Networking down but seems ok... ?!

["Nicolas Pillot" <nicolas.pillot@gmail.com>]

Hello !

I come to ask a question about my networking experience with debian. I
installed a basic debian system with the i386 network install of the
3.1r3 image. My hardware is an asustek a8n sli motherboard, with an
nforce4 sli chipset.

Before the install, i chose linux26, because using the standard onewas
blocking at the hardware detection. I have a dhcp server running
onboard my broadband modem but the install didn't manage to have the
configuration detected. So at the next step, i configured it manually.

The rest of the install went smooth, up to the apt-source selection.
Choosing any server in the list made the installation program hang up
to timeout. So i cancelled the package selection and finished the
install in order to examine what i thought was a networking problem.

When booting, i noticed a _huge_ delay between the "Starting MTA: "
and the display of "exim4.". Delay is about a minute. Then the second
part of the install finished and i have a bare running system.

I noticed i could not ping any server on the net, nor any host on my
network (even using its ip to skill the name resolving scheme). The
only ip that's answering is its own ip (198.168.0.3). I tried setting
up and down the interface, nothing new.

Here are the stripped outputs of the different tools i know :
[ go to this url to see each full text : http://netsach.free.fr/debian-nforce/ ]

- ifconfig

eth0      Lien encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr
00-11-D8-00-00-73-82-9B-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
         inet adr:192.168.0.3  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Masque:255.255.255.0
         UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
         RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
         TX packets:60 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
         collisions:0 lg file transmission:1000
         RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:2160 (2.1 KiB)

- lsmod :

Module                  Size  Used by
forcedeth              16256  0

- /etc/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 192.168.0.3
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	network 192.168.0.0
	broadcast 192.168.0.255
	gateway 192.168.0.254
	# dns-* options are implemented by the resolvconf package, if installed
	dns-nameservers 212.27.54.252 212.27.53.252
	dns-search nipil.org

- dmesg

forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.29.
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:0a.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:0a.0 to 64
eth1: forcedeth.c: subsystem: 01043:8141 bound to 0000:00:0a.0

- lspci

0000:00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0057 (rev a3)

I noticed it booted in runlevel 2 but an "init 3" gave me the same results.

Any idea anyone ?
Thanks in advance,

PS: Is there any way i can disable the infamous beep generated about 3
times a second when backspacing / tabbing / whatever ? :)

--
Nicolas Pillot (nicolas.pillot@gmail.com)