When I logon to my router to see what is connected I use the Linksys DHCP Client Table screen which displays all the connected PC’s, wireless radios and the iPhone.

Well that’s the idea. There’s a refresh control as well but that doesn’t appear to work. What is displayed though is never quite right. The columns displayed are Client Name, which is the computer name or ‘iPhone’ or for the wireless radios nothing. Then there’s an Interface column which is either ‘Wireless’ or ‘LAN’, then there are columns for the IP Address, the clients MAC address and lastly the Expired Time which is either in hours and minutes or ‘Lease’.

As all of the PC’s and devices are connected wirelessly then I would expect ‘Wireless’ to appear in the Interface column for all of them. Not so. My partners laptop does display relevant values in all of the columns. My laptop though has two rows displayed for it, representing two connections, one ‘Wireless’ and the other ‘LAN’, and two different IP addresses. When I run ipconfig /all on that laptop I can see one of the IP addresses but not the other. Odd. I then ran ipconfig /release on the laptop and restarted the DHCP Client Table utility from a different PC and the laptop was still displayed twice. I checked back on the laptop if it had an IP address and it didn’t. Finally I switched the laptop off, still with no IP address and did that make a difference to the displayed DHCP Client Table? No.

With one wireless radio connected it does display that radio in the DHCP Client table but with a ‘LAN’ interface. The IP address displayed on the table is being used by the wireless radio as I can see the IP address on the radio. If I switch on the second wireless radio and restart the DHCP Client Table then the second wireless radio is not displayed at all.

The Vista PC, when connected, also shows up twice. Once as a ‘LAN’ connection in the Interface column and the other being ‘Wireless’ and again with two IP addresses. The IP address that the Vista machine is actually using is the one for the ‘Wireless’ connection. The IP address allocated to the ‘LAN’ connection does not show up at all when runing ipconfig on the Vista machine. 

My XP machine shows up only once in this table, correctly as a ‘Wireless’ connection. It also has an ethernet card which XP tells me is working OK but that does not get allocated a second IP address. Drrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhh………… There’s probably someone at Linksys that would actually try and convince me that this is working correctly but to me it’s just downright confusing.