After some more fiddling around i've got it working. Ping, as usual, is the key - that showed that I could ping the local network, but the gateway (aka router in Mac-speak?) wasn't set so i couldn't get outside. Fixed that, could ping by IP but not URL - DNS problems, again easily fixed. And, hurrah!, a networked Mac.
Well, kind of. I'd really prefer to use DHCP, everything else does, but it all goes wrong again if I turn DHCP back on - the machine decides to give itself an IP address in the Virginia Department of Health Class-B network
and then refuses to talk to anything else (for obvious reasons). After a little more messing around i've come to the conclusion that DHCP just doesn't work on OSX in a heterogeneous network, so i've given up for now. I've certainly lost the belief that PC users have in the mythical self-configuring Mac. Maybe if you just have a network of Macs using Apple hardware then it is ok, but in my 'real world' network my Win2k Thinkpad does a far better job. Wired or wireless, it just works
unlike the Mac
