I have a Belkin wireless router, model F5D7230-4 6000 router with firmware version F5D7230-4_US_8.01.07. I found that oftentimes I couldn't ping the router from a system. I finally realized the source of the problem today. When I clicked on LAN Settings, I saw the router had an IP address of 192.168.4.1 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.248, yet the system from which I couldn't ping any other system connected to the router and which had no network access, had an IP address of 192.168.4.7 assigned via DHCP from the router. With a subnet mask of 255.255.255.248, the host address range would be 192.168.4.1 through 192.168.4.6, since the router is using 192.168.4.1 and 192.168.4.7 is the broadcast address. Yet when I attempted to change the IP address range the router used for its DHCP assignments, it kept resetting the IP pool ending address to 192.168.4.12 after I set it to 192.168.4.6. I would set the starting address to 192.168.4.3 and the ending address at 192.168.4.12 then click on Apply Changes. The router would reboot and I would find it had reset the last address to be assigned by DHCP to 192.168.4.12 again. I tried setting the ending addres to 5 with the same results.
So I changed the subnet mask to 192.168.4.240, which provides an address range of 16 addresses (14 usable for hosts, since 192.168.4.0 is the subnet id and 192.168.0.15 is then the broadcast address). I then tried setting the ending IP address for the DHCP server built into the router to 7. When the router rebooted that address was back at 12 again. This time I just left it, since at least this time all of the addresses the built-in DHCP server would assign will be within the subnet range.
