As I stated in my earlier post, linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=164570,
I was going to try and make the parallel connection while running the Mandrake Live CD on my laptop (with rh9 installed on my desktop). Anyway, I tried it - after reading a lot of information from the HOW-TO doc on PLIP connections.

I added the IPs to the /etc/hosts file: 10.0.0.1 (desktop, named "one") and 10.0.0.2 (laptop, named "two"). I then configured the SLIP connection as necessary. It seemed to have worked - ifconfig listed plip0 with the correct IP address and everything looked right.

Here's what I got from typing # ifconfig:

plip0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr FC:FC:0A:00:00:01
inet addr:10.0.0.1 P-t-P:10.0.0.2 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:1 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:255 Base address:0x378

Unfortunately when i tried to check the connections (pinging, telneting, ftping), on both machines all I got was timeouts.

I dont know what could be the problem. My only possible guess is that it has something to do with the interrupt of plip0. As you can see, it was listed as 255 on BOTH computers. I know normally its supposed to be something like 7. So I tried fixing it with the following command:
# ifconfig plip0 irq 7
io:addr: SIOCSIFMAP: Operation not supported << and got this error

On a side note because you may have thought I should try it, I already checked the BIOS configuration and it lists the parallel port IRQ as 7.

Does anyone have any ideas what's wrong and what I could do to fix it? Would love to hear from you.


PS: Thanks for all the help so far to those who responded to my last post.