Hi all! I am working on setting up a gateway for a small local newspaper's LAN--using Debian, naturally. :-) They recently had the local cable company (Comcast) provide Internet access. I installed the Debian DHCPC client from the 1.3 CD-ROM. DHCPC sort of works. Here's what is happening.
The Ethernet cards are both 3Com (a 509 and 590). The kernel properly finds each one and assigns it to eth0 and eth1 on boot-up. DHCPC seems to start up okay. Right after booting up ifconfig shows both eth0 and eth1 are seen. 'route -n' shows eth0 (cable modem) as being the gateway with the proper IP address. *BUT* we can't reach the 'outside world' (pings fail). Within about 60 seconds, the cable modem 'PC' light goes out indicating the cable modem no longers sees eth0. Running ifconfig shows eth0 is gone and only eth1 (the LAN) remains. 'route -n' also shows the cable modem has vanished. Then I manually run '/etc/init.d/network start' (as root). *Everything* works. eth0 is back. route shows the cable modem is back. The cable modem is happy *AND* we can now reach the outside world! This is really weird behavior and has me baffled. Supposedly. dhcpcd puts info in the /etc/dhcpcd directory after it initially talks to the cable modem. Nothing has gotten added or changed. A few weeks ago, I read on the list about 3Com driver insisting on making eth0 the card with the lowest hardware address. I also experienced this and made the necessary changes. That problem disappeared, so I don't think the cable modem problem is related. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but just don't see it. Can anyone offer any help? Thanks! bob -- Bob Billson, KC2WZ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] first year beekeeper, 2 colonies [EMAIL PROTECTED] (\ MS-DOS, you can't live with it. You can live without it. /) {|||8- Linux: the cure for the Windows 95 virus. -8|||} (/ \) -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .