OK, I have a motorola sb4200 cable modem. I am connecting it by an ethernet card. My NIC is a UNEX ND012. I tried installing slackware as a total newbie, tried following the cable modem tutorial on LINUX.COM, could not get it to work. I decided to try something a little more user friendly, so I installed Fedora Core 2.

I still cannot get net access to work. When I pull up the fedora network config tool I can see the connection listed as eth0, but it won't activate. When I try to activate it I get tons of activity, (the light on the modem goes on solid) but after a while I just get the message saying connection failed.

It works fine under windoes via USB. I am finding this very very frustrating. If anyone can shed any light for me I will be very gratefull. Thanks in advance.

Hello Tyke,

If you connect your Motorola Surfboard SB4200 to your computer with a Ethernet (TCP/IP) connection, you need to know a bit more about your computer.

One of the things you need to know are the IP addresses of your modem and computer. For some ISP's you also need to know the DNS IP addresses.

Probably your modem IP address is 192.168.100.1 and if you change your computers IP address to anything in the 192.168.100.XXX range (Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0)

Change in Linux "Network Configuration" the "Default Gateway" Address to 192.168.100.1

Try to find the first and second DNS server IP addresses from your provider, if you still can connect your modem to a Windows computer you can run IPconfig /all to see DNS address.

After this changes (you probably have to restart) you must be able to open your modem setup page (http://192.168.100.1)

Probably you can also connect to the internet............

Look at http://adsl.yoll.net/setting-up-adsl...-08-Linux.html to see some pictures on how-to

With kind regards,

Richard

Yes,
Generally by default your linux system is going to come configured to get all this information from a router on the network. Your modem most likely does not have this capacity and needs you to set that information for it. First step is to give your own machine an address, assign the modems address as the gateway to the web, and finally to be able to resolv names such as yahoo.com into something a machine can find is to add those addresses (DNS) or Domain Name Server addresses to your resolv.conf file by any means. Take er step by step it'l work out.