the linux networking utilities hate me

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Seth Gordon" <sethg at ropine.com>


> Until last night, I had an AirPort base station assigned to IP address
> 192.168.1.11.  My Linux (Debian stable) laptop has a wireless Ethernet
> card as device eth1, and the configuration for the card, in
> /etc/network/interfaces, describes it as "pointopoint 192.168.1.11 ...
> gateway 192.168.1.11 ..." and everything worked just fine.  If I typed
> "/sbin/ifconfig eth1", the output would report the point-to-point link,
> and if I typed "route -n", the output would begin something like this:
>
> Network      Gateway      ... Device
> 192.168.1.11 *            ... eth1
> 0.0.0.0      192.168.1.11 ... eth1
>
> Then I swapped out the AirPort, and replaced it with a Linksys base
> station whose default IP address is 192.168.1.245.  No problem, I
> thought.  I'll just replace "11" with "245" in /etc/network/interfaces,
> reboot, and everything should work just as before.  But it doesn't.  I
> *can* access the Web interface of the base station itself by typing
> "http://192.168.1.245"; into my browser, but I can't access anything else.
>
> Even when I explicitly type "/sbin/ifconfig eth1 ... pointopoint
> 192.168.1.245", and then type "/sbin/ifconfig eth1", the interfaces is
> no longer flagged as point-to-point.  Now, when I type "route -n", the
> output begins
>
> Network       Gateway      ... Device
> 192.168.1.245 0.0.0.0      ... eth1
>
> I've tried "route add -host 192.168.1.245 eth1" and "route add -host
> 192.168.1.245 gw 192.168.1.13" (.13 is the address of my laptop's
> wireless card), with the same results.
>
> What am I doing wrong?  Is there another configuration file that I
> forgot about?  Is a misconfiguration on the wireless base station
> causing the kernel routing tables to become confused?  Am I just cursed?

If your laptop is on 192.168.1.13, it can't use that as a gateway: the
gateway has to be a different machine on the subnet.

I suggest you change your interface configuration file: in Redhat, it's in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth<n>.

Here's something to try:

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.1.13
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.1.245
ONBOOT=yes

HTH.

Bill Horne