[hollowflame]

My 1.5 GHz Powerbook hasn't been able to connect to the internet with Ethernet recently. It connects fine with the airport network, but If I try to connect with the ethernet cable, it just plain doesn't work. It tells me that 'Ethernet is connected, but it has a user assigned IP address, so it may not be able to connect to the internet'.

Funny thing is, I never assigned it an IP address, OS X did

Any Ideas? Or .plists that I can delete to get it back to default, or something?

[tooki]

You sure it didn't say "self-assigned IP address"? (When you, the user, have manually assigned an IP address, it makes NO mention of this in the status area.) A self-assigned IP address begins with 169.254.

A self-assigned IP address means that it has an ethernet link (=the cable is connected, and there's something at the other end), but that it wasn't able to get an IP address from the DHCP server in your cable modem or router. (In the past, when it worked, it wasn't OS X assigning the address, but rather the DHCP server.)

Are you using a hub or switch between the Mac and the router? If so, the cable connecting the router to the hub/switch may have come undone. Also, have you tried briefly unplugging the AC power from the router and hub/switch to make them reboot? That often clears up such issues.

Also, this is NOT a PowerBook question. I am moving this to Networking, where it belongs, but please be more conscientious of where you put threads in the future.

tooki

[hollowflame]

Thanks for the Reply tooki

Yes, you are right, it says "self assigned IP address". Basically, I have the ethernet cable connected directly into my powerbook, and the other end of the cable is connected directly into the cable modem, so I don't think there is any switches or hubs. I have tried shutting the modem down and restarting it, but it doesn't seem to do anything....

[tooki]

Hold on a sec there... so when you say "connect via ethernet", you're not connecting through the router? As in, you're unplugging the router from the cable modem, and plugging the PowerBook instead?

Cable modems, generally speaking, will only connect to the first computer (or router) that they communicate with. If you then swap out another computer or router, you have to reboot the cable modem for it to recognize the second computer or router instead of the first. (If you restarted the cable modem with the router still connected, it wouldn't help.)

And why not just leave the cable modem connected to the router, and use a second ethernet cable to connect the PowerBook to the router?

tooki

[ghporter]

What tooki said. The router should allow you to plug as many computers as you want into your cable modem and allow them to connect to the Internet without any hang ups. That's kind of the point behind consumer-level routers. An AirPort Base Station IS a router as well as a wireless access point, so pluging into it will give you all the benefits of a router along with the wireless networking.

Or are we missing something here?

[hollowflame]

Okay thanks guys. Restarting the modem with the powerbook plugged in worked.

I need to plug in with ethernet, because I am dual booting my Powerbook with Ubuntu Linux, and Linux doesn't support the wireless extreme cards, so I need to plug in directly.

Thanks again

[tooki]

Again, why not plug the PowerBook into the router? There's no need to plug straight into the cable modem, and in fact, you should avoid doing that.

tooki

[hollowflame]

My airport is acting as my router, and I don't think I can plug directly into it. I'll look at it some more, I'm newer to the whole Airport thing.

[tooki]

If it's a white (not silver) AirPort (and also not the little Express version), it has two ethernet ports, one for WAN (the internet connection) and another for LAN (the local network). You can plug another computer, or a switch to connect multiple computers, to the LAN port.

tooki

[hollowflame]

Ahh, excellent. Thank you for your help tooki

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