HELP!!! Please?

Huh?

So how is he connecting? Wirelessly? If so, go to sys prefs, network and then network port configurations under show near the top. Make sure airport is checked.

 

could be the netgear switch... my friend's cable modem had a problem and i've had problems connecting my PB to a cable modem. even set to dhcp, somehow, the router remembered and refused to connect anything but windows machines. dunno why. in my friend's case, she upgraded from 98 to xp - and the cable modem wouldn't connect anything but the old 98.

weirdness...

 

It seems nobody ever reads carefully...

He's not trying to connect to a cable modem, it's a T1 jack in the wall. I used to have this problem occasionally at school. From what I recall, I had to manually remove all previous setting under network. Hope that helps a bit. It may just be the hotel, who knows.

 

Sounds familiar, I had the same problem with our college's campus wide network. I don't remember doing anything to fix it, it just suddenly worked one day. Sorry this doesn't help you though very much. Although I think that at some point I even did a fresh OS install and it still didn't work, so I figured it was a campus network issue and not me.

 

i know what he was saying, i know he wasn't connecting to a cable modem. i guess i should have clarified that if it's not as simple as plug and play for a Mac (for XP even, for that matter), the source of the problem could be anything. that's all i wanted to say.

sorry if i sounded like i wasn't paying attention.

 

Make sure that if he is connecting via Ethernet that his AirPort card is turned off. I took my iBook to a friend's house and connected to the Internet via Ethernet on his PC network. It should just work automatically.

 

use the release / renew function under network in sys prefs. If it is still coming up with a yellow dot instead of green meaning, internal IP, double check and make sure air port is truned off... then perhaps try another room or another port to see if you get any difference. If not see if you can specify an IP.

That's all I can think of :/

 

T1 lines still use a switch, and I've had the same problem in the past myself. Turned out that someone was running a server on the network I was on, that was confusing some of the Mac's and PC's into thinking it was a DHCP server (has to do with how the networking works, etc etc). The simple work around is to grab an IP address from your PC, plug it manually into the Mac, and plug the mac into the network and unplug the PC. As long as you stay connected you should be fine. Its a temporary fix at best.

 

Obvious question = Are you sure the ethernet connection is configured to use DHCP?

 

Try Using BootP

I remember having problems years ago with Macs running System 8 logging into an NT server. The fix back then was to use BootP instead of DHCP.

Another thought is that if it's an intranet, 192.168.xxx.xxx, you could just manually enter IP numbers until you get one that works.