I'm dual-booting Mandrake 9.1 and Win98SE.

I recently installed a Linksys NR041 4-port router. Here's what happens:

In Win98SE, I changed my network card TCP/IP to automatically obtain an IP address, and all is happy. I can both network to my laptop, and dial-in to the Internet with no problems.

In Mandrake, as long as my ethernet cable is plugged into the computer, I can start KPPP and dial in, watch it connect, but once connected I can't do anything because no traffic is moving. I start up MozillaFirebird, and it gets stuck on resolving the address for my homepage. I of course can't do anything else on the net either. I tried different web pages, different browsers, tried to start a Gaim session... nothing requiring net access works. However, if I disconnect the ethernet cable from the back of my computer, it all works again.

I can connect to the router (192.168.1.1) through a browser without a problem. Someone suggested that disabling the DHCP server in the router would be the simplest solution, but I'd rather actually figure out what's wrong and fix the problem or set the right configuration.

I don't know if I can connect to my laptop using Mandrake, that's my next thing to figure out how to configure, which has been put on hold by the more pressing demise of my dial-up connection.

Mark
(I'm a Linux newbie. I've finally made the switch, since almost everything I was using on Windows was open source.)

Sometimes, when you have two interfaces connected,
(in your case ethernet and dial-up - ppp)
you'll end up with two default routes which can cause
a lot of confusion for the routing of your internet packages.

This could be your problem, since it works ok if you unplug the ethernet -- which likely brings down the interface and cancels it's default route.

The w98 may override the ethernet default route once the
dial-up is established, but Linux will let you have as many
default routes as you want.

A quick check would be, from a root console, "route -n".
If there are two routes to 0.0.0.0, then delete the one
going to the router (192.168.1.1)
"route del default gw 192.168.1.1"
and try to ping an internet address (like: www.yahoo.com).
If it works, then that was the problem.
Configure the router to not pass a default router
parameter to clients and it should still work for the
w98 side too.

-bbeers