have ip from cable modem but can't surf.
 

title sums it up.
I thought my router might have been puking on me. But now I don't know, I hooked my pc directly to the modem with no router in between.
Modem dishes out ip address dhcp style, ifconfig shows the right ip, but no internet.
Running debian sid, I just apt-get upgraded yesterday, but this started this morning.

I'm posting from WindowsXP, so I know the modem works and my connection is fine.

Where should I start looking?

Have you got a default route set to your router? Do you have DNS configured?

You may want to try pinging to see how far you can get.

Not sure how to set default route. Ip is gotten dhcp.
I can't ping anything

resolve.conf has the usual ip addys.
ping 66.102.7.99 yields host unreachable
ping 66.94.230.32 yields host unreachable

The router gets an ip from the modem.

It seems that the only way I'm allowed to access the internet is when winXP is connected directly to the internet. Call me Oswald but strangely, that's the case.

Whether I'm behind the router or connected straight to the modem the box can't get on the internet unless it's booted into XP.
I'm baffled, please help.

what does the command
route
give you ?

It sounds like you do not have a default route set. You can confirm that if you type route. Here is what I see on my network.

Note the IP address as the default gateway. If you are missing that, that is the problem.

You can set a default route with Webmin. If you do not have it installed, I would recommend it. You can configure a lot of other things with it, from your own desktop or form another machine.

Some distros allow you to set them from utilities they provide. You could have a look through your documentation.

I think it was the router. I swapped out routers and everything worked fine again. I hadn't changed any router config. I don't get it why windows would work with it but not the debian install that had worked for months. Thanks for your help