Good day. New to the forum (and Linux admin) and glad to be here.

I ended up inheriting an IBM Intellistation Z Pro desktop with Red Hat 2.6.9-78.0.17.EL, that used to be part of a company network (hard IP, domain, etc).

I'm trying to boot and connect to my home internet provider.

With or without ethernet cable connected, the boot process seems to timeout on a number of steps (system logger, NFS Statd, automount5) and eventually get's stuck in NFS quotas.

I started looking at /etc (in single user mode) and of course there are a bunch of files (hosts, resolv.conf, etc) with hard IPs, domains, etc.

My questions are:
- how hard is to change network setting to use soft IP and be able to connect to my provider.
- If it is doable, is it a matter of running a setup utility or can I just edit some files.

Any input is appreciated.

it'll eventually time out and proceed with the startup.
try http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-que...#post302157715

Could try to fix all one at a time. I would dump the RH and install a distro of your own. Who knows what else would come up.

First, I like jefro's answer for simplicity. If, for some reason, you can't abandon what's already installed, start with cleaning out

- /etc/hosts: Limit yourself to the IPv4 and IPv6 localhost entries. Kill anything else.
- /etc/resolv.conf: Delete everything.
- /etc/fstab: Delete everything that uses NFS, but ~nothing else.~ Going overboard here could require a rescue disk for recovery.

and see if that changes where you hang.

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