ok, i've looked and looked, but i can't find an answer here, or anywhere else, as to what is happening to me. first, i'm running rh 8(i know, it's old, but it's worked up to now, so i'm not changing, unless i have to) with 2 nics, both smc and same model. one is the internal, for my home network and the other is external, for internet access. i am using the linux box as my firewall, since the modem doesn't have anything on it and the leased modem i just took out isn't one i'd trust with anything. i removed a leased modem, in favor of one i own. the network worked fine with the leased modem. all machines could access the net just find. put the sb5120 in and restarted the linux box and couldn't get anywhere. began checking things and i can ping, albeit with as much as 70% packet loss, even when pinging by ip address, as opposed to url. can't get a browser to work with urls. times out. i've looked at everything i can think of and can't figure this one out. did change my internal network ip block, since the sb5120 is hardwired for 192.168.100.1, which was the inside port on the linux box, before i made the change. still can't manage much headway, getting outbound.

here's the info from ifconfig -a and route -n. any assistance or suggestions would be appreciated. as i said, haven't been able to find anything via google, etc, and motorola's "tech support" has been useless in the extreme.

ifconfig -a

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:29:2EE:F2
inet addr:192.168.101.1 Bcast:192.168.101.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:63 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:434 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:6897 (6.7 Kb) TX bytes:42127 (41.1 Kb)
Interupt:10 Base address:0xc000

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:29:36:22:C7
inet addr:68.189.214.54 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1739 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:145 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisons:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:124686 (121.7 Kb) TX bytes:20182 (19.7 Kb)
Interupt:11 Base address:0xc400

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:72 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:72 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:4630 (4.5 Kb) TX bytes:4630 (4.5 Kb)

route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
255.255.255.255 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.101.0 192.168.101.1 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.101.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
68.189.214.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 68.189.214.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

that's all i have. i'm connecting straight from the eth1 to the modem. let me know if i need to provide more info. just can't figure out what's up with the routing and if there's something i need to hardcode or force.

thanks, ahead of time, for any assistance given.

ok, i've got an update on this. after shutting down for t-storms in the area, i brought the linux box back up, by itself, just to see what was happening. i was able to get some success, pulling down 2 emails, out of 6, from one email address and actually beginning to receive data from a website, though i never got the site to actually display. still seeing horrible loss rates, but at least it did seem to be connecting to things. i'm wondering if there's a website or some software out there, with which i can check to see if i've got a bad modem. i've noticed that even my windows machine seems to lose heartbeat to the net, quite a bit. i can be in browsing a site and suddenly can't get from the current page to the next or previous page. then, after 2 or 3 tries, it works again. i'm just not sure if it's the modem or something on Charter's side of things. any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. otherwise, i'll have to rely on charter's tech support folks and i don't have a great deal of confidence in them being able to help with a linux question. only chance would be if it turned out to be hardware failure, i'd expect.

thanks in advance for anything you can come up with.