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!

I don't know what you mean by up or down. ifconfig -a says nothing about up or down? But it sounds like your ISP did not give you a domain and DNS address. Find out what your DNS address(s) are from your ISP. Then place them in a file called /etc/resolv.conf in this format: search yahoo.com nameserver 123.456.789.123 Then do a: /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart The 'search' is the name of your ISP's domain. There can be three nameserver listings which are your DNS servers. Good luck

thank you very much for your responce. i am dool booted with redhat and winXP. i can get online with xp. i compared settings from xp to linux and they match exactly. same ip from my isp, same name servers that are listed in resolv.conf. thank you

im not sure if this pertains to linux, since I only deal with unix. have you checked your netmask, and/or your defaultrouter(gateway)? does linux use a nsswitch.conf file, if so did you add "dns" next to the hosts field? ex: hosts files dns Dave