I am trying to get road runner to work on mandrake 8.1 and i have followed the directions i found on this board and what i have found on the net and i have not gotten it to work yet. And the ifconfig command doesn't work. My info is
gateway: 66.25.0.1
dhcp:24.28.99.62
dns:24.28.99.62
24.28.99.63
24.93.35.33
What would my hostname be? I tried houston.rr.com but when i start gnome it says that it cant be found or cant connect and that it will make it unstable. Then when i try to edit the settings in the mandrake control thing it freezes sometimes and lags. I tried useing the wizard for the cable modem and i put in all the info and that didn't work so i tried to edit the ifcfg-eth0 file but still wont connect. What am i doing wrong and how can i connect to the internet?

Your hostname is the name of your machine on the network (without the domain name).

Hostname is also chosen method Windows passes to the 'client-id' parameter that can be sent as an option by the client when negotiating a dhcp lease.

Most cable modem ISPs use the client-id (incorrectly referred to as hostname in Windows) as a means of identifying the machine on the subnet.

In short - your ISP gave you a client-id that they will tell you to use as the 'hostname' for your windows box; use that as the client-id in linux.