Mandrake 8 and Cable Modems

[tep0583]

I am a relitively recent convert to Linux, I first started using the Mandrake 7.1 distrubution and upgraded when my hardware outstriped the abilities of the kernal (I put in a Geforce 2 MX and there just wasn't support for it). I recently updated to the ver 8 of the Mandrake distrubution and have been very pleased thus far.

My question is: Two week ago I finally got cable modem access. My windows box connects without problem when I set it up to use DHCP. The Linux box, however, will not lease an IP from the modem. I set the access up according to a link to the Hedhat 6.2 setup HOWTO from linux.com. Everything seemed very streightforward and the section about setting up a static IP address to connect to the rest of the network worked flawlessly ( I have two NICs, a 3Com 509 series and a Intel Pro 10/100 ) Everything appears to work correctly up to the point where the NIC leases an IP address via DHCP. Then it hangs for a couple of minutes and reports that there was no IP information available. I switched the role of the cards to see if maybe there was a problem with one of the NICs, but the result is always the same: The card with the static IP works fine and the one connected to the modem cannot get an IP address. I'm pretty sure this must be some sort of configuration issue, but I cannot seem to locate the problem. Any Suggestions?

 

[Bluecrack]

Just a note:

Some cable companies require that the MAC address of the NIC connecting to the modem be registered before it is allowed to lease an IP address.

Bluecrack

 

[MrTom]

with my cable company the modem has it's own MAC address and it's this that is registered with the company.

firstly, some cable modems do hang on to the MAC address of the nic and won't work if you plug it into another nic. powercycling the modem should sort this out.

i've had problems with mandrake behaving nicely with DHCP too, in MDK beta 8.1 there is supposed to be increased network support (but it is a beta . For some reason using the mandrake control centre i could get a connection by doing the "connect to 'net" program and even tho it said it wasn't connected it was, provided i kept the connection window open (the one with the graph in it).

there are a couple of other possible problems. firstly if you have set up a firewall it may be blockng the packets to or from the DHCP server - so switch it off if this is the case - and try again.

also you may have the same problem as me at the moment my network card starts up in 100baseTx for some reason, and most cable modems only have a 10baseT port. you'll have to find some way of forcing the card to 10baseT - i've certainly had problems with this using 3com cards but intel's are normally well behaved.

next time you try to connect, in another window run "tail -f /var/log/syslog" - this should show you what is happening with the DHCP request.

hth.

 

[tep0583]

Sounds good. I do not believe the MAC is registered, but I will swap NICs tonight just to make sure It souldn't matter, I have a removable drive bay and the 9x and Mandrake are on seperate drives but use the same hardware). The card is an old 3com 509 and it should only run at 10MBs so that should not be the problem. I was screwing around with it last night and if I switch off auto-detect, it will never "see" the NIC if I manually configure it as a 3C509. Leads me to think maybe there is something wrong with the card or maybe for some reson the 509 suppot is not what it used to be (which doesn't seem too likely given the popularity of these NICs. It does work OK in windows which also leads me to think that the card is OK too)

Bastile(sp?) IS running so I will turn that off and try it again. I will try the tail command to see if that can shead any light on the problem. Thanks very much for the suggestions, I'll let you know how it works out.

 

[jrjuiliano]

Guess I should have read the forums before I posted my earlier message regarding this.

I installed dhcpxd and set it up with the following commands:

dhcpxd -c -H cxXXXX-XXX eth0

where all the "X's" were the hostname. It picked it right up and I got immediate access. The only problem is that on a restart I think it lost all the connections and I would have to set it up again.

At any rate, check it out and see if it works for you. If you find anything to configure it to work nicely with @home cable modems I'd appreciate some help!

And this was on Mandrake 8.0 also. No MAC required! J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group