New to Linux, very motivated. I'm trying to get my Mandrake 10.0 box to shake hands with my XP box. I want to use the Linux box to protect (firewall) my abused and molested XP box. I have DSL and the Linux box runs well. I have 2 NICs in it and 1 on the XP box, a crossover cable between machines.they both transmit data but neither receives?? I just can't get them to talk. I have configured the Linux box to the best of my nieve capabilities; and the XP machine manually. (Two ships passing in the night).

Can someone give me the neewbie howto settings on making a (luv) connection between the "Oberlord" and the "Penguin"?

I think it may just be "jargon" that I don't understand. I have been using Mandrake for 3 weeks straight and XP on demand only. I really enjoy the freedom, but I need the umbilical cord for my day job.

Thanks in advance,
raidmac

The first thing I would suggest is to disable firewalls on both pcs while getting them talking to each other, when everything is working turn on the firewalls one at a time to check that things still work.

Some things you could do to find out what the problem is....

1) Make sure they are on the same subnet, eg 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 with netmask 255.255.255.0
If you didn't specify their ip addresses manually you can see them by running ifconfig on linux and ipconfig on xp.

I find things much simpler if you specify static ip addresses for all pcs on your home network, eg set linux as 192.168.0.1 and xp as 192.168.0.2 then add those to the hosts file on each machine (/etc/hosts and c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts). With a dynamic ip for the dsl connection.

2) Try running ping from one to the other.

3) If that works, try running telnet from one to the other (if xp doesn't have telnet running you can turn it on in services) (you may need to put an entry in /etc/hosts.allow to let xp telnet onto linux)

If telnet works then the connection between the computers is fine, just have to worry about firewalls.