Linksys Router problems after cable company maintenance

Yesterday, at about 4:30 PM, I realized that my internet access was down. I called the cable company to report the problem, but hung up after hearing a message about ongoing maintenance in my area, blah, blah, blah.

At about 6:00 PM, I was still unable to connect to the internet so I called again to ask for an ETA. The rep told me that the problem was resolved and that I shouldn't be experiencing any trouble. I answered the basic troubleshooting questions and power-cycled the modem on the router, etc.

She told me that there must be a problem with my router, I told her that I didn't think that this was the case, but was willing to disconnect my router and run the cable straight to the nic on the PC.

Then she suggested that I had spyware on my machine at which point I almost became offended, but was willing to play along. She asked me to run 'netsh reset winsock catalogue' and then to reset my computer. I told her that I did (I refuse to accept her spyware theory, I scan weekly, browse responsibly and am an IT professional for stinkin' sock's sake). While I was allegedly resetting my computer, I noticed that the cable modem reset itself (mysterious). I was able to connect afterwards.

So I asked if she'd hold while I reconnected my router to see if I was able to access the internet through the router again. Unfortunately, this did not work. When I attempted to ping the address of a DNS server that I have memorized, I received an error message:

192.168.1.1: destination net unreachable

This is the IP address of the router, the gateway of my PC. The NIC on my PC has an address of 192.168.1.100 which was assigned by the router and is obviously on the same subnet. I'm also able to ping 192.168.1.1 from my PC and access the web interface of the router (a Linksys WRT54G version 2 with the latest firmware). When I do access the web interface of the router, I'm not able to have it renew its DHCP address.

Does anyone know what the source of the problem might be? I thought (but haven't had time to test it yet) that it could have something to do with the way that the MAC address is cloned (I use Comcast and I believe that they have something in their terms regarding not being able to use a home network. Is it possible that they block the assignment of IP addresses based on the MAC if they can detect that the MAC is that of a router or other similar device?), but I don't know why the issue magically appeared after they performed their 'maintenance' yesterday.

Any help or suggestions that anyone could provide would be most excellent.

EDIT: BAH, I forgot the other part of this... I took the router into work this morning and hooked it up to our network. It is receiving an IP address from my DHCP server and routing the requests of a laptop that I have connected to it perfectly. What gives?

Unless I mis read your post, here's the deal

When you pluged your modem into your PC, the modem reconized your PC's MAC address.

When you pluged in your router, the modem did not reconize the routers mac address.

With the router in place and off, Power cycle the modem then turn on the router. Once all the lights are blinking like they normally do, turn on the pc and all should be well.

edit: most modems can only reconize one mac address

I'll test that later, but the only thing that I'm questioning is why the router worked perfectly up until yesterday. What do you think?

in laymans terms, (I'm pretty much a n00b when it come to explaining things) If you had the router hooked to the PC, and not the modem - the router would have issued a dhcp address to the PC. But since the modem was connected to the router. THe router and modem were too busy with modem looking for mac address a and recieving mac address b instead. That conflict was using all the routers resources. Couldn't get to dhcp and ather such processes.

Hence the 'destination net unreachable' message?

Just wanted to post back that I was able to resolve this after I had the router clone the MAC of my current machine...

When I originally bought the router, I was using another computer. I recently built another one, but never set the router to clone the MAC of that machine. It was still cloning the one of my old computer. I still think that it's odd that everything has been working fine for the past 6 or 7 months since I started with this new box, but it's working now!

Thanks for the help.

i had weird problems with comcast and my belkin router

once a week internet would drop from the router... my dad called and bitched em out enough that it stoped happening