I've very nearly cracked the sharing of an internet connection using Debian on an old set of hardware and using a 2.2.20 kernel.

I've battled my way throught the tldp home-networking minihowto and the tldp IP-masquerading howto and I'm pleased to say it very nearly works. I just have a small problem with DNS.

I have no DNS problem on the gateway machine - only on the client machines. All machines can ping each other and outside addresses, but the client machines can only ping outside addresses with a specified IP.

Similarly no DNS problem with web browsing on gateway machine, but client machines will only return web pages if I use the gateway to discover the ip by pinging, and then enter the ip in the web browser on the client machine.

I'd be very grateful indeed for any help -it's doing my nut! Please find below my /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/network/interfaces files.

Many thanks, reetep.




my /etc/resolv.conf file looks like this:

search
nameserver 123.231.312.132
nameserver 13.21.231.13


I can ping the DNS servers no probs.





The following is my /etc/network/interfaces file:


### etherconf DEBCONF AREA. DO NOT EDIT THIS AREA OR INSERT TEXT BEFORE IT.
auto lo

iface lo inet loopback

### END OF DEBCONF AREA. PLACE YOUR EDITS BELOW; THEY WILL BE PRESERVED.

iface eth0 inet dhcp
hostname $(username provided by ISP - not actually required, just here for the hell of it)


iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.0.1
network 192.168.0.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255

quick and dirty way around this would be to enter the (isp) nameserver ip addresses into the /etc/resolv.conf files on your client machines - i've found this works ok on my small home network. i'm sure any sysadmins out there will shoot me for suggesting this - i'm sure there's a more elegant solution, but this one seems to work!

thanks for your input - it's not a bad idea and i was tempted, but not ideal since I'd like to add computers (eg when friends come for gaming) on an ad hoc basis without hassle, so it was important to configure dhcp properly.

I've fixed it now - a silly late night mistake made me put "option ip-forwarding off" instead of "on" in the /etc/dhcpd.conf file, so it wasn't passing on the IPs of my DNS servers.

Thanks to all who bothered to read this post and think about my problem. Sorry to have bothered you with a silly mistake of mine.

reetep.