I have recently replaced my router, and I'm having trouble with one of the two machines on my home network. Machine B (Sarge) works fine with the new router -- no new configuration was required. But system B (Sid) won't connect no matter what I seem to do (it did connect fine before I replaced the router).

I've compared various files between the two computers: interfaces, hosts, hosts.allow, hosts.deny, resolv.conf. When I make the interfaces file on system B use dhcp (iface eth0 inet dhcp), as on system A, I lose my ethernet connection as well. ifconfig only shows the loopback. When I use static as the setting for eth0 (iface eth0 inet static), the card returns. But the router manual says I need to use dhcp, and since system A (with dhcp) is working, I figure this might be the crux of my problem.

When I use the dhcp setting for eth0 on system B, and then restart networking, it says it can't load the eth0 card. "ifconfig eth0 up" returns no errors, however. But in either case, pinging the router does not work. I get "network is unreachable."

And -- when I do route, the Destination shows as 192.168.1.0 -- which is an ip I don't recognize. The router is 192.168.2.1. On the system that works, it's listed that way in the resolv.conf file, shows that ip in route, and says that's the correct ip in the manual. So I'm pretty sure I also have to change the Destination ip on system B. How do I do that?

And any other helpful suggestions would be most welcome. This is driving me crazy (especially since the Debian networking howto seems to be quite different than my actual Debian systems).

Thanks.
Ross

Well, I haven't rebooted yet, so it may not stick, but I think I got it. I'm now online. The solution was in the interfaces file:

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.2.101
gateway 192.168.2.1
netmask 255.255.255.0

The system required all three settings (address, gateway, netmask) plus a static ip address. So much for the router manual.