I am using Red Hat Linux 5.1 on a 10BaseT ethernet network. All other boxes on the network are various windows. I have assigned my linux box eth0 interface to 192.168.1.241, with a subnet of 255.255.255.0. The deafult gateway is a software based router (WinRoute) on 192.168.1.3 which I entered for the default gateway. All other machines on the network are 192.168.1.X. The NIC seems to load up in linux just fine, it is a 3COM 3C905B card. My question is shouldn't I be able to ALTEAST ping other machines on my network? I cannot and I have played with the setting quite a bit with no success. I cannot ping the linux machine from any of my windows machines either. The windows machines are in a NT 4.0 controlled domain. I have entered the domain and then took it off on the linux machine and this did not help. I can ping the loopback interface just fine which I believe means the NIC card is functioning (although I may be wrong on this). Should I try to change out the NIC card first or am I just missing so obvious step? Any help would be much appreciated.

Pinging the loopback address of 127.0.0.1 only means that the tcp/ip stack is installed correctly. It doesn't mean the card is working. Try to ping the cards ip address that you put on the linux box from the linux box instead (192.168.1.241). This will ensure that the ip is really assigned to the nic card. Do you have link beat on the nic card? What about on your switch or hub? I have seen duplex miss matches between linux machine nic cards and switches. If you don't have link you might want to try the cabling or a different port on the hub/switch. If you do have link then you most likely the physical connections are good. I hope this helps.

I have pinged the actual address (192.168.1.241) and it responds fine. The 100 link light on the NIC is on and the link light at the switch in on to, so it seems that the physical connection is fine. It must be something I don't have set right on either the linux machine or my network, although I am at a loss as to what.

Pinging the interface's ip address doesn't tell you anything either, as the packets are still sent over the loopback interface. Step one, check if you have any firewall active that's blocking all traffic. Not likely though. Step two, check your routes. Redhat 5.1 is pretty old. Older kernels require you to manually add a route to the local network. Newer kernels do that automatically. Use the route command to make sure. In your case, you should probably add the route with... route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev eth0 Step three, check your driver. It's possible that the driver isn't talking to the nic at all (even though it "recognized" the card and loaded ok). Most common cause for this is wrong io/irq/dma settings, where some of those settings are right, but others are not.

I added the routing info and still no dice. I am rather new to linux. Any recommendations on 1) how to check my current IRQ, I/O, and DMA settings and 2) How to change them?