To whom it may concern,

I would truly appreciate any help that you can give me to help with solving this issue which has had me baffled for the last few days.

Just to give you a quick rundown of what I am trying to achieve:
There is an internet cafe which is currently running Windows XP SP3 on all 10 of their workstations as well as the administration and workshop PC's which are all connected through a 16-Port 3COM 10/100 switch. The cafe management software currently being used is a freeware app called Handy Cafe. Recently because of Microsoft stopping all support for the Windows XP OS and the high costs of updating their old copies of Office 2003 to a newer version, they have decided to try and use the LINUX alternative. After doing a of of research I came across ZenWalk Linux which has a internet cafe management system preinstalled. The initial system was called by a different name, but the later more updated version is now called Mkhawe. Now that you know more about the background I can explain the network issues I am having. PS I have installed and updated both the client and server packages and both are running perfectly.

The networking problem that I have is that no matter what options I use to setup the network on the two Linux PC's (DHCP or Manual IP Configuration) I can not get either of these two PC's to ping each other. I am however able to ping both of the Windows based administration and workshop PC's without any issues. The reason I need the two Linux PC's to see each other is that I have to enter the IP address of the Mkahawe server into the configuration file of the client system running on one of the Linux PC's. Out of pure desperation I installed the client software on the server PC and when I run the client app using the server's (or localhost) IP everything works and the server picks up the cient immediately. As both client and server apps are running on the same PC there is not much else I can do except see that the server does indeed see the client. I am not sure why I am unable to ping either of the two Linux PC's no matter what different configuration options I have tried to use. I have also completely reinstalled the Linux on both of the PC's just to make sure that I did not screw something up along the way.

I am using a basic 192.168.0.0 IP structure with the following IP's in use:
192.168.0.254 - Router
192.168.0.100 - Workshop PC
192.168.0.150 - Administration PC
192.168.0.180 - Linux PC Running as cafe management server.
192.168.0.181 - Linux PC Running as cafe client.
192.168.0.200 to 192.168.0.210 - Workstations

When using DHCP the following IP's are allocated to the Linux PC's:
192.168.0.128 - Linux PC Running as cafe management server.
192.168.0.134 - Linux PC Running as cafe client.

I can send you copies of all the relevant files including the routing tables, hosts(Incl. allow & deny) and any other files that might be of any help.

I would really appreciate any help or advice that can be given.

Thank you,

Iwan Goussard
+27(0)71-889-77-27
+27(0)21-552-38-43
igoussard@mweb.co.za

Hi

it looks like FW issue , have yo checked iptables on linux hosts ?

I am a newbie when it comes to Linux,so could you please be more specific about how I would go about checking the ip tables and what exactly I would be looking for.

Thanks, Iwan.

pls provide output of command

#iptables -nvL

from both linux hosts

and also

#ip a s
#ip r

Linux is a bit complicated as compared to windows I was at it but now i am a bit familiar with it as with your error i think that's an fw issue by just taking a look at hosts could have help you out.