I'm wondering if anyone has some insight and suggestion. I'm clearly enough of a green horn to still get myself into deep doo-doo.

I just now upgraded all packages with aptitude. Before that, I would boot and I would automatically get an IP address from my adsl router and eth0 would be up. Now, after boot, only 'lo' is up. I do: ifconfig eth0 up. Then I get:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:BA:7C:9C:FC
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:3 Base address:0x300

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:3712 (3.6 KiB) TX bytes:3712 (3.6 KiB)

And it's pretty clear that there's no inet addr line in the eth0 listing.

It looks like my pcimcia card is ok (but how does one confirm this besides looking at the lights on the dongle, which happen to be on?)

Examining packages in aptitude, it's pretty clear that dhcp, dhcp-client, dhcp3-client, dhcpcd, dhcp-relay, and dhcp3-relay are all now not installed. (Well, I certainly didn't want that to happen!).

Maybe because eth0 doesn't come up at boot there's something wrong besides a missing dhcp client?

Can you suggest to me which package(s) should I install? Is one (or more) preferred?

Assuming I install what's necessary, how do I get dhcp to automatically do it's job at boot? Will the install take care of this, maybe by establishing links in rc_number.d to a script?

Now that I can't install over the net, where can I find out how to get the packages onto my working debian machine (without installing them) and where do I put them on the so that aptitude can then find them and install them? (Or if you know the essentials, or another way to do it, please tell ;-)

Is it possible that the right packages are still hiding out somewhere in /var?

Also, _all_ packages in aptitude are now marked with a 'U' and each package says it's from an untrusted source. Why? They weren't so marked before this last round of package upgrades and I didn't mess with any config files.

Thanks in advance for your help.

kernel 2.4.24
ADSL router
mixed debian installation, testing preferred
Dell Inspiron 8100

Ok, perhaps this could be some kind of weirdness, but.......


So I booted up on a Knoppix CD. DHCP provoided by the CD allowed me to do some things on the web. I then rebooted without the CD.

Bingo, for some reason, there is a running DHCP client and an IP address!

I shut it down and did a cold boot. It still works. Wow.

Don't ask me what happened, I didn't do anything more than what's described here.

Guess I'll re-post if the phenomenon returns.

Maybe there was just a temporary problem with the DHCP -server you should be getting your IP from? I think that's the most likely explanation.