No *nix Will Find Home Network - 2Wire i3812V Modem/Router
 

I've Googled, and searched here in LQ on this particular modem/router. Almost all of the posts here for 2Wire are about wifi. My problem is getting my desktop to recognize the network under Linux or BSD - hard wired, NOT wifi. I've tried booting the x86 ed of LM12 kde & lxde, TAILS, Puppy, DSL, and GhostBSD (all the latest ver.), and none of them will find the network. I've got a Realtek RTL8139/810x in the desktop. This is an old machine. P-4 2.4GHz, 512MB ram, shared video. The modem/router is a 2Wire i3812V from AT&T. I've looked through the manual and the router's settings but didn't see anything that looked out of ordinary.

Here is the output from ifconfig and route in Ubuntu & Puppy

Puppy 5.2
Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.
gentisle

hm...first of all, I have no clue of that device (device combo? google gave me a PDF manual with the description of a tandem i3812V & i38HG). I guess you connected your PC to the i38HG (home gateway is it I guess). Since this is not a simple modem, I guess it will use DHCP. So you should start "dhclient eth0". After a short time, it should return to the prompt and ifconfig should show an IP address on eth0. Normally most distro start dhcp clients automatically on connected ethernet interfaces, so of course that could mean that the problem resides somewhere else. you can do a "ps aux | grep dhc" before starting the dhclient to see if one is already running.

Well, I tried the ps command, and dhclient is loaded. I tried running it again, but it seemed to hang. There's got to be something weird about this modem/router. It works w/WinXP. Thanks for your suggestion.

hm...looks like the DHCP handshake doesnt work...dhclient returns either after a successfully retrieving an address or after waiting a certain amount of time for an answer. Hm...maybe "cat /var/log/syslog" after starting the dhclient and letting it time out cout give more informatino....and of course a packet sniffer trace could help.

Silly question: you said WinXP worked perfectly...did you try it on the same PC and the same LAN interface of the router?

I am using the Linux on the Windows PC. I've been using only live distros b/c it's not my PC, I can't install anything on it. I've attached my syslog file. This is from DEFT 7.1 which is based on Lubuntu. I really think it's in the modem/router. Since there is no problem w/Windows getting on the network, and Windows is configured for DHCP, so it's all automatic. Furthermore, When I lived elsewhere and had another ISP, there was no problem getting Linux, BSD, Solaris on the network. Maybe there's a setting in the modem/router, that I really don't understand, and therefore, it doesn't work???
gentisle

hm...the log indicates that the DHCP client doesnt get an offer on its requests...what you could do it to check under windows what IP the PC got (and the gateway IP) and set the manually under linux (IP should bei in the 192.168.x.x range)

Well, I looked up how to configure ubuntu network, and tried that, but still it won't configure and come up. One of the pages I found was ubuntu-networking-configuration-using-command-line. But it keeps acting like the machine is not connected to a network. My question is this? Why don't any of the distros automatically find the network like before on my other network. This makes me think it's something in the modem/router, but of course, AT&T doesn't support Linux, so there's no help there. I have used a laptop, and got it working on the wifi, so I can't figure out what's wrong w/this desktop situation.
Thanks for your help.
gentisle

What is the IP Address the router gives your PC via DHCP under Windows?

Right now it's 192.168.1.65, but I've seen it at ...73.

I guess I could post all of the settings for the router here, but as I said, it looks normal to me. However, since I don't know what a lot of those things mean, what looks normal to me is not necessarily normal.

ipconfig /all looks like this:

One more thing I keep forgetting to mention. This computer is down stairs, and the modem is upstairs. I hooked another router (Netgear) up where the line comes in down here, just to see if that would make any difference. No change, still won't recognize a network.