[ale] Cable Modem Strangeness On The Road

[hbbs at comcast.net]

I'm at the in-laws' in Columbus, GA where Knology supplies the broadband.  My nephew's WinXP box is wired straight to a 2com "sharkfin" cable modem, and its Ethernet card is set up to use DHCP for obtaining IP address and DNS address.  The weird thing is that if I boot to a Knoppix CD, I get no connection, and my Linux laptop, which works just fine with DHCP supplied locally in the house, also gets no connection.  Even if I set the IP address, gateway, mask, broadcast, etc. manually, I get nothing - I can't even ping the cable modem using the gateway address.  The only thing I can get is a link light on the sharkfin (but I can't make it blink).  What's up with this?