Pinging difference between local loop and local machine IP address

[hjpsmith at earthlink.net (Henry Smith)]

Hello all,

Have been having problems getting ethernet up and running on my old Gateway
p5-60. It's running RH6.2 (installed as a plain vanilla "server" following
the options presented in the install procedure, so no X-windows except for
the font server etc.) The machine is intended to be a gateway (no pun
intended <G>) for a small network of mostly Windows boxes with one or two
macs and eventually one or two Linuxen. The NIC is a Netgear FA310TX 10/100. 

Last Saturday a friend was over with his Dell laptop running NT4. At that
time he could ping just fine over a crossover cable to this linux box but
the return ping from the RH6.2 box to the laptop didn't work. Well more
precisely, it would sort of work, if I added the -f i.e. "ping -f -c4
....." (the man page for ping in RH6.2 says that -f is for "flooding" the
connection.... haven't noticed this option before but never looked for it
either....)

Not being entirely too sure of the quality of that crossover cable, today I
tried to look at it again. Here is output from ifconfig and several pings
that I thought might characterize the problem. If anything else might help,
I'll try to get that too.  (Note that now it is connected to a Netgear
DS108 hub but I can't ping the other machines on the hub either - one
NT4SP4 and one W2K all with set local IP addresses 192.168.1.---- Note that
the WinDoze boxes also have problems of their own recognizing each other
and the Gateway, but that is for another list, I guess. <G>)

1.)  ifconfig   yields

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:A0:CC:5B:B3:60  
          inet addr:192.168.1.250  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:687 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:1
          TX packets:1276 errors:61604 dropped:0 overruns:1 carrier:122577
          collisions:1719 txqueuelen:100 
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0xfc00 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:3924  Metric:1
          RX packets:62456 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:62456 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 

--- clearly from the the IP 192.168.1.250 is having major problems..... but
the local loop is getting many errors also???

2.)  Pinging to the local loop yields a good result

--- 127.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.3/0.4/0.8 ms

3.)  a straight ping -c4 192.168.1.250 gives (I chose to get only 4 returns
(like the NT ping does) else it just continues indefinitely.)

--- 192.168.1.250 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 75% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.8/0.8/0.8 ms
PING 192.168.1.250 (192.168.1.250) from 192.168.1.250 : 56(84) bytes of data.

4.)  but if I do a ping -c4 -f .... I get

--- 192.168.1.250 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.3/0.4/0.9 ms
PING 192.168.1.250 (192.168.1.250) from 192.168.1.250 : 56(84) bytes of data.

and no difference if I add in a -d it gives the same

Note that the "flood" param seems to work ok but am not sure what it is
doing differently...

So my question is what have I done wrong/ left out of my set up. Clearly
something is not working right....

TIA for any help ...

Regards

Henry

Dr. Henry J. P. Smith
TPE Associates
"Technology	     Physics           Environment"
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