Topic: Cable Modem (Charter Pipeline)

[Kevin]

I am having trouble getting my Charter Pipeline connection to work using SME v5. I have been using e-smith 4.12 for a few months at my office as a PDC for some W2k and NT (Samba 2.21a) machines and it works great. The situation I have now is I would like to upgrade first of all, but also we are getting a cable connection at work in the next few weeks (ADSL not available) so I setup a test machine at home to make sure I could make SME work with cable. Listed below is what I have tried so far:

1. Added HD to primary machine and installed SME v5
2. Configured network adapters Local to use DHCP and Cable to use ethernet   address and DHCP (local network works fine)
3. no connection
4. swapped eth0 and eth1 (reboot)
5 no connection
6. called cable company they pinged the modem and said everything is working but I am not pulling an IP.
7. swapped eth0 and eth1 again (reboot)
8. tried again no IP being pulled
9. shut down swapped HD cable back and booted to W2k Internet works fine then booted to Redhat 7.1 Internet works fine also.

My intent is to use SME as a File/Print (Samba) and a Internet Sharing server only. I will not be using it for web or e-mail server etc.. (yet).

I am fairly new to Linux and real new to e-smith so I am a little afraid to go under the hood very deep without some guidance.

Any help,  Please

[J Carlson]

I have Charter cable, I could not get Esmith 4.0 to accept and IP address from the cable modem using DHCP, so I just entered the IP, netmask, gateway and dns manually and it works perfectly!

[Richard Schiffelers]

Hi Kevin,

To try and find what the problem is you could try the followiung steps:

1. First check to see that your SME system is working ok.

Hook up a machine to the cable modem that is succesfull in getting an ip-adress thru dhcp. Check to see which ip-adress is assigned and then define this staticly on your SME system. Then check to see if your Internet connection now works. At least you now know the the SME system is ok.

2. Check the error messages which 'dhcpcd' (dhcp client on SME)is giving.

Set external interface back to dhcp and reboot so the SME system tryes to get a ip-address thru DHCP. Log in as root on the SME system and try the following:

   cat /var/log/messages | grep dhcpcd

What messages from the dhcp client do you see ? (Maybe post them here)

Does your cable provider supply the ip-address based on mac adress or hostname or just as is ?

Hope you can get any further with the above.

Richard Schiffelers (ricrjhl@schiffelers.com)

[Kevin]

I have tried the static aproach and it doesn't work either.  In my area the just did a system upgrade and sent an e-mail out warning not to use static (but did not give a reason why it couldn't be done).  The IP is a is assigned using the MAC address.  I know it will have to be done using DHCP because I noticed th IP changes almost weekly on my W2k and Redhat machine (Dual boot). I will post the log when I get home from work today also. I may try loading up 4.12 and see if it works.

By the way I am using the same machine and NIC for all configurations (SME,W2k and Redhat).  I am just changing the HD cable back and forth.

Thanks