I've got an unusual network problem with some Linux boxes at school. Mozilla Browser can view web pages fine via the proxy on port 80 and ftp works OK. I can ping the router but if I try pinging any web sites it just times out - it does seem to find the IP of the web site I'm pinging, but no data pongs back. So I can use google in a web browser, but ping google.co.uk just times out - I didn't know that was possible!
I'm also having trouble allocating static IPs to the boxes. I've made "reservations" on the Windows NT DHCP server of the IP addresses I want in the range 10.25.20.101 - 10.25.20.108 but I'm having trouble getting /etc/network/interfaces set up correctly to connect to the network using them.
This is the current contents of /etc/network/interfaces: =================================== auto lo iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.25.20.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 10.25.16.1 #network 10.25.16.0 #broadcast 10.25.16.255 ===================================
After I make changes I do ifdown eth0 and then ifup eth0, which usually results in a "network unreachable" message.
Is there a way of being able to address a computer by its name as opposed to it's IP if a dynamic IP is being used, allocated by the DHCP server? I'd like to be able to do ssh user@hostname instead of ssh user@000.000.000.000 for example which is my reason for wanting static IPs in the first place. One other simple question, how can I find out the IP of the computer I'm working on? I thought it was hostname -i but this just returns 127.0.0.1 instead of the computer's IP on the network.
One other unrelated problem. I've been having trouble changing the keyboard language setting for X from the default US to UK. I've changed the relevent values in /etc/X11/XF86Config and /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and restarted X, but for some reason it keeps reverting to US. The KDE keyboard setting is fine, but in fluxbox it uses a US layout. The funny thing is I've been able to change the language on my home PC using fluxbox, perhaps I'm missing something obvious.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'm not very experienced with any of these problems!
-- Ben "tola" Francis http://www.bourne-grammar.lincs.sch.uk/bgstux