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Im trying to connect two laptops on my school's wlan, we have the same gateway and we should be able to communicate with each other, but somehow our laptops cant communicate

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this site is only for programming questions. Try serverfault.com – gideon Dec 15 '10 at 11:54
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 15 '10 at 12:01

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

3 Answers

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Hi I would advise a re-word of your 'Question'
To start with I would advise you make a note of your IP's and subnet masks. Post them let us see. Your both connected to the same wifi spot?
When you say communicate what OS are you using? Any Firewall blocking? Can you ping? What application are you trying to use?

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The router might be configured to drop traffic between clients in the same network and only allow traffic going out to the Internet. This could be security inspired in order to prevent students from doing bad things to other students.

Is there an IT helpdesk you can aks? They should know about the setup they are running.

Or: Do you know that it basically should work, but it doesn't?

BTW: your post is not really a question :-)

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If they really are on the same LAN (subnet), the traffic won't go through the router. However, the questioner didn't give us enough info to say for sure. – mfinni Dec 15 '10 at 14:51
That's not to say that PVLANs or similar aren't being used to prevent wireless machines from seeing each other, though. – jgoldschrafe Dec 15 '10 at 14:56
@mfinni good point :-). Do wireless access points usually only work at layer 2? I sort of assumed most of them would go up to layer 3 and check against policies. I agree that is a bit of a naive assumption though and actually not very performance orientated. Thanks for pointing it out for me. – Phi Dec 15 '10 at 15:41
WiFi is layer 1 and 2, has nothing to do with L3 or above. – mfinni Dec 15 '10 at 16:29
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up vote 0 down vote

A) Not really a question...might want to rephrase for the site?

B) Sounds like your wireless network is set up to isolate the clients.

C) Did you contact the school's IT department and ask them about it?

If I had to guess, I'd say either it's a public school doing this in the name of "security" (or some consultant came in and configured it for that reason to prevent snooping on other traffic) or if it's a college it's to prevent file sharing and/or LAN parties in an overtaxed network infrastructure.

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