problems in debian sarge with network interfaces configuration
 

Hello all I am new here and I haven't ever posted before so I hope that this is indeed a valid network question for this forum. If not please feel free to relocate it.

I have a Debian server that is setup with 4 different network cards. One is connecting to the public internet with a wan ip address for a monitoring application that I use on a dedicated T1. The other is connected to my VoIP network, (Same T1, different Internal LAN) for tftp, xml directory serving and so forth to my cisco 7960 phones. I also have a 3rd and 4th which are on another fiber optic network and are connected to two different VLAN's managed by a cisco 1841 router, one for LAN and the other for WLAN for radius authentication purposes.

Regardless of the setup though, I cannot restart my network over ssh without getting kicked off of this server and locked out. I keep having to drive to my office and restart it manually. Now I have been working on these things for many years and haven't ever had this problem, I currently have a datacenter with over 100 linux servers in it and I can restart their networks over and over without ever getting kicked off. Does anyone know why I cannot do this with this particular Debian Server?

I have IP tables controlling all of my routing rules, firewall rules, policys and protocols, but I do on all of my other servers too.

Thanks in advance for any ideas. I could be overlooking something stupid in a configuration file. If there are any additional details needed just let me know.

How are you restarting your network? And out of curiosity - why do you need to restart your network?

I have been making interface changes. To eth0-3, so after I set the IP's and information, firewalls, listening services, and what not, I do a /etc/init.d/networking restart, generally when I restart networks in this manner I do not lose my connection. But on this particular server it kicks me off every single time.

If you do a /networking/restart I would expect you to always be kicked off. Now if you can't get back on again that may have something to do with firewall rules, or if you changed IP that may be a simple matter of the services not listening on the correct interfaces (because the interfaces they are listening on no longer exist). You need to think about what is involved and how to remotely execute a script which will shut down services, make the network changes you want (including iptables rules), and bring things back up again.