Tainted new toy...

C

ctheory

Registered
Well, for the longest time i've wanted to get a Mac, mostly because I like to tinker with anything i've never used before.

My wish came true, I got a powerbook G4 tossed in my lap. So, first thing I try to do, snag a network cable, plug it in, and see what I can do.

Great! It got right online behind the router, so I packaged it up (I was at work), and got ready to take it home. I never got a chance to take it home, so it sat around the office for about 3 weeks. Well, today, I decide to pop it back out and see what I can do with it again. This time, I plug it in, and nothing. Says that it detects no network connectivity, that there's no cable plugged in. I switched between a few different cables at the office, to boot.

I figured the reason I got it handed down to me was because the ethernet port is dead. So, what the heck, I grab a D-Link DFE-690TXD ethernet cardbus card. Plug it in, still nothing. Okay, so I got a problem child/lemon. It kinda sucks, but hey, if i'm going to learn macs/osx, no better time than the present, right?

I dug around the forums for a while, searching for some situations similar to mine and even did a few things (reset-nvram, settings, etc), moved some .plist files from a preferences directory, and still nothing.

As of now, I have no clue where to go. I'm pulling my hair out, here, and dying for some insight.

Thanks in advance.
c.t.

EDIT - Spelling, and a detail I left out.
 
And no Airport/WiFi card I guess... Hm. In System Profiler, does it say anything strange (i.e. "nothing") about the network hardware? System Profiler is in /Applications/Utilities or in the About this Mac menu item under the Apple if you click on "More Info"...
 
No, that's what I don't understand. It "sees" the hardware, but the internal ethernet doesn't get an IP address at all, but the cardbus card at least assigns itself a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address. I've tried DHCP and manual addressing, but nothing. Apparently the co-worker actually had someone reinstall Tiger once already trying to fix this, but nothing.

I'm so confused. I don't even get any error messages or anything. Gah.

EDIT: No, no airport/wifi.
 
What if...and I have no idea if this is possible or not...

But, can the networking stack get damaged, much like the winsock can in Windows XP? I've had a lot of situations where I had to rebuild it because it got damaged and did the same thing. Could this be happening here? I can't get an IP address with the D-Link card, nor the internal ethernet, although it says it's still there.

Just hoping I can massage a mind here. :)
 
Never heard of such a thing on the Mac... Well: In classic Mac OS, yes, but not in OS X...
 
Worst case senerio, if nothing else works, you could get a wireless USB setup, and use that for internet. You could also look into installing an airport, but last time I checked, they were not giving those things away, and lets not even talk about opening up the powerbook.
 
? ... installing an airport card is easy. or did you mean to check on the ethernet port?
 
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