I recently had a problem connecting to the internet via a cable modem & Mandrake 9.1. The problem was that even though I ran the internet config wizard , I kept getting network unreachable messages and simply could not connect to the internet for over two months.

Why am I telling you this? well the solution to my problem was simple and unrelated to the Mandrake configuration programs or my hardware set-up.!!

If you are going to use your new machine (with a new network interface card) with Mandrake 9.1, you must first register the MAC address of the network interface card with your cable ISP. My ISP allows me to register as many MAC addresses as i like which enables me to plug the modem directly into a registered interface without the need for setting up a LAN.

Once i did register my MAC address, I ran the network configuration program, specifiying the option to automatically discover ip address at boot time and had no problems at all.

I guess that If you simply switch from windows to Mandrake Linux on the same machine, with the same network interface card, there would be no need to do this.

I hope this helps someone.
Cheerio

Must be your ISP, mine is ntlworld, it's actually the mac address of the cable modem they automatically register and associate with your account.
Can use any amount of network devices that uses a mac address that I want although I have to reboot the cable modem everytime I change it. Apparently mine has a limit of four different mac addresses per day that can connect to it but I've never tested it, infact if I plug in one computer and use it for for a good while, plug in another use that for an hour or so I can plug in the original one and get back the ip address it had before, point is I don't have to explicitly register anything other than the initial cable modem setup, so it must be ISP specific, don't know why I'm saying this but hell, it's good to talk