[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.

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.

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.

If you can get as far as the ADSL router, then the problems lies somehere from there on out.

Hoping this helps, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Aug-07 Time: 18:31:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Aug-07 Time: 18:53:27 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 18:02 +0100, CDW (Linux) wrote:

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.

The link light (if it is a link light but if there is only 1 this is usually the case) operates at the very lowest level, in fact in many cases it will work without an OS being loaded. Until you get that to come on in linux there isn't much point playing with the IP configuration.

Out of interest at the router end do you get a link light for the port the machine is plugged into ?

I'd suggest that as rare as it is nowadays, you have a network card that has dubious support in Linux or there is some miss-configuration at the interface level.

Do you know what card (or chipset) it is.

You may as well get this from Linux with the lspci command Then while you are there run the following and have a look at the output

sudo mii-tool

It's possible that the linux driver has miss-negotiated the link speed (everything defaults to auto nowadays, but with certain combinations of cards, cables and hubs/switches/routers you can get a problem)

You could also try forcing the interface down to the lowest level.

sudo mii-tool --force=10baseT-HD

and to save another boot grep dmesg for things like "thernet" "link" etc and see if there are any relevant error messages.

dmesg | grep "thernet"

(most likely it is Ethernet and not ethernet but by leaving off the E we capture both)