So my network is unique; it's the free stuff I get with my apartment, which is one pretty fast (probably 20meg) charter connection propagated to all the apartments with a fiberoptics network. Each room is guaranteed a .5 meg connection. Sucks, but it's free. Now, after a period of inactivity, the connection goes inactive, presumably to give your bandwidth to people who are using it. BitTorrent connections, Pidgin, etc. do not keep the connection open, it seems to be only browser activity. When this happens, going to a page in FF instead reroutes to (I think) ip3vbn.com, which shows a loading screen, and then reroutes again to ip3networks.com, which says "You are now connected to the internet." Quite annoying, but it works.

Now, I'm on Linux Mint 5 Elyssa Fluxbox CE. It works fine with this network. However, I tried to install Arch a while ago, and it was unable to get a connection, which is doubly annoying with a fresh Arch install. The other day I tried Crunchbang. Being also based off of Ubuntu, you would think it would replicate LM's success. It doesn't, at least not when booted live. It worked fine within VirtualBox, but I'm assuming that's because LM passed the network config to VirtualBox. I haven't tried fully installing Crunchbang, but I can't imagine it would work then if it doesn't work on a LiveCD.

Can anyone help me out? I would love to be able to use other distros. Clearly it's possible. If nothing else, where would I find the network configuration for my current install so I can try copying it into others?

Well... are you getting anything? does ifconfig -a show anything? Did you install arch with a netinstall or with a full CD? and most of your networking information is in /etc, but where it is might differ between different distros.