The IP addresses on my Android device and the DirecTV receiver appear similar but it still won't connect.

Administrator
2012-07-12 00:43

In some cases, a network may be configured incorrectly resulting in what are essentially two separate networks that cannot communicate with each other.  This can most often occur in a mixed wireless/wired network, but should be a pretty rare problem.  Obviously your Android device is connected wirelessly.  Depending on how your network is structured, your DirecTV receiver may be connected wired or wirelessly.  One easy way is to confirm or rule out wired/wireless connection problems is to try "pinging" your DirecTV receiver from your Android device.  There are many ping apps available on Google Play, but I will use one as an example that I have found to be easy to use.  If you have another app you like better, just skip step 1 below.


     1)  Download and install NetPing from Qwapp on Google Play.
     2)  Run the ping app and trying pinging your DirecTV receiver.  In NetPing, select the text box at the top and remove the localhost text, then enter the IP address of your DirecTV receiver as found in step 4B of Confirming settings on the DirecTV receiver or DVR itself.  So if the IP address of your receiver is 192.168.1.124 then enter that into the box and press the Ping button.
     3)  The results of the ping will be displayed.  If the results come back as packets lost: 4 of 4 then this means that your Android device cannot see your DirecTV receiver.  I will try to add more solutions to this problem as I discover them, but it is a problem in your network configuration.  Some possibilities are listed below.
          A)  Your wireless router or access point may have an option for guest access and your Android device is connected to the guess access network.  The guest access feature found in some wireless routers allows guests to access the Internet using your wireless network but for security and privacy reasons it is designed to prevent them from accessing other devices found on your local network.  This will prevent the app from communicating with your DirecTV receiver.  If this is the case, you simply need to connect to your full wireless network or disable the guest access feature in your wireless router or access point.
          B)  Another possibility is that you have a wireless access point connected to a wired router and both are setup as DHCP servers.  This can cause similar IP addresses in wired and wireless devices but they will not be able to see each other.  The solution is usually to disable the DHCP "server" or "client" option in the wireless access point but there may be other settings that need to be changed as well.

     4)  Ideally your results should be no packets lost.  You may want to try the test several times to ensure that you are not losing any packets.  If there are any packets lost, then this could also cause a problem with the app finding some but not all of your receivers.
     5)  While you can repeat this test for all of your receivers, if you have 4 of 4 packets lost in the first test then it is likely that you will have the same results for all receivers until the network issue is resolved.

NOTE:  If you use static IP address, it has been reported by a Linksys WRT600N router owner that assigning a static IP address outside of the DHCP range did not allow the app to communicate with the receiver.  After changing the static IP address to a number within the DHCP range, it did communicate.  So if you are trying to use a static IP address in your receiver without any luck then you might want to try using an address within the DHCP range.  Even if it is not a Linksys brand router it is worth a try.  Just be sure that nothing else is assigned to the address you choose.  Many router configuration pages have a section that shows a list of devices that are currently connected using DHCP.

 

Tags: Scan, Scanning, Setup
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