Networking older Mac

Hello -
I have an old eMac (PowerPC G4 (1.2); 167MHz bus) for which I just installed an Airport Extreme card; installation seems to be OK (ran it twice just to make sure), and I understand that the 167MHz bus will support the Airport Extreme.
I have a one-year old LinkSys wireless router. The router is unsecured - open access - and I have no problem connecting through it to my ISP from both a PC running Vista, and a MacBook Pro running OS X (10.5.8).
When I try to connect the eMac, I get the message that it cannot find a PPPoE server and that it cannot find the ISP.
What information do I need, and where do I get it?
Thanks for reading and for anything you can do to help.

gregt2 said:

Hello -
I have an old eMac (PowerPC G4 (1.2); 167MHz bus) for which I just installed an Airport Extreme card; installation seems to be OK (ran it twice just to make sure), and I understand that the 167MHz bus will support the Airport Extreme.
I have a one-year old LinkSys wireless router. The router is unsecured - open access - and I have no problem connecting through it to my ISP from both a PC running Vista, and a MacBook Pro running OS X (10.5.8).
When I try to connect the eMac, I get the message that it cannot find a PPPoE server and that it cannot find the ISP.
What information do I need, and where do I get it?
Thanks for reading and for anything you can do to help.

Click to expand...

As you already know, PPoE is short for "Point-to-Point Over Ethernet" - your eMac "thinks" it is connecting to the Internet through a direct connection to a DSL modem.
Like the old style of dial up connection through a phone modem, PPoE required you to "log into" the ISP before you would get your Internet traffic routed to their network. The main difference is the a dial up modem required you to ... dial. PPoE assumes that it is always connected to DSL modem (via a 10BaseT cable), and it is trying to authenticate itself to your ISP over the Ethernet link and establish a PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) route.
You obviously don't need that. Your Cable / DSL router is either handling it for you, or it isn't required. My suspicion is your eMac is still trying to connect to the Internet through it's internal Ethernet jack, not the Airport Extreme card.
You need to find someplace to change it. Most likely in the System Preferences / Network - find your Airport Extreme on the list of interfaces, and make sure it is enabled and that it is set to DHCP (your router will give it an address). You might also want to disable the built in Ethernet port.
Assuming your router and the eMac are "connected", open a terminal window and ping around your network - start with the IP address of the router (192.168.1.1 I assume). Also, run the ifconfig command to see what IP address the en1 interface has (this should be the Airport Extreme). Also, make sure you do not have anything plugged into the built in Ethernet port of your eMac.

Thank you, ticedoff8. I'll try your suggestion and get back to you. Cheers.

Ridiculous - I've had my 12 year old son doing the hands-on part of our connectivity work, because he wants to and because I'm happy he's getting comfortable with macs. He is, however, somewhat of a know-it-all. I gave him your suggestions, telling him to let me know if we need to discuss them. I just got a very excited call from upstairs - he pushed the AEx card in a bit further and connectivity works fine. Thanks for your time.

"Networking older Mac" solved

Thanks to ticedoff8, and to all.

Note: Merged duplicate thread