[ale] Got wireless working in 8.04, but ...

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

James Earl Smith wrote:
> I was so happy to get wireless working in 8.04, but my joy was short 
> lived. For I now have a line in ifconfig that I have no idea what it 
> does, other then maybe blocking my wired card from linking into our home 
> dhcp server.
> 
> eth0:avahi Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0b:db:9d:04:98
> inet addr:169.254.6.161 Bcast:169.254.255.255 Mask:255.255.0.0
> UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
> Interrupt:17
> 
> In all my other versions of Ubuntu  I have not seen this line before.


Hi James,

I think you have the situation reversed. Rather than the interface 
eth0:Avahi preventing you from getting an address via DHCP, 
avahi-autoipd [0] creates eth0:avahi when your request for a DHCP lease 
on eth0 fails.

Is your /etc/network/interfaces file empty (or commented out with #) 
except for the two lines about lo? Have you tried connecting directly to 
the device that acts as the dhcp server with a known good cable?

[0] http://avahi.org/wiki/AvahiAutoipd

-Brian