Whenever I turn on my SuSE 10.0 Linux computer and it connects to the internet, the router loses the connection. (The status says the PPP is down).

We have a home network with 2 Windows XP computers and my Linux computer connected through the router (Westell Versalink) and this problem does not happen when the Windows computers are turned on, just the Linux one. We use Verizon DSL service. The problem is very annoying to the Windows users so I have to announce that am turning the Linux box on.

I use Samba to send my files to and from the Windows boxes. I'm thinking that maybe I set something up wrong with that?

I've seen messages like these in the Samba and startup logs:
[2007/01/03 11:52:07, 0] nmbd/nmbd_become_lmb.c:become_local_master_stage2(396)

and:
Samba name server LINUX is now a local master browser for workgroup <workgroup> on subnet 192.xxx.x.xx

Does this have anything to do with the problem?

**
<workgroup> name substituted
xxx.x.xx substituted x for actual numbers

Is it possible you've set a static IP for the suse box that is identical to the IP for the router's internal interface?

That could be possible. I think that the connection software SuSE uses could have done that because I never had to mess with anything like that when this machine was set up.

How do I find this out?

Well, if you didn't explicitly set a static IP then suse should be acting as a dhcp client. (Which means my idea is probably not the case.)

You can check your router manual to find out the IP address of its internal interface. It's the same address you use for its web config tool, assuming it has one. It will be set by default to some private address such as 192.168.1.1, 10.0.0.1, 172.17.1.1, etc.

To check the IP on the suse box you can use /sbin/ifconfig

I had suspected that I had set something up wrong with Samba, since I had both a Samba server and client set up. So I changed the option on the server from "start on bootup" to "manual" and this time when I started the computer up, the light on the router did not turn red but the router log said that the dsl connection went down then came back up. My husband's Windows computer seemed to have no trouble this time when getting e-mail while the Linux computer was in the process of starting up. I tried another experiment and turned on my windows computer and this time, the dsl connection went down (the light did not turn red though) and then came back up.

So, maybe it is a router problem and not a problem with the computer after all.

Maybe so - it sounds strange. Unfortunately it's not a simple hypothesis to test (unless you have another router laying around that you can swap it with). Let us know if you get it figured out.

It doesn't sound likely that Samba would cause a router to go offline. However, when I googled for "Westell Versalink", I found this isn't a unique problem, and is common with certain versions of the device:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13747078