Hello everybody,

I'm attempting to install Debian on a server that I don't have physical access to. The server is currently running a version of Red Hat. I'm following the directions at trilldev.sourceforge.net/files/remotedeb.html .

I've gotten to the point where the core Debian files/kernel are installed, but when I restart into Debian, the network won't come up. Each time that happens, I'm forced to use my server-provider's "recovery tool," a Web interface that lets me hard-reboot the machine into a ramdisk environment, from which I can manually mount either the Red Hat or Debian partitions.

The Red Hat partition -- which still exists and is accessible via SSH -- uses DHCP to connect to the network. But I cannot get networking to work on the Debian partition with DHCP. I've tried the dhcp-client, dhcp3-client and pump packages.

So it seems to me there's something special I need to configure for the DHCP client. But I don't know what/where it is. On the Red Hat partition, there's a file called /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf that contains the following:

I've copied-and-pasted that into the files /etc/dhclient.conf and /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf on the Debian partition, but the box remains unpingable when I boot into Debian.

Debian *does* appear to assign eth0 properly. I've modified the init scripts to save the output of "ifconfig" and "route -n" to a file, and the ifconfig output includes eth0 with the proper IP address, etc. But the routing tables are empty.

I have also tried configuring the IP statically, but I'm not sure what the correct values for netmask, network, gateway, are broadcast are. I've called the server provider (1and1) three times to get this information, but I've gotten different numbers each time. I've tried about a dozen of different combinations, but not one has worked.

What else can I try to get the networking to work? I have a feeling the server provider has some sort of strange network setup, but I don't know how to configure Debian to use it.

Thanks,
Adrian