Using a router on Mandrake 9.1
 

I have been struggling to get my ADSL connection to start reliably via a router for over a month.

The ADSL connection rarely starts first time, most of the time it starts if I stop and restart the network service several times, perhaps after 10mins or so of stopping and restarting, and some of the time it never starts no matter how many times I restart the network... this is very curious behaviour, and all without any re-configuration.

I am using Mandrake 9.1, a Dynamode router and an Intel ethernet card (the driver is eepro100). I have configured the LAN to use bootp to get its IP dynamically (as instructed by my ISP). I'm sure it would be more reliable if I could use a static IP, but I'm not sure what this is for my connection. When it does connect, the IP I get is local in someway (ie. it starts 192.168..., which I think means it's a local IP?), though this works somehow. I've tried connecting to my router directly in a web browser as per instructions (on 10.0.0.2) but this does not work (eg. ping says "Destination Net Unreachable").

Any help greatly appreciated as it's driving me nuts!

(I've deleted this reply as I've edited my original posting now.)