Simple (Ha!) Internet Sharing Problem

[TheLlamaRama]

I have a couple year old OEM Celeron machine running SuSE 7.3 and an iBook 500 running Yellow Dog 2.2. Being the oh-so-clever computing guru I am, I bought myself a Linksys router (hub?) to try and share my cable connection between the two. Here's the setup:

Wall
|
Cable Modem
|
Router________
| |
PC iBook
Hooked up exactly as so, I can get one of the machines to conect to the 'net by simply turning it on before I start the other. Whichever starts first makes it past the eth0[ok] stage and the other is stuck hanging with no connection. Anyone catch where I'm screwing up?

[forand]

I would suspect that you bought a switch or hub and not a router, assuming that you can get each machine to connect individually. Check the model and see if it has routing capablities if not then you would have to use one of the machines as a router and get another network card. I could be wrong though.

[michaelk]

Interesting problem. At first glance it might be a DHCP error. I would make sure the cable modem/computers are connected correctly. You might have a DHCP or IP addressing issue. Try changing the computers to a static IP address i.e. 192.168.0.xx and see if that works.

[chikn]

We first need to no if its really a router or a hub. It sounds to me that its a hub and your only getting 1 IP adress (which is normal) from you Cable provider. Wheh the other box comes up the the ISP wont give you another address.

If it really is a router (not familiar with Best Buy routers...ie Linksys) then it sounds like its not setup for NAT and the 1 IP address is still making it to the first computer to come up.

[TheLlamaRama]

Thanks for replying everybody.

It's a hub. I have about zero knowledge with networking hardware, but this seems to be a bad thing. Do I need to pick up a router to do what I want to accomplish or will another ethernet card in the PC do the trick? I'd much rather buy another ethernet card than a router if it's just as easy to set up.

I'd also like to change the setup in the future to connect to an Airport base station rather than directly to the iBook. Are there conflicts involved with this, on the hardware side at least? I've gotten the iBook to connect wirelessly just fine with the cable directly in the base station, so the software parts weren't overly scary for me.

[michaelk]

It does sound like your cable service is only providing one ip address. Check with your cable service. Some ISPs provide up to 3.
If so then a hub will work. But remember that any communication between your computers will also be broadcasted to the rest of the world.

If not then with another ethernet card you can setup one computer as a router.