cothrige wrote:
I have been having some troubles with my DSL internet connection for a while now. First an upgrade appeared to remove some or all of the dhcp related software on my box. Thanks to this list I think I fixed that by installing dhcp3-client. But, then the connection would only be there about half of the time I booted. Thanks again to this list I can now work around that, though I still don't know how to fix it entirely. More troubling at this time, though, is that even when I have a connection it drops out. Very often I will open a browser and get one page up, and then for something like five minutes I can do nothing. No pages will load and nothing goes out. If I open a terminal and try something like 'ping www.google.com' it does nothing at all. Finally, things will start moving again but this will only last for a few minutes and then drop out again. BTW, my wife's Windows box connects fine and does not have this problem, and so I am assuming it is something in my system.
Patrick -From your bellsouth address and the fact that you have DHCP, I presume you are also have to contend with PPPoE. I suspect that PPPoE may be the culprit. Unless you love to tinker, I advise you to do an end-run around the problem. (1) Get an old machine (Pentium 166 MHz or better, 64 Mbyte RAM, 1 G or larger drive, two ethernet cards, CD-ROM drive).
(2) Download an ISO image of SmoothWall Express 2.0 from www.smoothwall.org and burn the image to CD.
(3) Boot the old machine from the SmoothWall CD, follow the installation dialogue, and in twenty or thirty minutes you shall have a firewall/router configured for PPPoE. SmoothWall can act as a DHCP server for your local area network; or you may assign static IP addresses to the machines in your LAN. With SmoothWall as the gateway for your LAN, configuration of the machines in the LAN is simplified significantly. And, if for some reason you are forced to revert to dial-up, or if you are able to upgrade to a static IP address without PPPoE, a quick reconfiguration of the SmoothWall box is all that is necessary: the machines in the LAN never see the details of the connection. This is in keeping with the UNIX philosophy of modularity. Why saddle a desktop machine with the task of network interface? And why squander time reinventing the wheel?
RLH