A couple of times I’ve given Mandrake 9 a whirl on my PC, and the same problem has arisen each time… and I’m sure we’ve all been in the situation where we say to ourselves “Ahh, now I remember why that wasn’t the solution I went with”.
In this situation no matter what network card I install, or how I hunt for why it happens, there is just no software connectivity. When pinging from this host to another I get host unreachable (and they ARE on the same subnet), when pinging from the other host to this it simply times out. Is there a hidden “I know you’ve plugged it all in, and switched it on, but it won’t work till you push this button” switch? I think maybe iptables or some software firewall has something to do with it but I could bewrong….