[ale] Dude, I got no Cable !!

Ronald Chmara ron at Opus1.COM
Sat Aug 16 02:17:55 EDT 2003


On Friday, August 15, 2003, at 11:41  PM, Debrihmi wrote:
> Hi-ya!
>
> I just got a Dell Insperon 5100 notebook (very nice) but when I 
> connect it to
> the cable modem the notebook sees the connection but doesn't use it..
>
> And before you say it, "No I don't need to register my new computer's 
> MAC
> address with the cable company." they tell me that if I'm just 
> unplugging the
> cable from my desktops ethernet card and into my notebook, all I need 
> is to
> "recycle" the modems power (they don't rip you off by charing you 
> extra for
> additional PCs ah-hmm-mediacom-cough..)
>
> When I boot my XP partition it says that it sees the connection but 
> doesn't
> reach out to the net..  I can plug it back into my desktop running 
> Mandrake
> and PRESTO!..

ISO/OSI debug style...
1. Do you have link lights? (Physical)
2. Do you have Data Link? (i.e., check the arp tables on both end, make 
sure that each end sees the MAC address on the other end.)
3. Network... does the laptop have an IP? Does it get one (if needed) 
from the cable modem? Does it get a routing address (if needed)? Is IP 
even turned on?
4. Transport. Okay, if you have working IP, how's TCP and UDP (and even 
ICMP)? Can you ping the cable modem (well, ping is really 7, but I'm 
debugging, not lecturing)? The next hop? Can you three-way TCP 
handshake on IP only to an active machine, even if it's just the router?
5/6. Session and presentation... okay, if you can get link, and IP, and 
TCP working, can you get some DNS queries out, or maybe some NFS 
traffic?
7. Application... now we're up to testing various apps. Are things 
failing because of firewalls, or other filtering? Try different apps 
based on IP, names... ssh, http, dtp...

Maybe not a solution, but a tried and true framework for testing.

-Bop
Ronald Chmara
Ronin Professional Consulting LLC
"It  can only be attributable to human error." --Hal.

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