[Empeg-general] Connecting via ethernet (help)

[andrewwalker@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

Appologies if this has been asked before, I have done a quick search.

Ok, here it is..

USB, plug and play, very easy, no problem !
Ethernet, difficult, hard, difficult, hard, hard, hard  !

I have bought a 10/100MBit Ethernet card to hopefully speed things up a little in communicating with my EMPEG.  However, I feel the manual is rather lacking in this department.  I'm a fairly capable kind of guy (i.e. have set up databases for allocating MAC address on units at work) so I'm not toally clueless about these things but this has got me stumped.

I have Win 98 running at home and don't have any other Ethernet products to communicate with, so I don't care about DHCP, IP address, net masks or default gateways, whatever one of those is.  I just want some instructions on how to get it to work.

The Windows help page says "you will need to allocate an IP address on your local network and know the subnet mask. You will also need an address for the gateway",  but this means nothing to me.  From the other line saying "If you have a DHCP server on your network" I get the impression it assumes we are all techies and have super DHCP networks setup at home, I don't.

Can anyone out there help me with some basic settings to use?

Within the EMPEG Player Configuration I have set the IP address to 192.192.192.1, the netmask to 255.255.255.0  and the default gateway to ... (well, no idea with this one).

Do I have to configure anything on the PC side, the network address maybe?

Anyway, would it not be a good idea for the manual to suggest some basic settings for people like me to use to get things up and running very quickly, as the manual failed with me miserably.  I would imagine quite a few people will be in a similar position, i.e. just go out and buy a cheap ethernet card for the EMPEG alone and then get stuck with the configuration.  Does it need improving a little?

What do you think, are my concerns justified?

Thanks for any help,

Andy Walker