I am having some difficulty setting up a lan using only static ip addresses. I have two computers they are almost identical. One running Mandrake MNF the other running Mandrake 10.0 as a file server. the MNF box has 2 nic's one connecting to my cable modem and has connection. at the installation screen it finds 2 nic's and wants to set them up. The first my wan connection dhcp client. The second is my lan. Im guessing the instalation assumes i already have a network running a dhcp server. It wants to obtain the ip address. I want it to serve as the dhcp server. There is almost no way to enable it from the computer at all. You must connect to the MNF from another computer using a web interface at https://localhost.localdomain:8443/ unfortuantely if it does not have an ip address i cannot connect to it because it is not actually connected to the network. I tried to set the MNF's ip as 192.168.8.1 and the server which i will use to try to configure the MNF from to 192.168.8.2 both with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and when it did not work tried a different subnet mask of 127.0.0.1. Both times and all the other configurations i tried it still did not work. Maybe i am putting in the wrong ip addresses but i dont see how. I tried connecting them using a crossover cable at first and now i am trying to connect them using a linksys hub not router. Any advise or suggestions would be appreciated and by all means treat me like an idiot please. I am 22 years old, been building computers for 14 and been playing around with linux for about 6 and i finally think i know about linux to use it everyday.