software such as Pocket Hosts)
2. Cached address from last ActiveSync
3. DNS lookup

If it wasn't for number 2, I wouldn't need the hosts file. If it went straight to number 3, I wouldn't have to do anything as I move around with my laptop and Axim. At least for now, I can manually edit the IP address with Pocket Hosts every time I need to Sync using a different IP address.

Thanks for the help everyone! I was able to resolve this problem much quicker with your suggestions.

allawy

Ok, so I ran into this problem too and found a fix.
I have VMWare installed on my main computer and it creates two virtual network devices, typically named something like "VMware Network Adapter VMnet?", each of which gets its own IP address with a different subnet. So my main (real) NIC gets its IP address from my wireless router (192.168.0.106), and the two virtual NICs have fixed IP (assigned by VMWare) - in my case they are 192.168.232.1 and 192.168.1.1.

ActiveSync via WIFI never worked for me, actually anything that involved tcp/ip connection to this computer, so I installed vxUtil, performed a LOOKUP on the computer name and got the following:
192.168.1.1
192.168.232.1
192.168.0.106

What this means is that somehow, the tcp/ip stack on the ppc gets all of the ip addresses the computer you had synced with (most recently) uses but not in the correct order. I guess it does not detect which of the addresses is the correct one - should be easy to fix by MS, just compare the address to the one assigned to the ppc! The ppc in my case is assigned 192.168.0.108 by the router. So when attempting to sync, or even ping from vxUtil, the tcp/ip stack uses 192.168.1.1 as the address and fails to connect!

On Windows computers, you can modify the hosts file (different location based on version of Win) to force a fixed IP address for a particular computer name, i.e. no dynamic translation is performed. Say you want a device/computer with the name myspeedypc to translate to 192.168.0.220, you would create an entry line in this hosts file with the name and the IP address seperated with a space or tab:

myspeedypc 192.168.0.220

Unfortunately, this file does not exist in the Windows Mobile world. Instead, its functionality is implemented via the registry. The magic location is "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\Tcpip\Hosts".

There are two ways to do this, use Pocket Hosts to very easily add the values, or manually edit the registry using a registry editor such as Resco's, yeah I always do things the hard way :)
- Expand the Hosts key
- Add a new Key under hosts and give it the name of the computer you want to resolve (force a specific IP address)
- Add a new Binary value and give it the name "ipaddr"
- in the same dialog, enter the ip address you want. Note that the IP address must be in HEX - use the Windows Calculator in scientific mode to convert

Example:
you want to enter 192.168.0.200, in hex enter C0 A8 00 DC

I hope this is helpful to those like me that thought "I'll never be able to get this #$%@ working!"

Good luck
Allawy

Originally Posted by Seiford

I'm having trouble trying to Sync using my WiFi card in my Axim. I have the Linksys WCF12 and it seems to be working just fine. I can browse the internet and ping things. My home network uses a Linksys Access point and a Netgear router. My home network is using a 10.0.0.x addressing scheme. I believe my Dell Axim is somehow caching old IP addresses for my laptop. When I use vxUtil to lookup the IP address of my laptop, it displays three IP address. 192.168.159.1, 192.168.198.1, and 10.0.0.100. the last address is actually the correct one for my laptop. If I try to ping my laptop by name, it uses the first IP address and I get no response. If I ping 10.0.0.100 by IP address, it will ping fine. Of course when trying to sync with ActiveSync, it uses the name and goes to the wrong IP address. Does anyone know how to purge old IP addresses out of the DNS cache? I tried deleting the partnership and recreating it, no luck. I upgraded to ActiveSync 3.7, same problem.