Re: LAN

Ray Olszewski
2003-12-26T07:40:01Z

At 12:44 AM 12/26/2003 -0600, Jose Colmenares wrote:
>I just installed Slackware. It's working fine and
>smooth. I also have three machines runing Windows (one
>XP and two 98). These are conected through a LAN. ¿How
>do I configure my new linux system to recognize the
>network and comunicate to it? it does not even
>recognize the LAN card. ¿did I miss something during
>the configuration?

Most likely you did. Exactly what you missed is hard to say. For more
specific help, please tell us:

1. What version of Slackware?

2. What version of the Linux kernel? ("uname -a")

3. What network interface card (NIC) are you using in the system?

4. How do you know "it does not even recognize the LAN card"? Just so *we*
can be sure, what is the complete output of "ifconfig -a" (run it as root)?

I'm not a Slackware user myself, but there are many Slackware users here
(though the holidays may keep them away from email for the next little
while). If I can't answer you after you provide the additional information,
I'm sure one of them will be able to after seeing it. I should mention that
Slackware is in many ways different from the other main Linux distros, so
the remainder of what follows is something of a guess on my part, based on
the way Debian, the distro I use, does things.

I'm not sure how Slackware sets up networking these days, but the usual way
with Linux is to put the information needed to set up an interface in
/etc/networks/interfaces ... your NIC would be entered there as eth0.
You'll enter either the usual sorts of info about IP address, netmask,
gateway, and such, or you will enter here that the interface gets
configured by DHCP (depending on how your network is actually set up).

If you are entering the information by hand, then you'll also want to enter
the IP addresses of the DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf ... if you are
using DHCP, then the DHCP client (which might be pump, dhclient, or dhcpcd)
can update this file from the lease info it gets.

The boot/init process should use this information to set up your
networking. If not, you can (usually) use the command, as root, "ifup -a"
to start networking manually.