no one here sugggested I do the ifdown/up thing but I did try it . In any 
casegoogling found dhcp3-client and it's webpage says 

 'Cable modem users likely need this or another dhcp client 
 'to successfully connect to the network. '

so I am downloading it (apt-get) and we'll see if that works.

Don't worry about half following the progress.... any help I get is greatly 
appreciated.

On Sunday 05 February 2006 09:01 am, Darrin Chandler wrote:
> First off, I've only half followed your progress, so you may have tried
> everything below already...
>
> Try "ifdown eth0" before "ifup eth0" and see if ifup works then. If it
> still gives errors then it sounds like somethings wrong there. I don't
> know Mepis, btw.
>
> If that stuff doesn't work, you should still be able to do "ifconfig
> eth0 up" and get somewhere.
>
> After eth0 is up, then you *should* be able to do "dhclient eth0" to get
> an IP address for that interface through dhcp. ASSUMING that all your
> network setup is correct then ifup will do this for you, but I think
> that's NOT the case here.
>
> When you try "dhclient eth0" it should print some progress messages, or
> errors.
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