I have been using redhat 9 on my Dell Inspiron 3800 for almost a year now. I have configured my Xircom ethernet card to use DHCP at work (A university campus) and I can connect to the net without any problems. When I bring my laptop home, I can't even get the NIC to get the IP information. My router is set up as a DHCP server. My router can bind a specific IP address to a MAC address, so I tried setting it up with a static IP. I was able to get the NIC to get the IP address, but I could not ping anything but myself. No internet, etc. ...

This seems really wierd to me, because it works fine at work, but if anyone could help me, I would appreciate it!

Hi, and Welcome to LQ !

When your laptop is on DHCP, it is likely that it didn't get only an IP address from the DHCP server, but other relevant setup like the default gateway and proxy server.

When you configure a static IP, you will also need to configure the default gateway yourself, which in this case will be your router at home.

To set a default gateway, type (as root):

route add default gw <ip of router>

also, make sure that both your laptop IP and your router's inside interface IP are in the same netwerk. e.g. 10.1.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 and 10.1.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0

Hope this helps.