can't get online

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:38:45 +0200, Duncan Lithgow wrote:

> Daniel Gimpelevich wrote:
> 
>>You seem to have two NICs. When you said you "configured the network card
>>as DHCP and activated it," you probably did that for eth0, but your
>>connection is plugged into eth1.
> 
> Erm, yup - my mistake. I should have read the output of dhclient myself
> - I just assumed it would be as useful as greek to me. I also assumed
> that etho0 was the onboard network card. That's why I setup etho0

It's a reasonable assumption, but only correct about half the time. ;-)

>>I also see something very strange: A DHCP server on
>>your LAN (10.5.255.254) is assigning a publicly routable address
>>(62.107.19.189) to your machine. What kind of LAN setup works like that?
> 
> My Cable modem is permanently online, I have to navigate to my ISP's
> website (the only place on the net I can get to anyway) and log in. Then
> they allow me out to the rest of the net. Does that still sound strange?
> Do let me know if that's odd - I don't know much about networks.

That's similar to what a majority of DSL users have to do, but I haven't
heard much about cable users being subjected to a similar setup. I'm
curious as to how your ISP managed to set that up. Based on the observed
DHCP behavior, assuming you were already logged in when you used dhclient,
I'd guess that the website where you log in isn't actually on the net, but
lives inside your cable modem, which I'm guessing is what's at the
10.5.255.254 address. When the modem communicates your login to the ISP,
it likely retrieves DHCP information to subsequently send to your machine.
Having a LAN rather forces you to know a fair amount about networks, but
it doesn't sound like you have one. It sounds like you instead have one
machine hooked directly to the cable modem. Am I far off?