DSL and SWLinux

[GMorris]

Hi, all

I don't know if this has been discussed before, but I'm wondering if I have ATT DSL and it works fine with Windows, will it work in SL? I mean, without actually setting up the whole network configuration through Linux itself? When I connect the Windows computer, it automatically goes and gets an IP address and is then permanently connected until we tell it otherwise. I just wonder if anyone else has gone through this, and are there any configuration tips or things that might give me a problem. What if I just hook up the Linux machine to the DSL router/modem that they gave me and try and snag an IP address? Wouldn't it seem that the least one would need is to supply a username/password, which Win does, or does anyone know if there are likely to be configuration problems that I haven't even considered yet... Cool...Jammin' Banana!

[smolloy]

I have AT&T DSL at home, and Linux works just fine with it. How simple it will be for you depends on how you set up your network. I have a wireless router plugged into the DSL box, and it's configured with the PPoE username and password so it can log onto AT&T's network whenever it's switched on. Then I configured the router to always give my desktop the same IP address, although I could have just let it hand them out using DHCP.

I haven't set up PPoE on linux in a long time (~3 years), but it was easy enough back then (when I was very noobish!), so I imagine it's still easy enough now. It sounds like this is what you'll have to do (since you say that you've configured Windows to supply a username and password).

I bet there's something in NetworkManager that makes this really easy.

[GMorris]

I don't remember seeing anything about NetworkManager, is that part of the X package or something you use from a console? The times I tried to configure this through X, it just wouldn't recognize the network correctly. Now, I can remember ONE time, and damned if I remember what I did to make it work, but I was able to connect from Slack to the router/modem (the "mouter") and type in a username/password combo which got me right in. Haven't been able to re-create that scenario yet. I can, still, do this from Windows. I log into the modem and can configure the login for automatically log in to the DSL, but I don't get why that doesn't stay in the mouter. All I do is change the DSL line and the net cable, I carry the mouter still powered up and all over to the Linux machine, and reconnect the DSL and ethernet cables. NOTHING ever works. EVER. It's driving me insane. I've played with pppoe, nothing. I've done just about every configuration I can come up with and NOTHING EVER WORKS!

If anybody can point me to a similar solution, I'd be ever so grateful! What I'm after is setting up the Slack machine (2-NICS) to accept the broadband from AT&T, then use it and serve it to our newer (1-NIC) laptop. I've even tried physically switching the cards, that is letting the other one try the internet, and the first one try the LAN. Neither has worked, yet.

Thanks in advance if you can help me!

[Freston]

OK, what you want is possible. But why it doesn't work I don't know.

I remember going crazy over something similar when I took my router out from between the modem and the computer. Everything stopped working. I tried everything imaginable, but overlooked the obvious. Resetting the modem. Try that first. Plug it out, wait a couple of seconds and plug it back in.


If you tried that already or that doesn't work, then read on

When you say your slackbox doesn't recognize the network, what does that mean? Does that mean your network card isn't recognized? Is the interface down? No carrier detected? Do you not get response to a DHCP request? Do you get an IP, but no outbound connection? Do you get outbound connection, but can't reach your internal network? Or do you find yourself the wrongful target of the beautiful but deadly "permission denied"?

NOTHING EVER WORKS

You might think it is very annoying that it doesn't EVER work, but I consider it High Treason. First machines stop listening to you, before you know it you're in the middle of the Rise of the Machines! Tell your machine who's boss. Type this:

/sbin/ifconfig -a

And post the output here.


You can safe yourself a lot of typing when you copy this to Windows and then copy&paste it here if you do it like this:

/sbin/ifconfig -a > outputfile

Now you have a file called outputfile, which contains the output of the command as flat text. Copy this to a Windows readable directory. Open it in notepad and copy&paste it here. Happy slacking!

[GMorris]

Thanks for the reply. The only way I can do this is to (again) move the mouter over to the Linux machine, and hook it up as usual just like I do with the laptop. Then, I already have my other net cable ready, so I take the laptop and plug that OTHER cable (assuming eth1 now for that one) into it's card to complete the LAN. Now, if I could do that and have the laptop-Linux LAN connection, I could easily move files around and such, but this laptop has no floppy, and the OLD computer with Slack can't write CD's so I'm basically f'd on that note. Every time I've tried to hook it up, I can't get either connection to work, thought the laptop does try to find it. This should be so easy, and I've even done it before with RedHat, years ago, with little problem. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was even easier than in Windows at the time!

Right now, I can tell you that the last time I did that, Slack did report (through ifconfig) that I had lo, eth0 and eth1 all up and running, so that leads me to believe that it's NOT the network interfaces that are the problem, it must be the config? lo had the standard 127.0.0.1 for an IP, and I can't remember right off, but one of the others had an IP address. Now, the only time I was able to pull this off with just the DSL was a few days ago when I was fooling around, and I got the idea to just assign an IP to eth0 (the DSL). I gave it the one I always get from the mouter, 192.168.1.1 and it allowed me to log in to the mouter with http://192.168.1.254. At that point, I loaded Lynx since I was at the command line, and it let me login. Just that once. Any other attempts so far have been in vain. Once I was in there, though, I tried connecting the laptop, but I still couldn't get the LAN going. X worked just like a champ, and the network configuration reported both eth's, it just said that eth1 was not enabled and nothing I did would enable it. I wish at that point I had never rebooted the darned thing, maybe I could have gotten more info (duhh...), but my plan was to boot back up with everything connected hoping that the Slack install would recognize the config and everything would be OK and we'd all live happily ever after... but this isn't a fairy world and it didn't work at all on reboot or since..

I'll hook everything back up again soon and see what happens. I'll have to write down and transcribe back what ifconfig -a reports since I have no other way to do it yet. Will be back soon...

EDIT:

I almost forgot, the resetting of the mouter, well I've done that so many times and in so many different ways, it's hard to imagine that resolving the problem. Worth a try though, especially when the internet light goes RED on me!

[Freston]

OK, assuming that eth0 is connected to the mouter. I take it you use DHCP. Did you run:

dhcpcd eth0

You can also try to reconfigure your network settings on the slackbox with:

netconfig

That does not solve the problem of the second NIC and the laptop, but might just get you connected on the one NIC.

Oh, and generally it is a good idea to reset the modem whenever changes in the network destroy the connection. Those apparatuses tend not to be overly genius.

[root@manabiscuits.org]

If you inet light is red it is not caused by slackware, unless you are you modem is a bridge with a dhcp server running on it.

If your getting to the router thats 75% of your work cut out.

ping google.com

ping 64.233.187.99

If google.com does not reply and the IP address does it is a nameserver issue and this will fix it:

echo "72.236.205.150" >> /etc/resolv.conf

if both pings reply than try:

telnet google.com 80

if that fails its a firewall issue and youll need to make iptables exceptions on port 80 traffic

Otherwise you modem is likely a bridge and you need to install a PPPoE dialing client. Roaring Penguin software makes the best one out there imo.

Good luck

[GMorris]

Like I said, I only got into the mouter ONCE. After that, I can't use lynx or any browser in X, I can't ping anything, yet the lights are all on and green at the mouter just as if I had a great connection. I've tried SO many things. I think I said already that I actually switched the cables once just to see if one connection liked eth1 over eth0, etc. but that didn't do anything so I changed them back. So I guess that means I am NOT getting into the mouter. Having seen several suggestions on it, I decided to try the pppoe thing, and had no luck with it either. I DID try using it from a LIVE Linux CD, and was able to connect with this SAME mouter in an instant, but that was from the newer laptop. This is bizarre. Also did the dhcpcd thing - nothing. Don't even get me started on netconfig. I'm not a big fan of it myself though I've tried it (TOO many times if you ask me!) Anyhow, I'm going to transcribe the last ifconfig -a I ran while ALL network connections were set up (just not working):

eth0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:b0:f8:c5:c7
           inet6 addr: fe80::260:b0ff:fef8:c5c7/64 Scope:Link
           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:1440 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:200 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:1
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
           RX bytes:127880 (124.8 KiB)  TX bytes:7446 (7.2 KiB)
           Interrupt:11 Base address:0xff80

eth1       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:14:d1:15:51:69
           inet6 addr: fe80::214:d1ff:fe15:5169/64 Scope:Link
           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:1755 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:540 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
           RX bytes:106174 (103.6 KiB)  TX bytes:33702 (32.9 KiB)
           Interrupt:3 Base address:0x2800

lo         Link encap:Local Loopback
           inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
           inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
           UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
           RX packets:3623 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:3623 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
           RX bytes:66884 (65.3 KiB)  TX bytes:66884 (65.3 KiB)

plip0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr fc:fc:fc:fc:fc:fc
           POINTOPOINT NOARP  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
           RX bytes:0 (0.0 KiB)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 KiB)
           Interrupt:255 Base address:0x378

ppp0       Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
           inet addr:74.235.71.107  P-t-P:74.235.71.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
           UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1492  Metric:1
           RX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:46 errors:0 dropped:26 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
           RX bytes:1612 (1.5 KiB)  TX bytes:2816 (2.7 KiB)

ppp1       Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
           inet addr:74.235.12.4  P-t-P:74.235.12.1  Mask:255.255.255.255
           UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1492  Metric:1
           RX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:24 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:
           RX bytes:242 (242.0 KiB)  TX bytes:68 (68.0 KiB)

Bear in mind that this was typed in by hand looking from one screen to the other over and over, so I can't guarantee accuracy. I did my best though to check, double check, etc. so it will be either exact or VERY close to what I actually saw. If anyone can determine what's happening, I'll be forever grateful, this is just NUTS!!

[Freston]

Well, the PPP interfaces do have an IP address. So something is working, just not what you hoped I guess. I dunno. Perhaps the PPP interfaces are interfering?

What happens when you do

ifconfig ppp0 down
ifconfig ppp1 down
ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0

And let the last command run for some time, a minute or two if needs be. It's not always quick when you're switching between interfaces.

I guess what you are facing is some sort of problem in your configs.
Maybe look through /etc/rc.d/rc.inet* scripts. See if DHCP is enabled, see which devices it tries to get up, that sort of thing. Although I'm not really sure. The eth# interfaces look good. Just that they are down and the ppp# interfaces are up.

[GMorris]

Alrighty then, I'll try that too and see what happens. I'm so baffled by the whole thing, which shouldn't take weeks to set up for one thing, but the fact that I got in ONCE to the DSL and cannot do it now is really bugging me. The biggest pain is having to take the laptop off of the DSL, then carry the mouter to the other machine, then reconnect all the cables, then move it BACK and again reconnect all the cables when it doesn't work after an hour or two (which is usually always!). The whole idea here was to have a working Linux machine that one of us could use while the other is using the laptop. When I have to take the laptop down, nobody can use the internet. I've done this before several times, and I can't figure out what is going on here. It's a b****.