Re: [Sheflug] More on the modem problem.

[Alex Hudson <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2002-01-03 at 21:40, Damian Bamforth wrote:
> few seconds... however, after running netscape, every url I give gives me the
> error 'server not available - check the address' or something lke that. Where
> is the script kept that tells browsers to use the modem? I get the feeling it
> is trying to use my ethernet card.

You like making things hard, don't you??

Attempting to use dial-up networking and having a home LAN working at
the same time sounds kind of easy, but actually isn't all that easy.
First thing, you're going to need to understand a few things about
networking.

The 'default gateway' is the machine you send packets when the ip
address you're trying to connect to isn't in your routing tables. If you
have an ethernet card on a local network, all the machines on the local
network are in your routing table. If you try to connect to slashdot,
that's not on your network so your computer actually sends packets to
the 'default gateway', who you hope will pass the packets on
(eventually) to the intended destination. It sounds like you've set your
default gateway to the local network, which is wrong - you need to make
sure it isn't set (pppd will set it for you automatically when you dial
up, so that you can connect to the outside world).

You can check the routing table, by doing a 'netstat -rn'. If you see a
line with 'UG' in it, that means you have a default gateway. If 'eth0'
is the device associated with that line, then it's set incorrectly. You
can execute 'route del default' to remove this entry; dialling up should
now work correctly. If this wasn't the problem, then you need to learn
about DNS which is altogether more hard.

To make the gateway configuration stick varies from distribution to
distribution - did you mention what you're running?

Cheers,

Alex.


___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk . 
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to 
shef-lug-request@list.sheflug.org.uk with the word
"unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.