Ahoy,

I'm trying to set-up a cable modem connection on my girlfriend's Mandrake 9.1 box, and I'm getting nowhere slowly!

Her parents' windows box works fine, connected by USB, though I don't know any Windows commands to show me things like the IP address DHCP has assigned to assist me in diagnosing what on earth Mandrake is doing!

In Mandrake, I've used the wizard to set-up a cable connection, and to use DHCP, etc. etc. but it doesn't seem to do any good. ifconfig shows eth0 and eth0:9 up, with an IP address assigned to eth0:9, but traceroute can't find any host names.

How does one go about setting this up? It's just a direct connection between eth0 on the box into the back of the cable modem.

There are several things that are probably going on here. Most cable modems are set up to a specific Ethernet Address - or address range.

The cable company can easily control this by telling the cable-modem to only give an IP address to one NIC. You should put in a hardware router that can deal with Ethernet Address masking, this way it will ask for an IP address as if it were the XP computer, then you could share the line between both computers using an always-on hardware solution. There are ways to get Linux to fake it's ethernet address as well, but this is a more advanced topic than "where Linux newbies come for help".