I have an old laptop running Fedora Core 6. I need to update it for a project at work. I am using my home network and a hard wired connection. I can ping my router, and ifconfig shows my interface is active and has the right IP address assigned. When I try to open the GUI package updater, it fails to connect. Opening an browser also fails to connect. My firewall is turned off. I suspect a service is not starting, but everything I can think of is running. Any ideas on why layer 3 is working, but my apps won't connect to the Internet?

I will say that Fedora Core 6 is quite old, especially considering Fedora's 13-month support period. Is there a reason you are running such an old distribution?

In all honesty my first advice would be installation of Fedora Core 14

@chrisof4:

Can you ping past your router by IP address? (i.e. Is it name resolution that's actually failing?)

If so, check /etc/resolv.conf. You may need to populate it with proper nameservers.

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And, yes, FC6 is ancient and unsupported.

Thank you for the quick replies. I am trying to get on the internet so I can up date the system since it is so old and bring the system to a current level (14 I guess?). The laptop does not have a CD rom and my USB attached one is at work. I need to get the patches done tonight, so I really need it to happen over the Internet.

I was able to ping past the router. I did a ping to 8.8.8.8 (google DNS) and it worked.

So add Google DNS (or OpenDNS, or your ISP's DNS) to /etc/resolv.conf, a la:
(That's OpenDNS in my example.)

I checked resolv.conf. I was not sure about the addresses in there as they were added by my work so I commented them out and replaced them with 8.8.8.8. The browser works now, but not the package updater. Any ideas on name server addresses for the package updater?

---------- Post added 03-08-11 at 08:42 PM ----------

Trying those addresses now. I will report back. Thanks a ton.

Here's the thing: the package updater may very well be resolving names now that you've populated resolv.conf.

But because FC6 is unsupported, it may be simply barfing upon discovering there are no package updates (or package updates are somehow programmatically prohibited - just a guess).

Yeah, you may be right. I put the openDNS addresses in and the browser still works, but package updater won't. It still gives the generic error which defaults as your network is not working. It does it very quickly now, whereas it used to take a long time, so you are probably right, it is just not finding any packages. Hmmm...I think I have Ubuntu on a stick somewhere. Maybe I can use that instead. Thanks very much for the assistance.

As stated FC6 is no longer supported and since so many packages have changed that trying to update to F14 is a bad idea. It would be best to install from scratch.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrad...rade_using_yum

the software repos for 6 were moved a long tine ago to the historical archives
the locations that fedora 6 shipped with are no longer there
the web addresses are not there any more

and if they were there IS NO updates for 6 , and there have not been any for 3 years .

see this fedoraforun topic
"EOL (End Of Life) Versions"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forumdisplay.php?f=75