I have a PC that was running Mdk 8.2 quite happily, when I upgraded to 9.0 the machine was not able to talk to the network. None of the hardware or cables have been changed and when I re-installed 8.2 everything was back to normal.

The symptoms are: when I attempt to ping an ip address on the network I get a "Destination Host Unreachable" error message. I have checked that eth0/loopback are loading ok - they are and I can ping localhost and the assigned ip address/syetm name.

I have stopped the firewall and cannot find any reason for this problem.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

What kind of connection do you have? You mentioned something about an assigned ip so I suppose you have a static ip and no need to set up any kind of dhcp client. Have you also setup the default gateway and the dns servers correctly? What about the netmasks?
Maybe if you post the output of the following commands someone could help you further:

ifconfig eth0
route
cat /etc/resolv.conf

The setup is on a LAN, 1 Mdk9 server, 1 W2K server pluse assorted Linux/Windows workstations. All the others work ok. DNS is handled by the Linux server.

Output from ifconfig eth0:
inet addr: 192.168.0.52 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

Output from route:
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default 192.168.0.2 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

/etc/resolv.conf does not exist.

Well where does the file /etc/nsswitch.conf tell it to look to resolve the host names?

Should be a line something like:
hosts: files nis

The above line would tell it to first look in the local files:
/etc/resolv.conf

But if it doesn't exist then it should use the next option which in this case would be the nis server. Well it should be able to at least use one of options in that line to resolve host names. You could always create the file /etc/resolv.conf and just add the ip's of your name servers there.

There is, the line reads:
hosts: files nisplus nis dns
which I believe is correct.


Already created resolv.conf - no effect.

Are you using Shorewall? Stopping Shorewall shuts down all network activity. You need to enter "shorewall clear" after " shorewall stop" to bypass the firewall.
Also, are you using the internet connection sharing in Mandrake Control center? There seems to be a problem where ics sets your lan ip to 192.168.1.1, sets up shorewall for this ip, but if you enter "ifconfig" in a console it says the ip is 192.168.0.1. I had to manually change the ip to 192.168.1.1 to get everything working.
This help at all?

You created this file, now what did you put inside of it ??

Should be in this format:

nameserver 0.0.0.0
nameserver 0.0.0.0

Where the 0.0.0.0 is the IP address of your ISP's DNS servers.

I followed that procedure for shutting down shorewall. My external internet connection is via a router and I have a caching DNS server locally. The resolv.conf file contains the ip address of this server.