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Samsung Blu-Ray Player not getting Internet

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A friend of mine asked me to come over and take a look at his WiFi situation. With him being a different flavor of nerd than I, I was happy to oblige. Everything went fine right up until we were trying to get his Samsung Blu-Ray player on his WiFi. And then I discovered something so bizarre that I have to share it with the internet

The Equipment

Blu-Ray Player

I don’t have the exact model,  but it was Samsung, and probably something made between 2012 and now (it seemed fairly new).

Router

I remember the router as a Linksys E1200 deal.  Not super high-end, not super low-end.

The Problem

Well, I gave Brian a new network name, a fresh new password, and turned off his guest account. His laptop connected to the internet just fine. So did my HTC Evo, and so did his XBox. We went through the setup screens with the Blu-Ray player. We found the network, and we connected. But we got this dumb error message that said something along the lines of

You’re connected to the router, but can’t establish a connection to the internet. Call somebody who cares.

I’m probably paraphrasing a tad, but whatever. It was a situation where the Blu-ray play was definitely on our WiFi, but definitely not getting the Netflix that Brian so dearly wanted. To confirm that it was on the network, I did two things:

  1.  I logged into the router and looked at the DHCP Device Table. The IP address that I saw there was the exact same IP address that the TV said it had been issued.
  2. I pinged the TV from Brian’s Macbook (using the terminal). Neither the TV nor the router were liars.

The Solution

I have no idea why I thought of this. Maybe it’s because the downstairs neighbors were smoking a lot of something illegal and I’d gotten a whiff of it on the way up. Maybe it was the headache which had followed. Or the three cups of coffee I’d had by that time.

Keep your IP address on the low

I had completely reset the router; it was at factory defaults until I started renaming the network and whatnot.  I noticed something that was only moderately odd:  the factory-default of a Linksys E1200 is to issue IP addresses starting at 100; the Blu-Ray Player’s IP address was 192.168.1.138.

What if that IP address is too high? Like the guys downstairs were…

So:

  1. I changed the router to start issuing IP addresses at 2.
  2. Disconnected the TV from the WiFi
  3. Reconnected the TV to the WiFi with an IP address of 192.168.1.3
  4. Got on the internet like a champ

The Root Cause

I don’t know enough to explain this bug super well. All I can say is that Samsung’s Blu-Ray Player doesn’t want the fourth octet to be triple-digits. My guess is that there’s some sort of memory restraint. Maybe that explains why it knows it has an IP address, but can’t get interwebz from it.  This could also be some sort of IPV4 vs IPV6 issue. Maybe. I don’t know for sure.