Hi, I'm have a cable connection running to a netgear WGR614 router, and am having trouble connecting to the internet with my vaio tr3 notebook running gentoo via the builtin wired ethernet card.

ifconfig prints out the following for eth0

eth0
Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:46:E4:7E:03
inet addr: 192.168.0.4 Bcast 192.168.0.255 Mask 255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets: 5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:38 errors:0 dropped:0 overrunns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:830 (830.0 b) TX bytes: 3018 (2.9 Kb)

Also, the netgear router settings page appropriately shows the computer as an "attatched device" with the correct name, etc...

Does anyone have any ideas where I should start poking around to make this work?

Thanks,
Rand

What error do you get from it? Can you ping any machine in the internet?
Try google, by IP:
ping 66.102.7.104

I'm guessing you can access internet because eth0 has an IP.
If you can ping a google IP you only miss a dns server.

Great, that works! So now I guess my problem is portage specific... I'm trying to emerge a package, and I just get "Resolving gentoo.osuos1.org... failed: Temporary failure in name resolution." I'm guessing this is a problem with my dns settings... How do I set that up correctly?

Wow, I just typed 'dhcpcd eth0' and got it working now, but I'm really not sure why or what happened.

If dhcpcd is the correct way to set this eth connection, thats ok. When the dhcp transaction happens, the client machine receives also the dns server information. So, when you dhcp it correctly, the dns server problem is fixed.
You don't have to worry about dns anymore unless you are curious. I recall fixing dns things with /etc/resolv.conf (this is for debian. Don't know about gentoo specifics...). But you might want to see this file.

In my resolv.conf file I have

nameserver 24.48.208.194
nameserver 24.48.208.198
search vmyca.adelphia.net

As far as I know, this looks ok to me, but I still am having major problems resolving urls...

When I boot up, I see this:

* Starting eth0
* Bringing up eth0
* Configuration not set for eth0 -assuming dhcp
* dhcp
* Running dhcpcd ... [ !! ]
* ERROR: Problem starting needed services.
* "netmount" was not started.

randcv
This error is because "netmount" uses eth0 so if your NIC has not started neither will netmount

The file you need to look at is /etc/conf.d/net and decide how you want eth0 to start

Then add eth0 to default run level so that it starts on boot
Pete