The man page kinda says it all. If everything is hooked up properly, you should be able to run dhcpcd eth0 and it should just work. When I first got my cable modem I was given an ip address etc, and figured I didn't need to mess with dhcp. Well I just couldn't get anything to work, and as you know, "We don't support Linux!!" So I tried dhcpcd, and that didn't work either, even with lots of variations on the options, which I now know I didn't need. Turns out, my network driver wasn't quite handling the nuances of the latest 3com card. I got the latest driver from the company, and it all worked fine. Fortunately 3com is Linux friendly. My first question would be, therefore, are you sure your Ethernet interface works? Don't just ping your outside address - that's not an adequate test. You really need to hook it up to another machine and make sure they can ping eachother. If you've done that, and your assigned ip address still doesn't work, and dhcpcd still doesn't work, well that would be very strange indeed. You may have to put a Windows box on your cable connection, temporarily, so you can get some help from those people. Once they get it working, and you've got your ip address, you should be able to swap in your Linux box without trouble. For a while I had two Linux boxes, very different hardware, both configured to my ip address, and I'd put either one on my cable modem, depending on my mood. I just unplugged the cable and moved it to the other box. Didn't reinit a thing, software or hardware. It just worked. So use Windows to get things started, if you must. But really, you shouldn't have to. Karl