Hi all,

I am a fairly new user to the world of UNIX in general. I have a Red Hat 8.0 server that I have built to give my self an e-mail, name, file server, etc. A friend of mine helped me build it, and did most of the configuration. I am learning more and more every day, but I'm still fairly green. Here's the story:

This server (hostname goliath) runs the e-mail server (sendmail), Samba, and DNS, among others. All the other machines in the house are Windows based. Everythin has been working fine, but yesterday, I rebooted goliath because I was playing with some things, and well, I just decided to reboot it. When it was shutting down and it came to "stopping named", it did NOT say "ok" on the right. It did not say "failed" either, it was just blank. When the system came back up, it DID start named ok. I also notice that when I use the "service named stop" command, it does the same thing as when the machine shuts down, nothing. If I then run "service named start, however, it comes right back up. To tell you the truth, I do not believe it is a problem with DNS, but with something else that integrates with DNS. Everything else on the entire network is running great: e-mail, DHCP, everything. What is happening, however, is that none of my Windows machines have access to the internet. The IP addresses are not being resolved to hostnames. I have checked everything I can think of, and called my buddy, but he doesn't have the time to help out right now. I NEED internet access asap. I do recall that this happened once before when I did a restart, and he came in through SSH, started something, and it worked fine. I do not know what he did, but he said that "whatever it was" (like I said, I can't remember) was not set to start. Do you have any ideas what I might need to do? I'm really stuck without internet access, and I need to get this running. Could anyone please help me? I'd appreciate it. Oh, it would also help if you all treated me like a 5 year old on this one. Step-by-step troubleshooting, commands and all would be infinitely helpful. Thanks you all in advance!

Cheers!

Chris

PS. Obviously, I am on the web now to make this posting. I am on the server directly. That works fine.

Hello again!
Don't worry about named - as far as I know it does shut down it is just a bug in the service script (it forgets to say OK).

Can you post "ipchains -L" and "route -n" (preferably in CODE barckets)

How's it going, David?! Damned if you don't just know everything, hehehee. Um, ok. "ipchains -L and "route -n". I'm assuming those are commands I run at the command line? Will they affect my server in any way? I'm kind of paranoid about that, don't want to screw anything up, because I do not yet have a backup! If so, do you just want me to post what their output is, and what do you mean by code brackets? Thanks, if anyone can solve my mystery, I know it's you. How's the weather over there, HA!

Chris

The weather is Ok - I just hope it holds up as I'm playing golf tomorrow - I doun't wan't the floods like they had in Augusta.

THe commands just display information - your firewall rules and default gateways. by code brackets I mean.
[ CODE ] YOUR OUTPUT [ / CODE ]

With no spaces in the [ brackets - it puts it in monospaced writing (much easier to read - post both - you'll see what I mean)

Ok,

ipchains -l generated an error saying something about incompatibility with the Kernel. I ran "iptables -L" instead. It gave me the following:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere

Chain OUTPUT
target prot opt source destination

the "route -n" command gave me this:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.5.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
24.61.64.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.240.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 24.61.64.1 0.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0


I hope the formatting comes out ok. So, you're a golfer, eh? Any good? I like the game, but really am quite awful, HA! Hope you can help!

Chris

Sorry - I meant iptables

That looks OK.

What about:
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

When I run that command, all it says is:

0 (zero)

Of course, only, the "0" is there. Another question... To be on the web, I am in run level 5. To do the commands you are requesting, I am switching to run level 3, performing the command, then switching back to 5. Anyway to do this all without switching run levels? I no nothing about the Red Hat desktop. Thanks!

Chris

PS. What time is it there? I hope I am not keeping you up!

coming up to 12:30 - don't worry

That means that forwarding is disabled try:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

to save swiching runlevels either open a terminal window and su to root - type "su -"

Or change console (this is what I usually do) "Ctrl + Alt + F1"
F1 - F6 are text
F7 + are graphical, F7 being the default.

Ok, that worked! I figured it was something simple, I just don't have the experience yet. Thanks! As stated earlier, I'n getting less dumb every day! HA! Ok, time for you to go to bed, man, hehehee, but when you get up tomorrow, could you answer me one more thing? Obviously, the IP packet forwarding did not start when I rebooted the server, so how would I get this to start at boot time like everything else? Basically, how would I get it so that I do not have to manually run the echo command everytime I decide to reboot my server(which won't be often, granted, but I'd like to know anyway). Thanks

Cheers!

Chris

I don't think it wouldn't start. It is more likely a firewall script that disables it so that your server can't be used as a relay.

Try:
cd /etc/init.d
grep ip_forward *

Hopefully that will throw up the name of a script that contains a line like:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
just change th 0 to a 1
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Like you say - I'm off to bed - good luck - I'll check back in the morning.

If the grep doesn't return anything leave it running overnight or something with:
grep -r ip_forward /* | less

I found a file called "network" in /etc/init.d that contains all that info and will change it all as soon as I do a little reading to learn fully what that'll do. Thanks again for all your help! See you in cyberspace (and maybe on the links, too)!!

Chris

If you don't have a script setting it explicitly other than network you can set the setting in:
/etc/sysctl.conf

Just change te default:
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0
to
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1