Connecting to the Internet

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 07:07:35PM -0400, Broming plutonium wrote:
> Hello everyone...for the first time.
>  
> I have two computers. I very recently installed FreeBSD on my first
> computer because the operating system it used to have, Microsoft
> Windows, was infected by so many viruses that my computer took a
> million years to open a program.

:-) 
 
> I've only had 2 days of experience with FreeBSD, so I don't know
> anything about it. How do I connect it to the Internet using Ethernet?
> My computer seemed to be telling me it had three network
> interfaces. I'm guessing that the ones called plip0 and ppp0 are all
> wrong; sl0 is the right one.

FreeBSD comes with a handbook. You can find it on your disk at 

/usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.html (HTML version)
/usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.txt (plain text version)

You can view the text version with the command 
'less /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.txt'

If you have the X window system running, and have a web browser (mozilla
or firefox) installed, reading the HTML version is probably nicer.

> FreeBSD tries to establish an Internet connection on plip0 every time
> it boots. How do I change that to sl0?  How do I tell it to "tell DHCP
> server to assign IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on subnet mask
> xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx USING the sl0 network interface?

If you run the command 'ifconfig', you'll see which interfaces are
available. On my system it returns this:

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=18<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
        inet 10.0.0.150 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
        ether 00:11:09:8b:c2:58
        media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
        status: active
plip0: flags=108810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 

You can forget about plip0 (it is shown because the system has a
parallel port) and lo0 (that's the loopback interface). In my case re0
is the ethernet card.

To see if you have a active ethernet card, run the following command
(without the quote-marks)

'dmesg|grep Ethernet'

On my system it returns:

re0: <RealTek 8169S Single-chip Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xd400-0xd4ff mem 
0xcfffbf00-0xcfffbfff irq 16 at device 11.0 on pci0
re0: Ethernet address: 00:11:09:8b:c2:58

This shows that I have a RealTek ethernet chip, that uses the re
driver. It is also listed in the ifconfig output.

> What do I have to do to establish an Internet connection? Any help
> would be appreciated. Thanks!

That depends. We need more information in order to tell you anything
usefull. Do you have a DSL modem that has an ethernet connection? Or do
you dial in via a modem?

Roland
-- 
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