ok i am a 24 hour newbie to linux. i messed with beOs for a while until i gave up trying to get any kind of networking out of it. I got mandrake 7.2 running with a 3com 905 card. i think the card is loaded fine.

I can't connect to the internet with my box, I live in a building that has a 1Mb sdsl connection in the basement with a router sending the connection to each apartment. I have 2 dns's, i have a gateway that is the same as my ip except it ends in .193, and my subnet mask is 255.255.255.192, i can't seem to get my internet connection running with mandrake 7.2. i enter this all into the drakConf -> network and internet configuration, and alas NO INTERNET.... can someone see what i am doing wrong, or do i have to configure something else...i can't even find a way to look at each card that is plugged into my machine....i need help bad, if someone knows how to set up an internet connection in my weird case..please let meknow..thanks...

To see which network interfaces are really up and running try the command

# ifconfig
# ifconfig -a ;Show even those interfaces that are down for the moment

What type of rotuer is in the basement? Does the router support dhcp? How do you know your IP, netmask and brodcast addresses?

If the router does support dhcp then the easiest way would be to call the dhcpc to get the IP info at boot.

/sbin/dhcpc -t 10

If the router does not support dhcp, then you will have to enter the correct IP, netmask and bcast info when you init the card with ipconfig. ex:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

When you say that you have 2 dns's. Does that mean that you are running a dns server on your box or do you have two IP addresses for a DNS server? If you have the DNS address they should go in /etc/resolv.conf in this format:

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Good Luck

Gary

When you know if you'r network device is running or not you should be on the way.
But if it does not, it might be because the 3com 509 card is a PnP card.
Linux does not work very well with that, in fact it would not load the driver for it, if it is sat to PnP.
If you have the driver for it, there i a dos program on the disk, where you can disable the PnP support.
When that is done you might want to find the driver for you'r netdevice, and then take a look at the insmod command which are used to load drivers into the running kernel.
Which means that, if Linux after disableing the PnP still does not find you'r netdevice you have to force it to load the driver.
Hope this could be of any help

Morten Torp