Newbie warning, I've never set up a home network before. I have at the moment, one windoze XP box and one SUSE 9.3 box. I can sucessfully connect to the internet via the cable modem to either one. I have three seperate routers, seven known good cables but when any of the routers are connected to the boxes, I cannot ping the router (192.168.0.1 on two and on the other 192.168.1.1). I have reset everything countless times, changed cables, called tech support and all I get is head scratching then "the router is bad, here is an RMA number". I can't believe all three routers are bad with the same prob. Two are new bought today.

The windoze box will pop up the config dialogue in IE that throws an error that says I have a bad cable between the router sand computer. run>cmd ping or ipconfig/renew returns timeout errors. (Since I can connect to the modem, I assume that I have the correct ethernet cables and not cross-connect cables.)

I have got to believe it is something simple I am overlooking. Is there any way possible that the modem can be it? It is a DLink DCM-200. I assume the ping is between the box and the router, and the modem is not a part of the picture in this part of the process.

Is there anything I can do to determine what the heck is going on? Any help will be appreciated.

What type of routers are we looking at?

I'd assume that you need to program the router with the MAC address from either your Windows or Linux machine so the cable modem (cable provider's) DHCP server will assign it an IP address.

If you connect both the Windows and Linux machine to the router and give assign them IP addresses, can they ping each other?

Watch out for the uplink port.

D-Link is not terribly helpful on their web page, but it does sound like the DCM-200 acts as a DHCP server. This means that it can tell other hardware that get plugged into it which IP address they should use.

From the XP computer: plug it into the modem directly, and go start-> run-> and type cmd. This should open a black command prompt. Now type:
ipconfig /renew

You will want to pay attention to the IP Address, but the important part is knowing the Default Gateway's addess. This number should be written on the modem. If it is not, you should probably write it on a peice of masking tape or something.

Now plug it into the router. Don't plug anything else in yet. Try the "ipconfig /renew" command again. Hopefully the Gateway will have changed. If it doesn't, you will probably need to tell the router to change it. Depending on the make and model, you usually can do this from a web browser by typing http:// followe by the Gateway's IP address (Bear in mind that the router's each have two IP addresses, one for the local net, and one for the WAN port. Leave the WAN on DHCP). 192.168.1.1 isn't a bad choice to use if the modem is already 192.168.0.1.

In the end, you will want both systems hooked up to the router, and the cable modem hooked up to the WAN port of the router.

(This is all assuming that the cable modem handles the connection. If this is not the case, then special configuration is needed in the router instead of on the computers, which is what your ISP would have told you to do.)

I'll add my bit too ...

I've just been through what you're going through.
Going through the router to the cable modem with only one computer plugged in seems like a good test tho.

With your newest router (to keep things constant) - and both machines plugged in. You still need to configure

1. the ethernet cards for both machines
2. the route daemon (man route)
3. /etc/hosts (host tables in each host)
4. firewall (to let packets from other hosts?)

If any of these is not configured, it won't work.

So a good idea would be to tell us exactly how you have configured everything ... your routes, the IP's, everything that you did to make the LAN+router go.

This is what I did/discovered so far. I left the Linux box connected to the modem so I can have internet access. Per a suggestion above, I'm connecting a Netgear WGR614 v4 to the windoze box without anything going to the modem. In this configuration, the network icon in the start bar says it is connected to the internet, different from before. When I open a browser, it still says that it is not connected to the router. (a default screen automagically comes up) I can, however open a browser and go to http://routerlogin.com/basicsetting.htm . I get the router set up there. This of course tells me that my hardwaree is probably OK, and I just need to configure something.

Doing start>run>cmd, I did ipconfig/renew again for the umpteenth time, but this time it was sucessful. I also can ping the router now. Again, this is all with the router connected to the box and not the modem too.

I'll post this message then turn the systems off and connect everything up to see if I have connectivity now.

I recabled and rebooted, but I still cannot connect to the internet. When I open a browser, all I get is the screen asking me to configure the router. It says I do not have a cable between the router and computer. I have icons saying that I am connected to the internet, but can only go to http://routerlogin.com/basicsetting.htm like before. On one of the screens, I can see the IP addresses, device names and MAC addresses of both machines.

Again, any further help will be appreciated. Reading the posts here, I only marginally understand some of the suggestions but will continue to plod along.

I don't know what is telling you that you are not connected to the router. This is a source of confusion to me. If you can get to http://routerlogin.com/basicsetting.htm, then you are obviously connected (that web page is inside the router.)

Basically, the modem should be connected to the WAN port of the router. Because of this, the modem should assign an IP address to the WAN port of the router by using DHCP. Let's pretend that the modem uses 192.168.0.1, and it assigns the router the address of 192.168.0.2. I don't know this for sure at all, but you might. These would be the numbers generated by ipconfig if you plugged the XP box into the modem directly (or by ifconfig and route commands on the linux box, next to eth0 and default respectively).

Now your router should be setup something like this:
* WAN port set to DHCP
* Internal IP address set to 192.168.1.1 (a different subnet than the one used by the modem)
* Setup to issue IP addresses to the computers via DHCP starting with (lets say) 192.168.1.10 and ending with 192.168.1.20.

Can you verify that the modem is indeed issuing addresses using DHCP? How did you get the linux box up? If it was done for you, then it is DHCP. If you needed to mess with addresses, routes,dns servers, or even passwords (in config files) then it is probably something else.

I got it fixed, just not the way I wanted. I bought a new Linksys router and modem.

Here is what was happening- I'm suspecting the D-Link DCM-200 modem was bad in some way. When I plugged the router into the computers sans modem, it recognised both computers and I could see the computers, MAC addresses and device names. I could ping between them and the router. Doing an ipconfig/renew on the windoze box left me with a working (sort of) router at this point. When I reconnected the modem to the router, then rebooted everything of course, it would bring up the connection wizard in the browser, then sucessfully search for the modem. It found the modem, but insisted it had a static IP address. Nothing I could do would give me a dynamic address from the modem. Netgear tech support took me through an hour of things to try (for the second time) but in the end he said it was a bad router. Given that I had three routers do the exact same thing, I thought differently. I bought the Linksys components to try knowing that they could be returned if they didn't work either.

In hind sight, here are some random comments-

If you have several routers, cables and computers that will not work, it is the cable modem, no matter what anyone says.

NETGEAR support was fantastic.

The Linksys components look like they are miles above the D-Link and Netgear components.