Knoppix 5.0 STRANGE INTERNET PROBLEMS!!!!

[Harry Kuhman]

I also looked at the broadcast adress the router was broadcasting to and found that it had a mac adress of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff i was really confused by this.

That's actually OK, the way ethernet is designed to work. Remember, IP packets are just a software abstraction, at the lowest protocol level everything has to translate to an ethernet packet. So to broadcast to all MAC addresses, ethernet needs a "broadcast address" concept similar to the Broadcast address that TCP/IP uses. In the case of MAC address based ethernet, all ff's is the designated broadcast address.

I also pinged the bcast addressed 10.0.0.255 and 255.255.255.255 and had no prblems at all.

I'm not sure what this means or what happened. Pinging a broadcast address is, at best, bad form, as if it does decide that it can ping the address it could cause a lot of systems to respond at the same time. I suggest sticking to pinging the router, pinging other computers, or even pinging non existant addresses on your sub-net (I do this to force the system to try to figure out where that address is, which generates ARP packets.

My windows xp isnt up at al i did some madness with some .dll files and the system wont boot. i tried reinstalling but it says my hd has error so it cant install. So im stuck with knoppix.
Thanks again. im kinds busy so wil reply sumtime later

Too bad about the windows side being down, you would see some interesting Microsoft network broadcasts as it tries to keep the workgroup organized. But this isn't the heart of the problem. You'll want to focus on finding ARP packets and seeing what addresses they use. I just did this under Knoppix 5.0.2 running ethereal under root (sudo ethereal from a console) and it worked as expected (mostly, I'm having one annoying problem getting the diplay to update in real time rather than having to stop the capture to look at the packets).

You might want to put another Knoppix CD in the down windows system, that way you can generate ARP traffic on demand (just ping unused 10.0.0.xxx addresses from the other system).

Good luck. I really think this thing can be resolved, focus on what broadcast address the router is using and what broadcast your system is using. If you can reconfigure the mask (aka sub-net mask) in the router try setting it to 255.255.255.0 and using a broadcast address of 10.0.0.255 across your network). Otherwise use whatever broadcast address that the router insists on (unless it's 255.255.255.255, which I just don't see making sense). Keep me posted and I'll try to provide whatever help I can.