There are two ways that you can set up networking in Puppy. After you boot Puppy to the screen, click on Start/Setup/Ethernet network Wizard and read Barrys instructions.
If you have a network card installed or have an onboard one it will usually be detected by the wizard, now you must know what sort of network you are trying to connect to. The two ways to connect to a network are by using static addresses or using DHCP.
Static addresses are network addresses that you enter into a file and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a way for your computer to obtain a network address from another machine on the network.
The network wizard will give you the option to configure your network card and if you click on the Configure_eth0 button you will be presented with a window that has two options, Auto_DHCP and Manual_config.
If your network has a DHCP server click on Auto_DHCP and it will connect you to the network. If you are using static addressing click on Manual_config. Follow the instructions and when it asks you to enter your ip address type in the address that you will be using for your machine.
Network addressing is a subject that can be complex if you do not understand the principal of dotted decimal addressing and would take up a lot of room on this wiki to explain so I will just give you a simple explanation and only cover Lan addressing for IPv4.
The makeup of a dotted decimal address is composed of four sets of blocks made up of up to three numbers separated by a decimal point or a dot i.e.
10.10.10.10.
or 127.0.0.1
or 192.168.244.100
There ar three main classes of addresses starting at, A 1-126, B 128-191, C 192-223 and each class has a range of restricted addresses that are not recognised on the internet, the addresses are reserved for private networks such as LANs (Local Area Network). The most common used for small LANs is the range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 in class C. If you are setting up a small network and do not intend to use DHCP you can use static addressing in your machines.
The usual way of setting up a network card is to determine the addresses you wish to use on each machine and then enter the address along with a subnetwork address. If you had two machines and decided to use 192.168.1.10 and 192.168.1.11 as the addresses you could go to a terminal and type in:
ipconfig eth0 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
this would enter the address 192.168.1.10 and turn on the network card. Then you could do the same on the second machine using the address 192.168.1.11.
If you wish to learn more about networking get hold of a good book on the subject as it is not a subject that can be learned in a half hour.
To test your network setup first you can use a command called "ping", this sends small packages through the TCP protocol to see if everything is working.
To use "ping" you only need to open a terminal such as "rxvt", which can be done on Puppys desktop by clicking on the rxvt icon, and typing in:
ping 127.0.0.1
this will start the ping program and display information showing if TCP is working:
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.0 ms
--- 127.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.0/0.0/0.0 ms
hit Ctrl + c to stop the program.
To check if your network interface is working use ping with the static address you entered in ipconfig above:
ping 192.168.1.10
this should give the same results as above if the network card is installed and working, again the process can be halted using Ctrl + c.
If you wish to check other machines on your network you can do so using the ping command and the address of the remote machine. If the machine does not have a static addresss you can run the ipconfig command on that machine and find the address, it will be under eth0 if there is only one network card in the machine.
By "pinging" this address you will be able to determine if the two machines are connected or if there is a problem.
The ping command returns the data above if all is well, else it will show data package loss.
You can check network addresses in Windows by opening a DOS prompt or terminal in XP and typing in "ifconfig". You can also run the "ping" command from here.
