Having a lot of trouble connecting to the internet

This bothers me very much because it has been happening often lately. I am having trouble connecting to the internet, and have had to reinstall fedora entirley each time.

Why is it that the fedora installer automatically sets up the internet for me, and it works fine, but when I use the internet config wizard to set it up it won't. I don't want to have to reinstall everytime I want to browse the internet.

Right now I'm using a normal motorola cable modem via ethernet in fc3. Yes, the modem works fine under linux, but only when the installer configures it for me.

I went in window's cmd and typed ipconfig to get all my network details, and even put them into linux. But that doesn't do anything.

Is there any hope?

[awdac]

Originally Posted by Bitmappity

I don't want to have to reinstall everytime I want to browse the internet.

Wow. I guess that does get to be something of a nuisance, huh? What exactly happens when you aren't able to connect? Find out if you're getting an IP by issuing '/sbin/ifconfig' in a terminal. You should see an inet address there that is similar to the one you saw with windows ipconfig. If there isn't one there, you probably need to run 'dhclient eth0' to get one. It would be very helpful in diagnosing the problem if you could get it set up and show us the results of ifconfig and your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file.

Basically, whenever I open firefox, it takes about an hour to load, until it finally comes up with an "<x> could not be found" message.

If I fill out all the details I got from windows, it has no problem activating it. I just can't browse the internet for some reason.

When I go into the terminal and type "/sbin/ifconfig", I get the following:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0E:A6:92:0B:57
inet addr:67.163.82.48 Bcast:67.163.83.255 Mask:255.255.254.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20e:a6ff:fe92:b57/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:209 Memory:feafc000-0

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:7391 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7391 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:4954922 (4.7 MiB) TX bytes:4954922 (4.7 MiB)

The eth0 part looks normal. pretty much everything I entered from windows. Not sure where it got the Bcast number from though.

This is what is inside my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
IPV6INIT=no
HWADDR=00:0e:a6:92:0b:57
DHCP_HOSTNAME=c-67-163-82-48.client.comcast.net
IPADDR=67.163.82.48
NETMASK=255.255.254.0
GATEWAY=67.163.82.1

Everything looks normal to me.

[awdac]

Originally Posted by Bitmappity

Everything looks normal to me.

Well, yeah, more or less. You've got IPv6 stuff going on, which doesn't help, but may not hurt either. A lot of people turn it off by adding these two lines to their /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off

Also, you generally have BOOTPROTO=dhcp in the ifcfg-eth0, but you seem to be doing fine without it. That pretty much leaves us with DNS issues. What does your /etc/resolv.conf look like? Did you enter your DNS servers with the GUI configurator? Often, even usually, when you have DHCP on, it automagiaclly writes the DNS servers to your resolv.conf, but it may not have.

Edit: on second glance, it appears that you have a dhcp hostname defined, but then specify your own IP. Which are you doing? If you aren't using DHCP, then you probably just have to define your nameservers.

I ended up reinstalling fedora because I needed the connection.. and it worked at first, but when I switched to windows and then back to fedora again, it stopped working :/ So back here I am..

My resolve.conf file was something like this (may not be 100% exact, I'm remembering this off the top of my head..):

; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search hsd1.il.comcast.net
nameserver 68.87.66.196
nameserver 68.87.64.196

I filled all that stuff out with the gui, so yeah, it's writing it to there.

Right now I'm providing the DNS information, and letting it get an IP from dchp, which it refuses to do. If I try ifup eth0 in the terminal, It fails in getting the IP and loses all packets sent. If I try dhclient eth0 it ends up finding nothing.. and at the end says something like "unable to find something something database.. sleeping." I'm not sure what else to do at this point.

[Triobe3]

Apparently the resolv.conf has been an issue with FC/RedHat products since 1999!
Check your resolv.conf file before you connect with the browser and then after you connect. I think it is a temporary address file.

I can only tell you what I did in FC2 to fix my problem of connection but no browsing. This was in Kppp but something similar may affect your situation.

In the DNS tab of kppp configuration, I did not let kppp automatically find the ISP addresses. I called the ISP and got their #'s, then entered them under manual/static.

Then I:
1. open terminal>go to /etc/resolv.conf>backup the contents

2. delete the contents (not the file itself)>save and close>reboot

3. Voila! I have my connection and my browsers.

hope this helps

good luck!

I have temporarily solved my problem. It seems to work for now, not sure how long it will last. If I fill in everything as static, then run dhclient, it seems to work. Usually anything I come up with doesn't last for long, so I'm not sure how long I'll be doing this until I come back here

Triobe3, thank you for the suggestion. I'll be sure to try that first If I come up with anymore problems.