At 07:10 AM 5/25/02 -0700, J wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>Once again, I'm having a problem with losing external network
>connections. I'm relatively new to linux etc, so I don't really
>know what to look for in fixing this..
I looked back at your prior messages and find that you have never reported
any details about the baasics of your setup, other than that you are using
Bering and NE2k NICs. See the link at the bottom of this message (and all
list messages) for some help in checking and reporting the basics.
>ideally I'd like to set
>up this router and be able to leave it for years at a time. Right
>now it seems i have to mess around with it more than make use of
>my real computer.
Yes, that is not an unusual experience when setting up a new device using
an unfamiliar OS. Particularly one that provides considerably more in the
way of capabilities (e.g. NAT'ing to allow all the computers on a home LAN
to share the connection, firewalling) than your "real" computer.
If you really do need to connect only one "real" computer to the Internet,
you might consider just doing so, perhaps purchasing a firewall product
that runs on Windows to offer at least a tiny bit of safeguarding. If, on
the other hand, you do need or want to share the line, you need *some*
device to manage the sharing ... and they all require a bit more
configuration than your "real" computer.
>Is there something different with how pump is called at startup
>vs. how I call it at the command line?
Depends. Tom hit on the most important possible difference in his reply --
which firewall package are you running, and how is it configured? Even if
you are not using Shorewall, conflicts between the firewall ruleset and the
need for DHCP clients to send and receive broadcast packets ... and for
some ISPs, to receive packets from private e.g., 10.x.y.z) addresses ...
can make it impossible to renew an expired DHCP lease without a reboot
(when your DHCP client will run before any firewall rules are added) ... an
increasingly serious problem now that at least one cable-based ISP changes
your IP address every 15 minutes.
>Where is it called on
>startup? When I lose connection, I type "pump -R -i eth0"
>and it won't reconnect.. nor does just "pump". If I reboot,
>it seems to work (which is a step up from earlier, when it wouldn't
>even do that). Also, does the system detect when connectivity is
>lost, and try to reconnect on its own? Or do I have to write my
>own script to do that?
No, the system doesn't, in a general sense, "detect" a loss of
conenctivity. As posed, this isn't even a well-defined problem, since
possible meanings include:
1. Loss of an IP address (lack of DHCP of PPPoE renewal) for any
reason.
2. Failure of the physical connection (power out on the "modem",
broken cable between the "modem" and the router, failure of the external
connection bwetween the "modem" and the ISP).
3. Inability to connect to the external default gateway, which
could have any number of causes.
4. Inability to ping "well-known" Internet sites, which could have
any number of causes.
Some people have written scripts that test for various versions of "loss of
connectivity" and take appropriate action. They tend to be fairly custom
scripts, because the nature of the "appropriate action" is far from
standard -- the most common is to do some "ping" test for connectivity,
then failover to an alternate (dial-up, say) connection if the main
connection is not active.
>Windows' DHCP client seems so robust.. it never fails. it always
>reconnects. always obtains a lease. always lets me access the internet.
>What's different about it?
Many things. I'll suggest two that are possibly important.
1. It is not running with a firewall. The same openness that makes Windows
vulnerable to a lot of attacks also makes it easier to do DHCP renewals.
2. ISPs simply have to make their systems work with Windows, if they want
to stay in business. With regard to anything other than plain-vanilla
Windows -- Mac OS, Linux, LinkSys routers, even Windows machines running
NAT'ing software to share a connection -- they can in practice get away
with saying "we don't support it".
Commercial firewalling devices for the home, like the LinkSys and Netgear
routers, are, to my eye, a bit friendlier than LEAF with respect to
configuration issues. People, here and elsewhere, will disagree about why
(perhaps even whether) this is so ... my take on it is that you pay for
those products, so there is more incentive for the companies to do work
that is important to the naive users but boring for programmers. The
strength of LEAF systems is in their flexibility, their ability to be
configured by knowledgeable users (that is, people like the developers) to
handle complex problems.
--
-----------------------------------------------"Never tell me the
odds!"--------------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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