I installed RH 7.3 in workstation mode, firewall=MASQ to act as gateway and firewall with a Sympatico high speed modem (ADSL). I then configured 3 windows workstations on the LAN with statis IP addresses. I have 2 network cards in the Linux box. eth1 is connected to the modem, and eth0 is the local network.

The first day all was fine.

Today, things changed. Suddenly my workstation could not ping any websites, but could ping by IP address all the workstations and the Linux server. About 15 minutes later the second workstation lost the connection.

I rebooted the linux server and 1 of the 2 active workstations came up okay. Mine did not. Again, all could ping internal IP addresses, and one workstation could get out onto the net.

I looked at all the logs and the only thing logged at about the same time the problem occurred was in the message log, it said:

Oct 16 09:25:25 localhaost kernel Packet Log input DENY ppp0 PROTO=17 219.68.114.178:1025 65.93.97.102:137


then it said:
CDROM: The Disk L=78S=0x00 I=1093 F=0x0000 does not have any tracks I recognize!

What happened, and more importantly what can I do? I still can ping the gateway from the blind workstation and the 'seeing' workstation, and the seeing can ping the blind. The Linux box can ping both......:

The message:
Looks strange. Do you have a ppp0 interface on the machine? maybe there's an old configuration that wasn't removed correctly?
BTW If Linux is configured correctly, try to remove all networking support from Windows machines and then add it again.

Thanks, I will work on this today. PPP0 is the interface to the internet though, not the internal lan. Is that relevant?

Port 137 is used by Windoze for NetBios name service.
It looks like someone tried to talk to you on port 137, or tried to route a packet through you to check your response...
Nothing to do with your problem...

If you can ping an ip number but not a name, it usually means you cannot connect to a dns server, or receive it's replies...

Type ifconfig both before and after the problem and see if your ip number on eth1 is changing. If it does, you will need to do some more Masquerading work in the firewall to keep it current and check pppoe is running correctly.

If not, you will need some more LOG rules in the firewall to get more information to work with.

Regards,
Peter

Thanks - I redid the tcp/ip settings on all the windows workstations, and it worked like magic. Thank you for turning the focus from the Linux box to the associated workstations.

It has been up successfully now for several weeks.