Howdy all,

Im dcent with Linux in general, played around with 3 distros so far, Gentoo, SuSE, and Mandrake. When I used SuSE 8.2 on a barebones system I got from tcwo.com, I was able to get all the on board sound, graphics, USB, LAN, etc. working. When I used Gentoo no sound, and mandrake, no LAN. I decided to turn that barebones system, which is using a Biostar M7VIQ into a PVR with KnoppMyth, and I cannot get this machine to pull an IP. When I run ifconfig, all I get is info on lo. If I type ifconfig eht0 I get some info, but no IP. I gives me the MAC HW address, so I assume that it recognizes the on board LAN, just it wont work? The router Im using is Clark Connect Office 2.1. I am able to get the same machine to pull an IP using XP of course. I cleared my dhcp list on the CC machine, to make sure the KnoppMyth should have no reason to NOT be able to pull an IP, and the DHCP is working in the CC machine. I havent checked the logs on the CC machine to even see if the KnoppMyth is talking to the CC box. When I run netcardconfig, the machine tries to pull and IP thru DHCP multicast, but nada. Anyone have any ideas? If any more info is needed about my setup, let me know. TIA.

Edit: Umm yeah, said that towards the end of my original post.

Have you run netcardconfig?

Not sure if this will help, but...

If you can find a non-coliding IP address you can manually assign for testing purposes, try setting that as your root account.

For example in the range 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.254, I have set up my dhcp scope to range from 31-49 for dynamic address, 21-30 for hard coded dhcp addresses, and a few other addresses (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) for devices that I had configured before I set up DHCP, or that should not have dhcp assigned addresses for one reason or another (router for example.) So if I want to test a device outside of my dhcp scope, if have addresses from 6-19, and 50-254 available. If I am testing a bunch of devices, I like to put them in the high range, 128-254, as I can easily split that range off into a seprate subnet if need be.

So, to test this card, I would probably use the command ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.128, then the command route add net 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 followed by route add net 0.0.0.0 gw 10.0.0.1 if I wanted it to be able to talk outside of my network. (actually my firewall prevents devices outside of the dhcp scope and below from reaching the Internet, so this isn't compltely perfect)

At this point you should be able to ping devices that you know the IP addresses for in your network. If you build a /etc/hosts table, or set up dns some way, you can probably also ping by name. That will prove that the network card is working in both directions.

I have had bad cables show up in various networks that I work on, that all appears to be working with, but the pair leading from the switch or hub to the device isn't connected.

-Rusty

I'm not sure if you solved this problem already, but I had a similar problem. I'm a total linux newbie so if this is too obvious I'm sorry but maybe it will help some other poor newb...

I had the same problem with my onboard NIC not getting a DHCP address. Trying to manually configure an IP address didn't seem to let me use the network either. In the end I found another topic talking about PnP and APIC. I went into my BIOS and turned off anything I could find to do with PnP and APIC and hey presto my DHCP started working....

Now if I could just find answers to the rest of my problems...