[plug] Network Woes

[Gavin Tweedie]

I dont have time to go through all your questions, so I'll leave that to
someone else to answer (NB: school is a royal pain in the ass)

> Kernel IP routing table
> Destination  Gateway     Genmask             Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
> 203.59.xx.xxx  0.0.0.0   255.255.255.255 UH    0      0     0   ppp0
> 192.168.0.0    0.0.0.0   255.255.255.0   U     0      0     0   eth0
> 127.0.0.0      0.0.0.0   255.0.0.0       U     0      0     1   lo
> 0.0.0.0     203.59.xx.xxx   0.0.0.0      UG    0      0     12  ppp0
> 
> (as an aside, if i want to set this machine up as a gateway, do i just add 
> route add default gw 203.59.xx.xxx eth0 ?  Which gives me a SIOCADDRT:
> Invalid argument)

In short, No. A Gateway in this case can be thought of as "a machine which
has internet access" so you do NOT want to be adding a default route to
your network. this machine already knows how to get to the internet (via
ppp0) so what you have to do is to "teach" the other machines on your
network how to get to the internet, and also tell your machine to allow
people to go through it to access some other network (the internet in this
case). Make sure you have IP Forwarding compiled in to your kernel, and
if you are using "private" ip addresses internally then you will want IP
Masqurading too.
All other machines on your network need their gateway to be set to this
machines ip address.

Arrg...running late for school now :) check out the net-3 howto:
http://www.linux.org.au/LDP/HOWTO/NET-3-HOWTO-6.html#ss6.6
that section should be of some value to you.


Hope that all helps...


Gavin