I notice that you have also been posting in the Networking forum.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-pppoe-634763/
You appear to have a Billion product (after googling the HW version), so it is either an ADSL modem or an ADSL modem/router.
I think that your problem arises from your gateway setting for your NIC card at eth0.
The NIC card needs to communicate to the modem at 192.168.1.1.
In your /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf set this:
...

Thanks allend, it worked
so it was the eth0 config that was wrong.

(ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.6 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255)

interestingly enough I got these from the ubuntu ifconfig

Just to make sure I understand it correctly:
IPADDR[0]="192.168.1.2"

also something like 192.168.1.6 as used by Ubuntu should be ok

netmask ok, but where did you get the gw value from?

Think of it this way.
Your system wants to send a packet to a destination IP address. It consults the routing table for information on how to send the packet. If the destination is not specfically configured in the routing table, then it sends the packet to the default gateway.
In your case, your internet traffic needs to be sent to your modem at 192.168.1.1. The modem then sends this off to the internet.

To communicate to your modem, the information has to pass via your NIC, which you want to configure to a local IP address to suit your modem. Any 192.168.1.x value will do, except for x=0,1 or 255.

Glad it worked!

Ok, I understand the routing, the question was about the broadcast. I guess

192.168.1.255 comes from the netmask complement, i.e. (not 255.255.255.0)=
(0.0.0.255) bitwise OR'd with the IP address 192.168.1.2
which is 192.168.1.255,as you said.
Thanks!