I recently installed RHEL 4 WS on my EMachines m6805 laptop. When booting, if the ethernet cable is plugged in, I get "Determining IP Address: Failed". When the cable is unpluged: same except it also prompts me to check cable. This tells me that when the cable is connected, it knows, but won't get an IP. I have a via-rhine nic, which shows up in lsmod. Ideas?


/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=DHCP
HWADDR=mac
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE: ETHERNET
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
IPV6INIT=no

ifconfig -a

eth0:
Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr (mac address)
inet6 addr: fe80::203:25ff:fe10:811f/64 Scope: Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU: 1500 Metric:1
packet info for two lines
Interrupt:11 Base address: 0x2c00

Sounds to me like a router problem. I mean, if you have that nic connected
to a router in wich case you should check if you have dhcp enabled on the
router.

Not a router issue. I have tested in 3 different locations. I should have mentioned that when I boot into windows xp, the eth0 works just fine at all 3 locations.

Well, I had the same problem once. My nic didn't get any IP from
dhcp server. I managed to solve it by editing
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

and anabled dhcp. File looked like this after edit:

# Config information for eth0:
IPADDR[0]=""
NETMASK[0]=""
USE_DHCP[0]="yes"
DHCP_HOSTNAME[0]="portable"

that solved the porblem but I'm using Salckware. I'm not
sure if RHEL uses that file. I think it wont hurt to check and try.

post outcome

regards

Unfortunatly, that file does not exist in RHEL. Looked around, and made sure that the network config files had dhcp enabled.