From: Drakeman on 11/24/2002
I remember a few commands from my long ago windows days.
Go to Start - Programs - MSDOS
You should be in a DOS window, the two commands to try are
ifconfig
-or-
ifconfig /renew_allThis will show you some information like your IP address and the "renew" will try to renew your IP address by doing the same thing that happens when you restart.
winipcfg.exe
This brings up a little box that shows IP info and if you click on "advanced" you will see even more info and you can see how many network devices windows thinks it has.
I just thought I would mention these, they always came in handy.
In Linux you want to install "tcpdump" if you don't have it try
urpmi tcpdump
and urpmi should find it on your distro CDROM. tcpdump will show you activity on eth0 (your ethernet interface) and you can watch the packets fly to see your computer talking to the DHCP server etc..
Try this (as root)
tcpdump -Xs 4000 -i eth0
read about netstat
man netstat
and don't forget the control panel in KDE, it has a lot of network tools, or try "setup" or "setuptool" from a console.