Whats wrong with my internet connection?![SOLVED]

[doubleagent]

This is the best forum in the world and one can find the answer to just about anything if one will just look....

That's how I managed to solve my problem this morning! Quick story:

Network connection works on LiveCD - yay! But upon reboot, I get this (apparantly very common) error:

[moleculardeconstruction]

I had a similiar problem when installing Gentoo on older machines with old network cards. The only way I could networking with the livecd was to set a static IP, subnet mask, and gateway manually. When I had built the system, including the installation of dhcpcd, the networking started on boot retreieving an IP from the router.

If you have the information for your router you can enter the information using:

[doubleagent]

Thanks moleculardeconstruction,
There are couple of reasons not to do this:
1. I don't have old hardware: everything is about a 6-12 months old.
2. DHCP worked on the liveCD (yep, that's what it uses), so there's no reason it shouldn't work off the hard drive.

That said, I tried it anyway (i'm desperate). First I booted the liveCD to make sure I had all the information. Then I rebooted the OS and...

typed in

[RayDude]

Most of this stuff is basic and you probably already tried, but what they hey you never know...

Can you ping localhost?

Can you ping 127.0.0.1?

If you assign a fixed IP can you ping your own IP address?

If you can do those things, then do a ping the IP address of your broadband modem and see if that works.

Then try ping 68.142.197.88

That's www.yahoo.com, if that works and ping www.yahoo.com doesn't you have DNS issues. One thing that's important, the default /etc/conf.d/net has a fixed IP addy for eth0, you need to comment out that line before you enable dhcp. I've also noticed that people change the dhcp parameters to increase the time for dhcp addy issue with a -t 30 (makes it 30 seconds).

Can you post the output of 'ifconfig' so we can see what your system thinks it has.

Also, did you make sure you have absolutely the same drivers enabled in your kernel as are used on the boot cd?

Raydude
_________________
Some day there will only be free software.

[doubleagent]

Thanks RayDude,

I tried a few varieties of pinging like you said. Of course pinging the local host worked, but when I pinged my IP I got

[RayDude]

[RayDude]

Thought of one other thing: (actually saw it in another thread)

Have you been using

[krinn]

dfitzpat:

Easy

Network unreachable
Error in routing table, your route table is invalid check & fix it

[doubleagent]

Thanks for all the help: These forums truly are great.

First things first. RayDude:

I tried adding "-t 30" and "-t 30 -N" (didn't know what the -N did) to /etc/conf.d/net and rebooted both times: nothing happened.

On a brighter note: I am using /etc/init.d/net.eth0 on boot-up for my connection - thanks for finding it! I tried a couple of things:

[doubleagent]

[doubleagent]

Something I just now noticed. Why is my inet addr in ifconfig on the livecd 192.168.1.255, but the only time that DHCP has worked was when it was ???? Is it temporary (static, non-static or whatever thats called)?
_________________

[RayDude]

[nuke235]

This may be a dumb question, but some DSL networks (like sympatico here in Canada) use PPPoE. Do you maybe need to set that up instead?

Also, are you actually using a router? Because if you don't have a router, then your default gw is not 192.168.1.1 (if you were using a Linksys router), or 192.168.0.1, if you were using a Dlink or Netgear.

[doubleagent]

My setup:

I have a RCA digital broadband cable modem (model DCM425) hooked with an ethernet cable to a Linksys router (812.11g, Model WRT54GS). From there I have an ethernet cable that goes directly into my computer. I also have a wireless network card that I use on the same computer that goes to the same router. The reason I have two hook-ups? Windows supports the card - Linux doesn't.

I hope this helps: the lack of internet is really incapacitating.

RayDude: Thanks: I'll try some of that stuff and let you know how it works out.

Nuke235: Thanks for the help, however, DHCP works on the livecd, and it has worked from time to time on the hard-drive.
_________________

[RayDude]

[doubleagent]

Raydude,

I ran lsmod for the 100th time this week (no it's most certainly not empty), but this time I noticed something odd. My network connection got noticed at boot-up once out of the ten or twenty times that I rebooted, and when I ran lsmod this time...something was different.

Here's the oddity. First what happened when the network doesn't work:

[RayDude]

[doubleagent]

Thanks again RayDude,

Okay, I think the problem is pretty close to being solved. But before I get to that, let me be good forum-user and give you what you asked for.

First, lspci seems to always be the same whether the connection works or not:

[RayDude]

I only know how to do it with make menuconfig... I don't know how to use genkernel.

[doubleagent]

RayDude

I cannot thank you enough man! My Internet connection is finally working!

Although it's still a mystery to me why that init script for eth1394 would only run most of the time and not all of the time, I'm glad it didn't or else We wouldn't have seen the relation btwn it and my connection.

Thanks so much man! This case is solved!
_________________

[RayDude]