Hi

I've just moved to university, taking both my PC, and my new IBM thinkpad, both running suse 9.3. The thing is i need the internet on both machines, and the university wants to charge me £95 for both machines. currently, i have the PC connected to the net, and i am trying to set it up as a DHCP server, to give the laptop internet access.
I have been following the novell: cool solutions Router How-to, but as yet i have had no success. The pc has two NICs, one setup to connect to the net, and one setp as the internal card to do DHCP.
However, when my laptop searches for an address, it gets to DHCP, and fails to find an address:

eth0 (DHCP) . . . . . no IP address yet . . . backgrounding

interestingly the activity light does not come on on either the internal card on the pc, or the laptop. i have tried this with a differnt laptop, and with differnt cables, and i get the same problem. Unfortunately, i have no idea how to precede with solving the problem!
This is my first post so apologies if ive made any mistakes

Thanks in advance

James

Does the connection work with static ip adresses?
I believe you should try to make it work without the dhcp first.
Make one adress 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 and one 192.168.0.2/255.255.255.0
See if they can ping each other.

Set the second card on the pc and the laptop to have static internal network addresses (i.e. 192.168.XXX.XXX) and configure the server as a NAT gateway.

Put the internal ip address of the server into the gateway part of the laptops network config and the server will process all requests from the laptop and route them out over the uni's lan.

Ive tried setting them up with private static addresses as you said but ping reports

Destination Host Unreachable

i tried this before with another laptop, and recieved the same error.

Are you plugin the ethernet cable from the laptop straight to the PC or thru a switch?

If its straight to then you'll need a cross-over ethernet cable (some of the wires are crossed to map Tx to Rx and vice versa).

OK, i thought i was using crossover cable, turns out it was straight thru

anyway, now i can get the machines to ping each other with static IPs.
i set it back up to do DHCP, but the the problem still remains, that the the laptop does not recieve an IP from the computer, DHCP still fails, and it backgrounds to find the address 192.168.0.2
However, when i do ifconfig, it tells me the ip address is 192.168.0.254, which is the highest address the DHCP server will give

if i do route -n on the laptop, it gives the gateway as 192.168.0.1, which is correct

Hi

I've now got it working.
i can't ping google.com, which confused me, but it turns out i can't do that on the PC either, my packets are filtered. either way, i can now get on the internet on the laptop, thru the PC, i just can't ping anything other than the universities server, can anyone explain why this is, not that it matters really?

thanks
James