internet connection blues!

[Harry Kuhman]

OK, now I at least have a better understanding of the setup.

1 and 2 - I didn't understard that where you said that they gave you a router that it was actually a modem and router and that you had put aside your old modem. So this thakes several potential problems away.

I've looked over the link you gave, still can't find a manual for the router. Interesting that they set it up so it could only work on their system. I note that they say the NAT feature can be disabled, but it isn't in your case, answer 3 confirms that.

Just an observation, you only seem to get one ethernet port, so I suggest using a switch (or a hub) if you want to build a local network or give more than one computer access to the Internet at once.

3 - this looks good.

4 - hmm, the eth0 didn't show up at all here, I expected that it would, but as long as you don't get an error when you try to manually do a netcardconfig I'm not too concerned about that.

5 - Without knowing why DHCP is failing, doing the manual netcardconfig seem the next logical step. All of your input looks good. I don't know if that Nameserver (DNS) is valid, but I'll assume it is. If it's not them the symptom would be that you could access sites by the IP address but not by their URL.

OK, I have one suggested test to try at this point. It may sound strange, it should. But try the same thing using an IP address different from 192.168.1.2 for the computer's IP address. I know that the computer is being assigned that address in Windows, but there's an extremely slim chance that you could have a dhcp lease problem with that address (Which in no way explains why automatic DHCP is failing and really doesn't make any sense unless you know about a problem another user had about two years ago). But try putting in 192.168.1.10 or 192.168.1.100 and see if that works. I don't really have a lot of hope that this is going to fix anything, but I think it would be a shame not to try and then find out later that it was the problem.

And just to be real clear, when you did the ipconfig under windows, that was done on the same computer that we are trying to get Knoppix running on, right? We are not talking about two different computers here, are we?

6 - Well, at this point the data here looks right, although I want to fire up Linux and look at my interface's ifconfig to check a few things. Your hardware address sure has a lot of 00's in it, which is giving me some doubt. ifconfig is telling us that you're sending packets out but never getting anything back. And it doesn't seem to get any background chatter from the router, also strange. This leads me to a question that I should have asked but missed, and I don't think you've posted the answer yet. Just what is the NIC hardware that you're using to talk to the router? I'm wondering if it's some fancy NIC chipset that Knoppix isn't supporting yet. If it was I would have expected the manual netcardconfig to give an error, but it's the most obvious thing to ask at this point.

And there is only one ethernet port, right? You don't have a NIC card installed but also a NIC on your motherboard, do you? If you did it would be posiable that you are configuring eth0 but need to talk to eth1.

Assuming that you're running a normal supported 10/100 NIC that Knoppix should recognize, we need to determine just why the etho interface seems to be talking but never getting a response. To know that it would be helpful to see exactly what it's saying. There is a tool that will let us do just that, ethereal. I wrote up another entry on using it recently in this thread. You might want to read that thread through and then try capturing packets on the interface. We'll learn a lot by seeing if it's trying to access 192.168.1.1 when it should, and otherwise picking apart the packets to see how they differ from the windows packets that do get a response.

I would start ethereal even before trying to do a netcardconfig. Even the captured packets from answering yes to the dhcp question should tell us a lot. The packets for trying to access 192.168.1.1 with Konquror after doing the manual netcardconfig may tell us even more.

Hope that has given you more to think about and that maybe somewhere here I've stumbled across the answer.

[muppet]

Thanks for all that Harry,
Yes there is only one computer and as far as i know there is only one ethernet (on the motherboard) (i know i should know if i've put in another network card in my own computer, but i cant remember if i did when i built this one, Ill check when i get home)

I'll have a go with ethereal and changing the ip adresses and let you know how i get on.
Thanks again for your help.

[Harry Kuhman]

Ok thanks. You might want to post what that motherboard is and what ethernet chipset it uses if you can find it. Would be worth trying to research how well it is supported under Linux and under Knoppix too.

[muppet]

Back again!
first things first.
motherboard

Motherboard Properties:
      Motherboard ID                                    63-0201-000010-00101111-091605-945PL$A0355000_BIOS DATE: 09/16/05 11:07:08 VER: 08.00.10
      Motherboard Name                                  ASUS P5PL2

    Front Side Bus Properties:
      Bus Type                                          Intel NetBurst
      Bus Width                                         64-bit
      Real Clock                                        200 MHz (QDR)
      Effective Clock                                   800 MHz
      Bandwidth                                         6400 MB/s

    Memory Bus Properties:
      Bus Type                                          Dual DDR2 SDRAM
      Bus Width                                         128-bit
      Real Clock                                        267 MHz (DDR)
      Effective Clock                                   533 MHz
      Bandwidth                                         8533 MB/s

    Chipset Bus Properties:
      Bus Type                                          Intel Direct Media Interface

NIC; (only one!)

 Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC ]

    Network Adapter Properties:
      Network Adapter                                   Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC
      Interface Type                                    Gigabit Ethernet
      Hardware Address                                  00-15-F2-08-0F-ED
      Connection Name                                   Local Area Connection
      Connection Speed                                  100 Mbps
      MTU                                               1500 bytes
      DHCP Lease Obtained                               30/09/2006 12:33:52
      DHCP Lease Expires                                01/10/2006 12:33:52
      Bytes Received                                    49832832 (47.5 MB)
      Bytes Sent                                        2858125 (2.7 MB)

    Network Adapter Addresses:
      IP / Subnet Mask                                  192.168.1.2 / 255.255.255.0
      Gateway                                           192.168.1.1
      DHCP                                              192.168.1.1
      DNS                                               192.168.1.1

ok,
i booted up knoppixand tried using other ip addresses for the computers ip address. when i then tried to ping the outside world i simply got the message network not found. One thing i did notice when knoppix was booting up was after it found eth0,it brought up the message "DHCP broadcasting for ip (backgrounding)" (dont know if thats pertinent or not)

so i then re-booted knoppix and started ethereal (as root) before i ran netcardconfig. ethereal could not find eth0 at all, so i quit the application and ran netcardconfig. This time ethereal found eth0 so i started the capture process. Nothing happened until i tried to ping to ping 216.32.81.146. ethereal gave a few lines of the following;

source        destination    protocol     info
(blank)       (blank)         ARP           (malformed packet)

at this point the only thing i could think to do was to try and reconfigure my NIC to use DHCP, this gave a few lines of the following;

source        destination             protocol        info
0.0.0.0       255.255.255.255         DHCP           DHCP Discovery Transaction ID 0x69140600

ethereal then quit itself complaining that it could not find eth0

So i'm not sure where to go from here, any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Harry Kuhman]

Am I to understand that the network interface is on a PCI-E card and not on the motherboard? That seems strange, particularly for a recent Asus board. I'm thinking that maybe the interface is on the motherboard, even though you called it PCI-E above (maybe a terminology that Asus uses). Obviously with that BIOS date it's a pretty new motherboard. While Knoppix is doing better in supporting 10/100/1000 NICS, it might be that it's just too new to be supported yet, even though it's being recognized. That's just speculation, but is seems to fit with everything that you are reporting.

My first though is that it seems from your previous posts that you very well may have another NIC available. If so I would try adding that NIC, hopefully a simple 10/100 NIC on a PCI interface. If there is a BIOS feature or motherboard jumper to disable the other NIC and you want to really keep things simple I would disable it, and if it is a PCI-E card I would remove it. You should still be able to get the add-in NIC working if you don't, but this would prevent problems differentiating between eth0 and eth1, and help be sure that DHCP at boot time tried the NIC that you wanted it to use. Of course, feel free to try experimenting without disabling or removing the 10/100/1000 NIC if you wish.

I expect that that will resolve it for you. Hopefully a future release of Knoppix will suport your newer hardware.

[muppet]

Thanks Harry for all your help.
you are absolutely right. I've installed my old nic card and am now writing this running linux.
Thanks again, no doubt i'll return when (not if)_ i need help !