Arrgh!! Please help, I'm tearing my hair out.

I have 2 PC's connected with a CAT 5 crossover cable. One machine runs Windows XP and has a printer which is shared to the network.

My machine boots into XP, 98SE or Mandrake 9.1

In XP or 98SE, networking is no problem, both machines see each other, printer and files shared ok no probs.

When I first installed Mandrake, the two machines worked fine together and I got the printer working via SAMBA - I have the Mandrake printer test page to prove it !!!

However, since I did a complete re-install of Mandrake (which I have done several times before without problem) I can no longer use the network. I can't ping either way, nothing.

Nothing has changed - hardware all the same, net settings all the same - it just DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE!!!! I tried another re-install - still no joy. This is so frustrating as it WAS working.

IP addresses are 192.168.1.1(Mandrake) and 192.168.1.2 (XP)
Net mask 255.255.255.0

The Mandrake machine pings itself and 127.0.0.1 no probs. I do not have any firewall set up at the moment.


Any suggestions gratefully received - I am a Linux newbie

here is the output of ifconfig eth0:-

[root@ian ian]# ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:192.168.1.1 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:35 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:613 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:16 Base address:0xe800

and route

[root@ian ian]# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
212.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 ippp0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default lineone-cl2-hg8 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ippp0

Ok, it appears it is a problem with the VIA Rhine driver.

Run Linux with "force no APIC" and all is well !!!


Phew, it's only taken me a week to sort it out

I am so happy now