From: Wayne Stallwood Sent: 17 May 2006 22:21 On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 12:09 +0100, Tracy Dickerson wrote:

...

Then the next morning after switching on, the network card seemed to be found but would not connect to the outside world. Nothing had changed and I can't work out why this has happened.

Does the card have a link status light, if so is it on ?

What does ifconfig say ? (you may have to be root to run that, depending on your distribution)

Also run route to list the routing table and ping whatever is shown as the default gateway (that is the ip address of your housemates router)

If that works then try pinging an external address like google on 66.249.93.99

If that works then your name resolution is broken and you need to look at the contents of /etc/resolv.conf

This should have something like nameserver (ip address) where IP address should usually be the same as the IP address of your housemates router (the address returned as the default gateway when you ran the route command)

With that info we should be able to track it down.

Had a similar problem with an old Dell laptop a while back. Using a Live Linux CD (Ubuntu Breezy Badger in this case - it's only a matter of time before some marketing type christens them "boot'n'go" :o) ) was very useful in tracking down hardware vs. software issues.

Regards,

Keith ____________ CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else (q.v. EXPERT). Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary