[sllug-members]: DHCP & DNS Issues

[Elijah Newren]

Hi everyone,

For some reason, my sister's laptop (running FC5, if relevant) isn't
setting the default gateway when using DHCP to determine network
settings.  I told her the workaround was to manually run e.g.
  route add default gw 192.168.0.1
whenever she boots up or restarts her network.  This manual
intervention is somewhat annoying, and it strikes me as really odd
that no default gateway is being set.  This was probably caused by
people at her work doing some modifications to her laptop to give her
whatever static configuration she needed there, but somewhat
embarassingly I can't find what would cause this.  This has happened
with two different DHCP servers and in both cases my laptop (also
running FC5) has no such problems with the same network.

There is also a second issue, that I think may have come up on this
list before but which I don't remember the answer to.  The Qwest
Actiontec modem, acting as a DHCP server, will always provide two
nameservers -- the first is 192.168.0.1 (itself), which doesn't work,
and then the second is the legitimate one.  With the bogus nameserver,
the network connection seems to move at a crawl.  One can workaround
this by editing /etc/resolv.conf to remove the incorrect line each
time, but that's somewhat annoying.  Is there any way to configure
things to just automatically ignore  the bad nameserver and not use
it?

Thanks!
Elijah