Good Morning,

I've been experiencing an issue with a freshly installed Mandrake 7.0 distribution of Linux. The installation goes smoothly including the networking portion. Because I use Microsoft's ICS to share my internet connection I set up the TCPIP settings in accordance with the settings  recommended in the ICS documents I was able to locate. Specifically, to obtain an IP from the DHCP server, no subnet, no gateway, no dns. Upon rebooting and starting linux, I received three consecutive dhcpcd [250] errors indicating that the DHCP was not acknowledging the Linux connection. I managed to get around this by logging into Linux as root and running 'dhcpcd -H', which seems to have created the appropriate files in the /etc/dhcpc directory. The problem is, on restarting I was once more greeted with the DHCP_NAK errors and, again, had to run dhcpcd -H to activate the link to the internet. Is there some way to configure linux to automatically obtain the address or, barring that, to run the dhcpcd command to activate the link?

Please, be gentle with me, I'm a complete novice with Linux. <G>

Be well
David Nolan

Three possibilities. First, you can edit the script /sbin/ifup to change
the command to include the -H parameter. Second, you can write your own
script to bring up networking: insmod your NIC driver, dhcpcd for the IP
address, etc., etc. Third, just configure the Linux box with a static IP
address on the subnet used by ICS. The dhcp server part of ICS only
assigns a dozen or so addresses - pick an address above that range
(192.168.0.200? or so) with the correct netmask (255.255.255.0?) and
router (192.168.0.1?), and set the dns servers for the Linux box to be
your ISP's dns servers, and you're off to the races.