[UFO Chicago] make linux connect to the evil attbi

[j.bare]

Good morning,

I am your worst newbie nightmare and I need some help connecting to the
internet through ATTBI. Right now I have my win98 machine online.

I have two ethernet cards in the RedHat 7.2 box.  Eventually, this machine
will be a NAT server/router and firewall.  This is the network I am trying
to configure:

eth0 is dynamicly assigned by the ISP
eth1 is 192.168.0.1
eth1 connects to the switch which connects the following
my compaq desktop is 192.168.0.66 (this is online now and has a ATTBI IP
address at this moment)
my old laptop is 192.168.0.65
my new IBM laptop is (when connected to our LAN) 192.168.0.67

On boot, eth0 fails to come up.  the message (during boot) says "determining
ip information failed" /var/log/messages has a line that says timed out
waiting for response from dhcp server.  dmesg says both NICs came up fine
(although one is sharing an IRQ with the usb port - should that make a
difference?)

# ifconfig -a

shows me
lo - inet addr 127.0.0.1
	UP LOOPBACK RUNNING
eth1 - inet addr 192.168.0.1
	UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST
eth0 - does not have an entry that says inet addr at all

eth0 does have a hardware address so I think RH 7.2 sees it and has a driver
for it

/var/log/messages says that dhcp times out waiting for a response from the
DHCP server so I know the DHCP client is sending the message, it is just not
receiving the reply

I don't want to use DHCP but my ISP assigns addresses that way.  dhcpcd, the
client daemon is supposed to query the DHCP server and use the response to
fill in the IP and gateway info.

As I understand it this is what is supposed to happen: dhcpcd sends out a
broadcast message either to 0.0.0.0 or from 0.0.0.0, I'm not sure which,
with a message saying something like, "I'm here!" and a MAC address.  My
ISPs DHCP server is supposed to respond to the specified MAC with, "Here ya
go!" and an IP address (and default gw, and other stuff  I think).

What I suspect is happening is that dhcpcd is sending the broadcast but DHCP
server at my ISP is either (1) sending the information but being denied by
my firewall, or (2) the ISP's DHCP server is not responding because it has
already assigned an IP to my MAC address; that being the cable modem.

Thanks for the help
Joe Bare