Slack 10.2, 3C509b, dhcpcd not getting info
 

Hi Folks, newbie here...

I've just installed Slack 10.2 on a K2-300 machine connected to a working intranet served by a modem/router with DCHP server (D-Link DSL-504).
My network card is a 3C509b which works well when running win98se ( washes keyboard ) but intermittantly getting DCHP service when booting Linux.
The card is recognised, dchpcd loads and tries to obtain the required info - usually to no avail.
Help please.. I may be able to sort it myself if I knew how to log the startup messages, they fly past so fast I can't read them on screen.

gently please.. Mike
--

To read the messages at boot time type "dmesg" (on a console) and you will see them.

Hope this helps.

Rick

There's nothing outright wrong with dhcpcd that I'm aware of, so you might want to use tcpdump to make sure your client isn't missing something. Your D-Link may well be screwing up.

Once you've gotten the machine booted up, login as root, and kill off dhcpcd if it's running (you don't want it running just yet), preferably killing it by using `dhcpcd -k`. Then in one window run the following:

tcpdump -l -v -n -e -i eth0 port 67 or port 68 | tee dhcpsession.log

Now in a second window, go invoke dhcpcd to grab an IP address. The tcpdump command above will (blessedly) only log the DHCP packets going back and forth, and you don't even need to completely understand the output beyond figuring out which ones are a packet sent and which ones are a packet recieved back. You should see your machine sending packets (often to a rather obvious broadcast address), then a response back from the DHCP server, then your machine telling the DHCP server that it'll accept the lease. This should give you plenty of hints as to where things are breaking down, and if you can't figure it out, the log will really only be about 12-15 lines so you should be able to easily post it here as a followup (just don't be a paranoid n00b and try to edit out the addresses).