Please HELP!!

[justjohn924]

So I had a pc at my house which I was running ubuntu on for quite some time. The Internet connection which is accessed via a cable connection was working just fine with firefox. I just got a new computer and it's working fine too. However when I took the old one to my mother-in-law's and tried to connect it to the internet there it wouldn't work! I don't understand why I didn't change any settings or anything before I moved it. Her Cable modem box is slightly different then mine but all the cables and hook-ups are the same so I don't understand why it won't work! Please help me.
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[blackhatbrigade]

Did you power cycle the cable modem? Cable modems usually retain the MAC address of the last device connected to them and need to be powered off then back on to recognize a new device.

[justjohn924]

yeah several times

[Titan8990]

Does your mother-in-law's ISP use PPPoE?

[justjohn924]

well I'm farely new to all this so don't really know. How would I know if she was?

[blackhatbrigade]

Is your NIC pulling an IP from the cable modem? You can tell by going to xterm and typing "ifconfig"

if not, you can type "dhclient <iface>" and see if it pulls one. That's assuming it's wired and not wireless. If you only have one NIC, then <iface> should be eth0

This is all assuming your ISP isn't doing anything messed up (like mine) and only allowing one MAC address to be active for the internet connection. It's also assuming your ISP is using DHCP and not static ip's.

[snowpine]

Some ISPs set up the connection to work with a particular computer's MAC address. I have Time Warner, and in order to get it to work with both of my computers, I had to set up my router so that it "fakes" the MAC address of the original computer. Just a suggestion.

[blackhatbrigade]

You did say a cable connection right? This isn't DSL is it? (which would be PPPoE)

[Titan8990]

PPPoE more or less means that you need a username and password to get on the internet.

[justjohn924]

I don't think it's pulling an Ip address because when I try to open firefox i get the address not found error so is there a way to make it detect one? Because it doesn't seem like the computer is even recognizing that it's plugged up to the router.