Pure:dyne Work Arounds

Introduction

The purpose of this section is to provide work around(s) for certain areas within Pure:dyne and presumably Dyne:bolic that SoSLUG has invested an amount of time in resolving. We do not clam to provide a solution to any given problem, instead we provide a procedure to overcome some of the issues that have come to light.

<< Network Issues >>

You know how it is you have just installed Pure:dyne and everything is working fine, everything that is except for the network be it wired or wireless this is purhaps one of the most difficult areas to correct. If you follow the following rules however it is possible to overcome the limitations of the dyne product.

1. First of all you need to find out if you actually have a problem that is network related.
   Run in xterm the "ifconfig" on it own, this will tell you what devices are connected and available to the network that you are or wish to use.

   If the only returned display message looks like below then there is a problem with the network.

   lo Link encap:Local Loopback
   inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
   inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
   UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
   RX packets:2801 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
   TX packets:2801 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
   collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
   RX bytes:259342 (253.2 Kb) TX bytes:259342 (253.2 Kb)

2. You will now need to confirm your network hardware, this is easily achieved by running a program again in xterm called "lspci" this lists all the hardware recognised.

   <<--- Snip --->>
   02:00.0 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-768 [Opus] USB (rev 07)
   02:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): NEC Corporation uPD72874 IEEE1394 OHCI 1.1 3-port PHY-Link Ctrlr (rev 01)
   02:06.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
   02:06.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
   02:06.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 02)
   02:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 10)

   As can be seen from the example above an ethernet controller has been found, if yours is not found perhaps it is a wireless network card on whatever you will first need to identify the network card in your installation. You then need to find a linux module that supports the network card you are using. Installing any given module for use in linux is as simple as entering the following command, but as 'root' user.

   modprobe module_name

   Whilst this will install the necessary driver for your network card it is not a permanent solution as this will need to ne re-installed each time you use the Pure:dyne liveCD

3. Armed with the above information you can try hard coding an IP address to the ethernet controller, first however you will need to decide on a free IP Address number this can be any number not currently in use by other network devices including routers and servers etc. You will probably need to change your user to root the password for this currently is "luther".

   As root user:

   ifconfig eth0 192.168.nnn.NNN broadcast 192.168.nnn.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

   192.168.nnn is the class 'C' of the network I have assumed you have selected for your own internal network where 'nnn' is defined as your network segment, you may have selected differently, if you have then change the values accordingly. The "nnn" portion may vary according to your own network and usually is the value '1' or perhaps '0' depending on the router as this can not be predetermined, we have choosen to use a variable 'nnn' in it's place. The final variable defined 'NNN' is the Host number this is the only part of the address that is likely to differ from the rest of the computers located on the same network segment. If you didn't already know the 'nnn' portion, this we refer as the segment number. Both 'nnn' & 'NNN' should be replaced by the values needed for your network, Dynamic Host Control Protocol or 'DHCP' will usually increment each host address by one unless it was previously assigned so if you incremented your host address in 'fives' it should be possible to find a free address reasonably quickly.

   If you can now ping another PC on the network on the same network segment you are halfway to restoring network connectivity.

4. To restore full connectivity the manual way you need to do two more things modify the /etc/resolv.conf file with the IP Address of your nearest router if you are using a 192.168.nnn.NNN network then this address is likely to be 192.168.0.1 or perhaps 192.168.1.1 depending on the network segment established.

   The second thing to do is establish the route of your gateway usually this is the same address as your nearest router. The following command should be used.

   route add -net default gw 192.168.nnn.1 where again 'nnn' is your current network segment.