Problems establishing a wired internet connection after fresh install

Question

I had this problem about half a year ago and had posted about it on these forums. Shortly after, I had given up due to having too much else on my plate at the time. Now I'm ready to give it another try, but I seem to be hitting the same wall as last time. I didn't want to necromance such an old thread, so I figured that I should create this one.
This is the old thread just in case it might help: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=66179
I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to Arch Linux and Linux in general, but I feel that I'm taking a bit more time to learn about each individual configuration file this time (rushing it was my downfall last time). I have the Beginners Guide printed out and have used that throughout the installation.
So I have just installed archlinux-2009.02-core-i686 on my old Dell Dimension B110 with no problems at all. I have edited the rc.conf file so that the hostname matches up with the one in /etc/hosts. I have also made sure that eth0="dhcp" and that routes=(!gateway).
I read on another forum that I should replace eth0 with the appropriate interface name. So I ran ifconfig -a and it then listed three interfaces. Here's a short description of each:
lo            link encap: local loopback
              inet addr:127.0.0.1 mask:255.0.0.0
              up loopback running mtu:16436 metric:1
              the rest of the values were 0
wlan0     link encap: ethernet hwaddr  00:11:95:8d:2e:af
             braodcast multicast mtu:1500 metric:1
wmaster0   link encap: unspec hwaddr 00-11-95-8d-2e-af-00-00-00-00-00-00
                 broadcast multicast mtu:1500 metric:1
As I said before, I'm very new to Archlinux, Linux in general, and also am not very knowledgeable about computer hardware (yet).  So I'm not entirely sure what lo, wlan0 and wmaster0 represent. I read on another forum that wmaster0 is definitely not it. So I'm guessing it is wlan0? I also have a wireless card installed, but I am not concerned with messing with that until I have my wired connection working.
Is it necessary at all for me to replace eth0 with one of the above in my rc.conf?
Should my rc.conf look something like wlan0="dhcp" ?  (note: I have tried this and so far it has not worked).
Every time I ping -c 3 www.google.com, the host is not found.
Thank you very much in advance to anyone who is willing to help.
,Ryan

Answer 1

@Mr. Elendig: I just did ifconfig -a, and it finally listed eth0! But I'm actually not sure if it was there the first time or not - I think I may have forgotten to scroll up the first time I did ifconfig -a *smacks self*. It was just recently that I found out how to use Shift + PgUp/Dwn to scroll. So I don't know if it was the modprobe that did it or not - either way it's showing up now. Here's the output for eth0:
eth0      link encap: ethernet hwaddr 00:16:76:19:21:a0
            broadcast multicast mtu:1500  metric: 1
            the rest of the values were 0 except for txqueuelen: 1000
@B: Oh, I completely forgot about looking at the man page for it, probably would have been a good idea. I'll go ahead and do that for now on.
Last edited by Hallucinogenic (2009-07-02 13:56:07)