dhcp help requested

[Scott Howell]

	Hello Speakup friends,

Well I'm temporarly using my work E-mail address until I get my cable 
connection working. Therefore I have a question regarding the Debian Potato 
installation. I'm using the disks off the ftp site and from what I can tell 
I get to the point where I'm to configure the network, but I'm having some 
problems. I have a cable connection whcih uses dhcp and from what the cable 
company tellss me they don't support anything but windows, but well gee 
does this surprise anyone, however, there are folks using Linux with their 
service. This leads me to believe their dhcp implementation is normal so 
all should work.
I have a 3com card its an older isa 10mbps model that uses the 503 driver. 
When the module was installed there were no errors and if you type ifconfig 
it gives me some basic info about the card like the irq and so on. Of 
course it does not provide any ip or other info as one hasn't been assigned 
to it. So I let the installer run pump to obtain the ip address and so on 
automatically and it returns a message after about 20 seconds or so stating 
the configuration failed. I can't get any useful information as to why it 
failed. I tried running pump by hand to see if anything of value would come 
from it and yet nothing. Does anyone have any suggestions I might try? It 
appears as far as I can determine that the cable connection is working or 
so all the lights on the cable modem would indicate this and the network 
card worked fine previously in this box when I had dsl.

tia
Scott