eeePC 2G Surfs will no longer connect to network, wired or wireless
 

I have a pair of EeePC 2G Surf machines I use to control some demos. They haven't been used in months, but worked reasonably well. Recently, I powered them up, and they work, but neither will connect to either a wired or wireless network.

With a network cable plugged in, they see the cable electrically, and connecting to a LAN produces "enabled". But DNS lookups won't work. "netstat -r" shows an gateway of "*", so the machine hasn't found an outbound route.

Attempting to connect wirelessly finds all the nearby wireless LANs, but connection attempts produce the repeated "No leases in persistent database" message. (This is a known EeePC 2G Surf distro bug. But this time, deleting the access point from the list and re-entering it again with the password doesn't help.)

This fails for both EeePC 2G Surf machines. Repeat, BOTH machines. Four months ago, they worked. Do they end-of-life themselves automatically, or what?

A Windows 7 EeePC Seashell machine immediately connects to either the wired LAN, using the same cable, or either of two available wireless LANs.

The other end of the LAN cable goes to a ZTE W300 wireless/wired DSL router.

(No, I can't install Ubuntu/Debian/whatever because the big distros won't fit on these little machines with 2GB of file space. I experimented with Puppy Linux once, but one of its overly verbose dialogs didn't fit on the screen, so that was a dead end.)

Some things to look at. Your DHCP server, are you sure it has enough IP addresses to go around? I have had it happen they were all in use.

There are two commonly used clients to get a IP address. dhcpcd, and dhclient. I have seen threads where one would work the other would not. Same network. There are man pages for both, so, what ever one your systems are using, the other may get you going.

No, I don't believe that, even with your strange failure.

Thanks. I have to go out, but I'll check that when I get back. I doubt the router is out of IP addresses; it's only supporting 2 devices normally. And yes, I've tried restarting the router. Doesn't help. More later.