I'm not sure where to start but pretty much i have a large paper weight.. My debian desktop machine that i recently fired back up and although it is communicating with the modem (shaw cable moterola 'extreme package') I have an on-board network card, and when i seen it was communicating and requesting an ip but it was not grabbing a lease, i was suspicious that perhaps it was a piece of hardware. I installed a second nic as eth1, but to my surprise it was the same result. I plugged a 400 Mhz windows machine and it was pretty much plug and play on the same modem/cable and grabbed an ip right away, but the linux machine will not grab a dhcp lease no matter what i've tried.. i've checked the logs and there are no errors whatsoever. If somone has any ideas could they please share their insight with me? I really don't want to be on this windows machine much longer lol!

Make sure that you use DHCP on the interface with the Cable Modem. ( Unless Canadian cable companies do things dramatically different )
If you have another interface such as wireless, you might have a conflict where both interfaces end up on the same subnet. Try shutting it down.

Use the "ifconfig" or "ip" command to find out whether your interface got an IP address, netmask, etc. Also check the /etc/resolve.conf file. It should be changed by the DHCP client on your computer with the nameserver address added.

Also, make sure that you have a DHCP client installed.

Other things to look at:

• lspci -v to list the NIC hardware information
• output of "dmesg" and /var/log/messages may contain information on errors when the network starts up
• output of the route command. Check if the default gateway matches the modem's IP address.
• A new device connected to the cable modem needs to be requisitioned. Point your browser at the IP address of the modem, or maybe the web site of your ISP.

If you change the hardware that's plugged in to a cable modem, you have to power the modem off for a minute or two (pull the plug, don't use the switch on the top) before it will talk to the new device. Otherwise it will just "pretend" to talk to it.

If you've already tried this, show us your DHCP client's output.