Networking :: Trouble connecting to network via DHCP

If your friends with the XP and Ubunto laptops still want to help, you could try having them boot the DSL live CD from their laptops and see if they can connect to the network switch with their NIC's.

That way, you can make sure that it is a problem with your network card/network switch combo and not with DSL.

I have had a similar experience connecting an older NIC to a managed switch. It seemed that the switch tried to autoconfigure the speed and would not correctly identify the NIC as only capable of 10 mbit half duplex so it believed the card was capable of full duplex. Nothing went through and everything got stuck.
The solution in my case was to tell the switch to configure that particular port manually and set it to 10 mbit half duplex.
A basic case of automatic sensing gone wrong (because of old, possibly slow, NIC).
The reason the other port worked for you is possibly because it is another brand/model switch/hub managing that port.
It could also be that you can modify your card to speak full-duplex or at a higher rate if it is capable of it.
You could also try connecting a minihub/switch between your computer and the ethernet port. The intermediate hub will hopefully "understand" your NIC and it will certainly be understood by the network.
Good luck.

original here.