A unix box not seeing the network, a routing problem?

[dbsgi]

I'm running Irix 6.5 on an Indy r5000. The box is having trouble seeing my network.

History:
The machine originally had a static IP on my home network, and would communicate just fine. I deleted the "Demo" and "Out-of-Box" accounts, ran the "Improve system security" utility. Since then my network connectivity has stopped. Except for when I added a router to the setup...

I set the router to be a DHCP server, set the Indy to configure it's interface using DHCP, rebooted, and it worked. It received all it's config info from the router and could see the LAN and the internet. I rebooted later, and now it can't see anything. The syslog reports "No response to DHCPBROADCAST."

I went back to static IP, set all my other boxes (running os's from Mac OS X to Windows to Linux) and they can all use the network with no problem. The Indy however, still will not respond. No pings (except it's own ip), no internet, no nothing. Heres the output from "netstat -rn"

Destination Gateway Netmask
default 192.168.1.1
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1
192.168.1 link#1 0xffffff00
192.168.1.12 127.0.0.1
224 link#1 0xf0000000
255.255.255.255 192.168.1.255

For an experiment I gave it the same ip address as a machine running Mac OS X using ifconfig. As soon as I pressed return on the Indy, the mac immediately threw an error that another machine was trying to use its IP. So the Indy is communicating on some level.

It looks like a routing problem to me. I flushed all it's routes and manually reconfigured, no dice. I disabled one of my Linux boxes to the point where it was behaving the same way, and with some ifconfig commands, and the addition of a default route, it was fixed. So I'm stumped. Any ideas out there on what might be wrong? Thanks very much...

-dbsgi

[DVNT1]

"No response to DHCPBROADCAST" would normally indicate a cabling problem or DHCP server availability problem.

But when you used tried manually assigning a duplicate IP with a result of another machine showing a Duplicate IP on the network error. This normally indicates the cabling is good beween those two computers (at least).

So far , it is not clear if the DHCP server is working at the segment with the MAC and UNIX computer. Can the MAC successfully renew it's IP address?

Regardless of the DHCP avalability though, when you assigned a valid a static IP that should be become a null issue. At that point, I am unclear how to test setting problems within UNIX.

From a different perspective, the cabling to the UNIX machine might have a good transmit pair but a bad receive pair. I think this is another way to explain the basic symptoms you described.

[dbsgi]

I've swaped out cables, no luck.

The Mac, and also windows and linux boxes, can all renew thier IPs.

I'm starting to think there a hardware problem. Ugh.