[sra]

I just got a 1 Gb Time Capsule to use with 3 machines at home: a MacBook Pro, a (core2duo) MacBook, and an iMac G5, all running Leopard (10.5.4). Setting up the Time Capsule to use my DSL modem and getting the three machines to connect to the new network was quite straightforward and simple.

However, I need to connect the iMac to the Time Capsule with an ethernet cable, so that its slower AirPort card won't force the network to run at 802.11b/g speeds and also so that I can do the first Time Machine backup with the hard-wired connection. I have a category 6 ethernet cable for this purpose. When I turn off AirPort on the iMac and connect the cable from one of the Time Capsule LAN ports to the ethernet port on the iMac, it doesn't make a connection: System Preferences/Network chows "built in ethernet: not connected", and the little light on the LAN port on the Time Capsule does not go on.

I don't think it's the cable, or the LAN port: when I do the same thing to connect my MacBook Pro to the Time Capsule, the Built in ethernet shows as "connected" and it seems to work.

Is there something about the G5 iMac, or something else I need to do to get this connection to work? Information about ethernet connections to Airport devices is a little sparse on the net.

One other (surely stupid) question: how do I determine the speed (b/g or n) the network is running at? I'm assuming I don't need to do anything to enable 802.11n networking on the two machines (the MacBook and MacBook Pro) on which this is possible, since they are running Leopard. Also, the CD with the Time Machine doesn't seem to include the 802.11n enabler, as far as I can see.

Thanks in advance,

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Steve Anderson

[sra]

Once again, the act of formulating my question helped me solve it.

It seems that the built-in ethernet interface on the iMac was set up to configure ipv4 with "PPP". In fact, in the "Automatic" configuration I was using, the only options here were "PPP"and "Manual," while what I needed was to configure ipv4 here via DHCP. When I made a new network configuration, it gave me that option, and once I had chosen it, the ethernet interface came up fine.

On several occasion in the past, I have had the experience that some necessary option on the Networking panel just wasn't available, for completely unclear reasons. In this case, I have never used PPP networking on this machine in any way, and I have no idea why it thought I was going to use that for ethernet.

I'd still like to know how to check on the current network speed, especially now that I have gotten the iMac off the wireless net ....

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Steve Anderson