I have a home network of 2 computers. PC1 has 2 NICs, runs Win 2000 and connects to the Internet via DSL using one of the NICs. PC2 has one NIC and is connected to PC1 via cross-over cable and is running Mandrake 9.

I want to be able to get to the Internet from PC2. I enabled ICS on the Windows box and the Linux box is set up for dhcp. Now I can ping both by IP and hostname to the external world from Mandrake; I can also telnet (both by IP and hostname) and FTP from the Linux box. But, I cannot browse the Web either via Mozilla or via Konqueror on the Linux box. When I try Yahoo or Google the browser just sits there and waits; there is no error message like host not found etc. I can browse fine from the Win box. I had a firewall on the Win box - ZoneAlarm - but I have turned it off for now.

I just cannot figure out why HTTP requests from the Linux box are not working. any suggestions?

Try pinging just the IP addresses for domains like google.com from the Linux box. See if you get replies. After that try a traceroute command to google.com's IP address see where you stop at - if it is your local box, your win2k box, or some gateway somewhere else. That might give you an idea as to what is broken.

Also, there maybe some commands you have to run to enable your win2k box to be the gateway for your Linux box.

Running the follow three commands (changed to your preferences) might also fix the problem:

# ifconfig eth0 123.123.123.123 netmask 255.255.255.0
# route add default gateway 123.123.123.1
# echo "nameserver 123.123.123.10" >> /etc/resolv.conf

Good Luck

Thanks lunardreamr. I can now ping and browse with Mozilla. But now I have a peculiar problem. Some websites like Google and Google news load fast but others like Yahoo take a long time - about 10 minutes. Via the Windows box all sites load pretty fast.

When I ping Yahoo from both boxes; the average time is roughly the same about 100ms.