(Ted Harding) wrote:
[Sorry, I first inadvertently mailed this from the wrong address]
On 19-Aug-07 17:02:21, CDW (Linux) wrote:
Due to some finger trouble on my part, I lost the Mandrake 10.2 system on my second hard drive which is on my dual-boot machine. The other OS is XP and that's where I'm writing this.
Over some weeks prior to my hosing of Mandrake, the Internet side of Linux had been getting distinctly unreliable. I'd say that at least 50% of the time it wouldn't work. Other days I'd boot into it and it would work fine. All the time it would say that the network was up but it wouldn't talk to the router (all static IP addresses as they are under Windows).
Having lost Mandrake 10.2, I thought I'd give a later version a go. The install all went well with no problems except that it wouldn't bring up the network to search for updates. I gave up with Mandrake at that point and decided I'd take a look at ubuntu so grabbed a copy of that. I was impressed that it found all the Windows hardware and allowed me to enter an IP address from the GUI prior to install. But it still wouldn't talk to the ADSL router. At this point you might imagine that I had a faulty network card but with no changes, other than to the OS, the network is running fine. I watched the light on the back of the LAN card and as XP was rebooting, the green LED illuminated. At no time does it do so in Linux. It's back with Mandrake Spring by the way now as I couldn't persuade Ubuntu to write a sensible boot loder config and at least Mandrake did that, or should that be Mandriva now?
Any ideas as to what I should have a try at now?
There's a lot of possibilities for this!
One thing to look at is whether you have a default gateway set up in Linux. If (as root) you enter the command
route
you should see somthing like
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
where the "192.168.1.1" should be replaced by the IP address of your actual router. If you don't get a "default" line in the output from "route" then nothing for outside will get to the router.
I get the following :- Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 169.254.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo default 192.168.1.51 0.0.0.0 UG 10 0 0 eth0
Ah. I've just noticed that there's a 169.254.0.0 address in my list. That would appear to come from a DHCP config but I purposely didn't set that so would that be stopping it working? If so, how do I remove it?
Another thing to look at is the output from
ifconfig
This should show (as well as a similar block for "lo") something like
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:10:5A:8A:FB:90 inet addr:192.168.1.5 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:27965 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:26720 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:30 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:7067225 (6.7 Mb) TX bytes:2998330 (2.8 Mb) Interrupt:3 Base address:0x310
Check in particular that you have an "UP" in there; and that the IP address (here "192.168.1.5") is on the same net "192.169.1.0" as in the routing table, and that the router is also on the same net.
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:F4:4A:08:C7 inet addr:192.168.1.132 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::240:f4ff:fe4a:8c7/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) Interrupt:10 Base address:0x8000
What happens if you ping your router? If that works, then most ADSL routers have a web-based configuration interface, e.g. in my case I'd point the browser at http://192.168.1.1 -- so try that.
It doesn't reach the router and so I can't connect to the web page. It shows above that nothing has been sent or received on the eth0 connection.
If you can get as far as the ADSL router, then the problems lies somehere from there on out.
It's definitely within the Linux box, I'm sure of that but where I have little idea. But when booting, I noticed a message along the lines (it scrolled too quickly for me to write it down exactly) of error reading key net.ipv6.route.flush and something similar when I shut it down - I did explain that it was dual-boot and therefore I have to keep swapping between OS's to check. Having booted into XP, all the same hardware works so I imagine that this is all software/config related. The ironic part is that I'm trying to convince my son that I'm trying to use Linux because it's more reliable!
Hoping this helps,
It's pointing in the right direction I feel, so thanks.