I am trying to use my linux desktop as a gateway to my wireless laptop. They are both running gentoo.

Individually, both the wireless and ethernet cards work on the desktop. I can enable the ethernet with dhcp and it grabs an IP from the dsl modem and networking works great. I can also enable the wirless card and my laptop grabs an IP and can ping my linux box.

However, once I have enabled the wireess card I can no longer access the network on the ethernet side of the desktop. Even if I disable iptables, dhcp server and dnsmasq. In fact, even if I disable the wireless connection (ifconfig wlan0 down), it does not let traffic go through the ethernet card.

My routing table continues to show the dsl router ip as my default gateway and I can stop and start the ethernet connection successfully but no traffic will go there until I reboot with the wireless disabled.

Any ideas on what could be the problem?

I am using the 2.6.7-r11 kernel build from gentoo-dev-sources with an intel pro/100 ethernet card and a linksys wusb11 wireless adapter that has an atmel chipset. I'll update this post later when I can paste in my ifconfig lines and other configuration issues.

Try the following script
/etc/init.d/network stop
mv /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/Xifcfg-wlan0
/etc/init.d/network start
mv /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/Xifcfg-wlan0 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

It looks like a redhat based script.. I don't think those files exist in Gentoo.