Hello all, I have been trying to get online with linux for the longest time And i finally feel that i'm making progress since i have an ip address and eth0 inializes at boot. however, for some reason, i cant surf online, i cant ping anybody. i dont understand, since i have an ip. could it be some sort of firewalling? i am using red hat 7 and it is pretty much at default from when i installed it except for trying to get online. one thing though, when i run ifconfig -a, it doesnt show eth0 as being up like lo. it doesnt show up or down for eth0. dont know if that makes a difference. it also doesnt show the kernel module used. dont know if it should. anyone who offers help, thank you very much for your help. it is greatly appreciated I WANT TO GET ONLINE DAMNIT!

Where do you get ip ? dhcp or static? if eth0 is not up. You can not ping your self. What about light on NIC?

thank you for your reply. i get an ip from dhcp. i know it is a good ip though because it is the same ip i get when i switch over to windows. same settings as when i switch over to windows, including ip, subnet, and name servers. when linux is booting eth0 passes ok. when i said that eth0 isnt up, i meant that when i run ifconfig -a, eth0 doesnt say up however it does show the proper ip. and i can ping myself. i also posted this in the linux forum. if you want to view the info. on those posts which has more info, here is the url: http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwboard/forum/7172.html once again, thanks for any and all help!