BusyBee Debian

Let there be Internet!

After my second try with Debian installation, my network card is still down. I can load the driver but cannot ping the router at all nor my PowerBook G4. So i figured it might be the driver coz I saw the syslog says something about block for the tulip network card. I suddenly remembered that the PC has two network cards. One is built in and the other is on a PCI bus. So my hunch was that the wrong card was detected. (Writing this log later makes me knock myself in the head to see how stupid I am not to have just unplugged the network cable from one card to the other to test this theory).

I did a search using

find / -name tulip* 

and got the location of the driver at

/lib/modules/2.4.18-bf2.4/kernel/drivers/net/tulip

I went through the drivers (yes I know i can just open up the box and see what the chipset of the network card is but I'm too lazy :p) and see if any rang a bell. I saw eepro which looks familiar and did an

insmod eepro

but gave me a device resource busy message, so I tried eepro100 and it worked! I pinged 192.168.1.1 (my router) after i did an ifup eth0. I pinged 192.168.1.222 (my powerbook connected via a wireless airport card to the linksys wireless router) and it worked as well. I've set 192.168.1.222 as the gateway to go through the internet using my powerbook connection sharing using

route add default gw 192.168.1.222

but still i can't ping www.google.com. I then spent like a few hours trying to see on my powerbook (I've also just upgraded to 10.2.4 Mac OS X at that time so I thought that could be the culprit) and figure out what settings were changed. Then when I nearly gave up I tried pinging Singapore's DNS server 165.21.83.88 (I've memorised this after years of setting up internet when I was in Singapore) and it pinged ok! So it must be my dns. I went on to modify /etc/resolve.conf. The name server was pointed to 192.168.1.222 (my gateway) so I changed it to

nameserver 165.21.83.88

and then pinged www.google.com and it worked, woohoo.

Now it seems that using Singapore dns all the way in Melbourne, Australia seems to be kinda stupid so I looked around for Telstra BigPond dns ip address. I went to the support page which is hopeless and never show me what I need. I did a google search and found a site which is quite good called the oscableguy at http://www.ozcableguy.com/dns.html which gives not 2 but 4 dns server ip addresses! So thats it. I was in business! Now all I have to do is update the debian packages.

Posted by zoo at February 15, 2003 01:10 PM