OK, let's make sure I've got this right:

My understanding is that Dave, who is your flatmate, is a misguided individual who's running XP and has a permanent connection to th'Internet? (Openworld?)

You want to have your Mandrake 8.1 box set up with a static IP address for some reason?

AFAIK, if Dave sets up his XP machine to to share his connection (ICS - that a shared Internet connection?) then Windows says something like:

I'm now going to set myself to IP address 192.168.0.1 and I am going to be the DHCP master. You have *no* choice in this is you want to share your Internet connection. (I had no end of problems when I originally did this because my little Edimax print servers were also set up as DHCPs!)

So, given Dave's XP machine is now a DHCP master, if you want to have a static IP address on any machines on the LAN, you must tell the XP machine to only dish out IP address *above* a certain value. Then, you must have all your static IP address *below* that value. eg. Make the XP machine start the dynamic IP addresses at 192.168.0.100 - then ensure that any IP addresses you assign to be static, in the range 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.99

I'm afraid I don't know how to do this off the top of my head, I'd need to be in front of an XP machine and I don't know anyone stupid enough to run XP. ;-)

In reply to a couple of your specific questions:

>> Here's what I'm reading:
I can set my machine to statically be 192.168.0.2. The XP box can be the DHCP server and give out dynamic IP addresses to all others machines in the range of 192.168.0.1 --> 192.168.0.255, with the exception of 192.168.0.2 because that's my machine. <<

I must confess I'm not 100% sure whether the DHCP server is intelligent enough to look at all the existing IP address and ensure it doesn't dish out the same one as one on, say, your sister's machine. It might well just keep a local cache and assign a number not in its cache. Someone more knowledgeable out there might be able to tell us! But the way to prevent the possibility of this happening would be to make sure the XP machine will only dish IP addresses outside of your static IP address range as explained above.

>> Am I right so far? If this is so, would the XP box always be 192.168.0.1, and how could I stop it from assigning 192.168.0.2 to my sisters' computer if that's booted before mine? <<

Yes, the XP box - *because you made it the machine that shares its Internet connection* will *always* be 192.168.0.1. That's certainly the way Win2k works. I know 'cos I am that soldier! <g>

I am afraid I simply don't know - other than telling you to use the connection wizard - how to connect your Mandrake box to the Internet. As I said before, it just worked for me and I was bloody grateful for that. I'll go hacking around config files etc when I have more time, and more in depth knowledge of Linux. In fact when I have everything set up and going, I'm going to try connecting my jellyfish to a Linux box and get rid of the Windows 2k machine that connects directly to the Internet. :-)

Does that make sense now? Don't hesitate to post back it it's not clear.

Cheers,

Rob.

Found out a little earlier:
XP's 'automatic network configuration' wants all to be in the range of 10.1.1.x! Unfortunetly it doesn't tell you this (as far as we could see). No wonder I couldn't get the bloody thing to work! They couldn't see eachother! Thanks to all! With any luck, after Chrimbo I will have my old PII-333 back on it's feet (with a new mobo) and so I can set up a gateway myself which I will control!

I'm sure the little wizard does do it nicely, if:
1) Your housemate doesn't keep changing his mind as to whether he wants to be running XP's DHCP or DIY the networking setup. This is where the problems lied: XP wanted auto 10.1.1.x, we wanted manual 192.168.0.x!

2) You want to do things manually so that you know how they're done.

BTW, he doesn't have an always on connection, just a lowly 56K dial-up, but the principle will be the same since it's the networking part that was the problem.

I think that can now finally be laid to rest. Again, thanks to all.

PS Yes, he is a misguided individual running XP, but has sworn (and I'm going to keep him to it) that he will try Linux over Chrimbo. It's not as if I haven't got enough distros for him to play with.