I'm sharing a wireless internet connection through an iBook (OS X 10.2.8) to my Linux box, and when I first set it up, it worked great. At some point I disconnected the computers, played with macstumbler, and reconnected. Now it's working funny...on the Linux box I can only look up sites that the iBook has loaded.

Any ideas?

I would assume it has something to do with DNS, but the Linux box CAN resolve addresses on its own, as I can use the host command to look up any domain I want. However, when I try to ping a site, while the address resolves, I get no answer. I've shut down everything and restarted from scratch, all to no avail. I'm pretty sure the iBook's firewall is set up correctly, and disabling the firewall didn't help.

Example:

I try to load www.linuxquestions.org in Firebird; times out. Then I type host www.linuxquestions.org in a console and I get multiple addresses. Then i try to ping www.linuxquestions.org and it doesn't work, nor does pinging that site's IP address. Then I load www.linuxquestions.org on the iBook, try again in Linux, and presto! It works. Unfortunately pinging still does not work.

FWIW:

iBook to router (wireless) manual setup:
IP 192.168.1.199
Subnet 255.255.255.0
Router 192.168.1.1
DNS: Servers provided by ISP

iBook's address to Linux is 192.168.2.1. Linux is set to DHCP, receiving the IP 192.168.2.2 and gateway 192.168.2.1 .

Thanks for any help.

How do you have the server/client set up? This sure seems like a proxy issue. If you can surf a cached page but not the rest of the world, perhaps you're stuck on the proxy. Is it NAT? Or do you have a proxy set up?

No NAT, and no proxy, so far as I know (I didn't set anything up).

Okay so as I said, I've rebooted both machines to no avail. To check on some WinXP files, I booted into XP and then back into Linux, and all of a sudden everything's peachy. Before, WinXP didn't work either. Anyone care to comment? Bad mojo?

Damn I saw that written somewhere, about a billion newsgroup posts ago. You're not the first. Likely has something to do with your NIC card's firmware. Win reset it, I guess. Congrats, and hope it works ok from now on (although, no problem was solved, and no solution learned, I guess - but, hey! IT WORKS)

HA, thanks anyway. It's still working at this point, so I'm happy. This is only temporary while I'm housesitting for some friends, so as long as it works for the next few weeks, I'm not going to worry about fixing an inconsistent problem.

(edit) Okay so I lied! Damn thing doesn't work again, since I installed an update that required me to restart the iBook. I want to do very bad things to this computer right now...rrrrrrrg.(/edit)