hi there.
as you might have guessed, i have problems.
so i am turning to some experts for advice.

heres the scenerio:
----------------------------------------
dillo is a computer running debian sarge
- dillo is ( wanting to be ) a router/firewall
- dillo has 5 ethernet interfaces eth0-eth4
- the only ones i'm concerned with at this point are eth0 and eth4
- eth0 accepts an IP address via dhcp and is connected to the 192.168.1.0 network ( subnet for all: 255.255.255.0 )
- eth0 is up, active and working no problems, i am able to ssh into it through eth0 no problem
- eth4 is connected to the 192.168.3.0 network
- eth4 is statically assigned the address *.3.1
- eth4 is up, and active and somewhat working ( keep reading to see what i mean )

jackass is a computer running debian sarge also
- jackass is ( wanting to be ) a webserver when it grows up
- jackass has one ethernet interface/port: eth0
- eth0 is up, active and working
- eth0 is statically assigned the address or 192.168.3.2

grackle is a laptop running windowsXP ( yet not for long )
- everything works fine on grackle
- grackle accepts a dhcp address from the same place that dillos eth0 IF does
- side note: both grackle and dillo are connected to a linksys router, which is issuing the dhcp addresses on the *.1.0 network and is also connected to the internet
- grackle can talk to dillo just fine. as a matter of fact, i ssh into dillo from grackle with the current scenario


heres what i know:
- dillo can successfully ping jackass, and vice versa*
- dillo can successfully ping grackle, and vice versa*
( *well, the interface they are respectively connected to anyway )
- grackle canNOT ping the 192.186.3.1 interface, nor can grackle ping jackass
- the opposite is true as well ( just switch the words grackle and jackass )

here is the routing table from dillo:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
jackass 192.168.3.1 255.255.255.255 UGH 0 0 0 eth4
192.168.3.0 192.168.3.1 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 eth4
192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0


i'm pretty sure it has something to do with my routing tables, but i'm not 100%. this is my first time setting up a linux router, so i'm not exactly sure as to which direction to head in next. I've been racking my brain on google and man route to no avail. Any help is greatly appreciated.

the routing table on the router is actaully a little irrelevant for as long as you are only routing between locally connected subnets the actaul routing knowledge is a given. As you've made no reference to it yet, i'd have to assume that you have simply not enabled ip forwarding: "echo 1 > /proc.sys.net/ipv4/ip_forward" and then that will start the basics of routing.here the use of tcpdump or ethereal on the router itself is a legal obligation ;-)

actually, shortly after i made that post, i found some instructions telling me to do that over here:
http://www.chinalinuxpub.com/doc/www...m#_Toc33893563

so, i followed those instructions and did this:
- added:
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
to /etc/sysctl.conf
- then restarted the machine
- when it came back up, i issued the following commands:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/conf/eth1/proxy_arp
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/conf/eth4/proxy_arp

then i came back, and noticed you offered the same suggestion, so i issued that first command again...
all to no avail.

got some more suggestion?

*sigh*

i found my problem.

the windows XP machine didn't know the route to find the 3.0 network, so it kept trying to go out another interface.

as soon as i added the route to my XP machine, it saw everything just fine

( that is, after i turned on IP_forwarding )

thanks for the help!

ooh shabby! i would suggest that whilst it's laregly irrelevant for a tiny network, try to keep explicit routes on routesr, not clients, i.e. the linksys router you have should be more than capable of being used as a hop towards that internal subnet by the XP machine, as long as that konws the route to the other net itself.