First of all, today, I had a comcast tech come by. He was incredibly unsuited to working with computers (he had to hunt and peck to type...), so unsurprisingly he had absolutely no idea what Linux was. He radioed for help, and the response was "uh.. linux is like... a software". Luckily, my mom's work box runs XP, but I'd like to be somewhat more informed in the future, plus have some fun.
<br><br>I googled for an equivalent of ipconfig /release and /renew, and got ifconfig up/down &lt;device&gt;, but it sounded like this was for that device, and that I had to do something else for the router. So my question is, how would I do this for the router? (Netgear, not in the mood to check the model right now so just let me know if you need that info)
<br><br>I&#39;ve also been screwing around with ping and found a couple computers on my network where I&#39;m unsure of what they are. One, is there a way to tell all of the devices on my local network? The &quot;Attached Devices&quot; page on my router doesn&#39;t show anything-- not even my physically-connected-to-the-damn-thing-by-a-cable computer. Two, is there a way to tell what a device is with it&#39;s IP address? Like have it report some information about itself? 
<br><br>I&#39;m running (a bastardized) Ubuntu 7.04, if that matters. I&#39;d also be interested in any other fun easy-to-do LAN things. I&#39;m easily amused, I still get giddy whenever I ssh to my main box from a laptop and open a text file in nano, so there has to be other fun things to do... 
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