Hi!

I've just installed Mandrake 9.2 on my computer, and everything seems to work fine. However, I must share the Internect connection on that computer with another one (running XP). O my linux box, I have my Internet connection on eth1, and another ethernet board as eth0, which is connected to the other computer. I have internet up and running on eth1. The other computer has WinXP with a network connection that expects DHCP on the other end. Everything is ok, hardware-wise, because both computers are able to share the Internet connection using WinXP (I ahve it on another partition on the linux box). So, it must be a configuration problem.

I tried the Drak application that would set everything up for sharing the connection. No luck...

I stopped the firewall (shorewall, '/etc/init.d/shorewall stop'), just in case. Still no luck (but maybe I must do more than this?)

I then checked (with ifconfig) that eth0 was down (no IP address, nothing). Was this to be expected?

Anyway, I manually configured eth0 with ifconfig with an IP of 192.168.0.1 and a netmask of 255.255.255.0, and brought it up. Still no luck.

I checked that dhcpd was running...

Getting a bit desperate, by now, I went to the Windows box and manually assigned an IP of 192.168.0.32, netmask of 255.255.255.0, Gateway 192.168.0.1, and my ISP's DNS. Rebooted...

Nothing!

I tried to ping the linux box and was unable to.

So, I've run out of ideas. I'm a newbie with regards to linux configuration, and I'd really appreciate any help you can give me, both in how to configure this, or by telling me how to verify that everything is ok (the DHCP server, eth0 configuration, etc.)


Daniel

>I then checked (with ifconfig) that eth0 was down (no IP address, nothing). Was this to be expected?

Sounds normal.

>I tried to ping the linux box and was unable to

You need to get the computers to be able to contact each other first.
It sounds like you have done the right things so far.

>Everything is ok, hardware-wise, because both computers are able to share the Internet connection using WinXP

I don't know mandrake so a few general ideas.

Look in the logs for messages relating to the network card.

Are the link lights on on the network cards? Does the data light flash
on the other computer when you are pinging? Perhaps mandrake is set to not respond to pings. Trying pinging the windows machine from the mandrake machine or try connecting to a service on the mandrake box eg telnet/ssh/web server if it is running such things.

Trying tcpdump -n eth1 and see if you can sniff some traffic from the windows machine.

Once the xp machine and the linux machine can contact each other you need to enable NAT (ip masquerade) on the linux machine.
I'd do that manually with ip tables (see many previous messages), don't know if there is an option in mandrakes configuration program.

<sigh!>

No, the data light on the linux box's ethernet card doesn't flash... In fact, I noticed that Linux is unable to bring eth0 up at boot time (despite de fact that the icfg.eth0 file has the correct values in it). I must ifconfig it again and bring it up manually.

Maybe there is something else interferring here?