I am a newbie who is having trouble setting up a LAN in my home. I have RH9/WinXP dual-boot system running on a PII system. I am connected to the internet with one NIC (eth0). This works fine!

My wife has WinXP running on a PII system. She is also able to connect to internet through one NIC. This also works fine.

Both of the internet connections are through a shared cable modem and router. We have separate internet accounts.

What I am attempting to do is to set up a LAN so that my RH9 box in the basement can access her WinXP box elsewhere in the house.

I have installed a second NIC card in each machine.. They are connected through a separate router.


RH9 (eth1): IP address: 192.168.0.1
submask: 255.255.255.0
I ran 'neat' and put the IP address of the WinXP box (192.168.0.2) and the netmask into the route tab.



WinXP: IP address: 192.168.0.2
submask: 255.255.255.0
Client for Microsoft Networks, File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Network & QoS packet scheduler are installed.



I have rebooted both machines. I can ping from the WinXP box to 192.168.0.1. I cannot ping from the RH9 box to 192.168.0.2.

If I reboot into WinXP, the LAN works fine and I can share files between the two computers.

Any ideas what I should try to do? What should I be checking? Any help is appreciated.

do you have the iptables firewall installed on the redhat box?

run the following command as root iptables -L and post the output (if any here)

Here is the output from the iptables -L command:

[root@localhost michael]# /sbin/iptables -L
/lib/modules/2.4.20-24.9/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.o: init_module: Device or resource busyHint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters.
You may find more information in syslog or the output from dmesg
/lib/modules/2.4.20-24.9/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.20-24.9/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.o failed
/lib/modules/2.4.20-24.9/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.o: insmod ip_tables failed
iptables v1.2.7a: can't initialize iptables table `filter': iptables who? (do you need to insmod?)
Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.


Does this mean that I need to upgrade my iptables? Or am I to turn off my iptables? If so how does one do either? Your help is appreciated!

ooh, im out of my league now.

Wouldnt want to lead you donw the wrong direction, id wait for another member to take a look

If the XP box has the "XP Firewall" settings enabled it apparently does not respond to ping. I just had this problem helping my dad set up a LAN at his house this weekend.

Go into "My Network Places" and right click on the LAN connection and choose Properties. Then go to the Advanced tab (I believe) and uncheck the box. Then give it a try from the linux machine, you should start getting responses back.

The XP computer does not have the firewall option on, and there are no second-party firewalls running at this time - though there certainly will be once I have resolved this LAN problem.

Is there anything else that I should be doing or checking?

Here is another piece of information. When I run neat as su I receive the following warning message:

redhad-config-network:
Static routes file eth1 is invalid

- eth1 is the NIC for my LAN. I had thought that the problem pinging was causing this warning, but could some other problems on the RH9 box be causing both, this warning and the inability to ping out?

When you do a netstat -rn on the red hat machine, what do you get?

First off.... the two machines are on the same subnet, 192.168.0.X. Since that is the case, there is no need to route between them. They should be able to see eachother without any routing entries in "neat."

If you remove that static route you entered in "neat" are you now able to ping?

Also, you mentioned that these machines are connected together through a "seperate router." Do you mean, switch or hub?

MrKnisely

You are using a shared cable modem. To get both machines to attach to the modem do you use a hub or are there multiple ports on the modem itself? Also what IP addresses are on the NIC's used to connect to the internet. I only ask b/c most times you have a 192.168.xxx.xxx/16 network on an internal LAN and the client pc's use the modem as the gateway to the internet. If this is the case then installing a second NIC in the two pc's is unnecessary, since both pc's would have compatible network addresses to begin with.

I guess i'm most confused by the statement that:
"Both of the internet connections are through a shared cable modem and router. We have separate internet accounts."
If you share the same proprietary Cable modem then you should be using the same ISP.

netstat -rn provides the following output:

[michael@localhost michael]$ netstat -rn
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

Removing the static route did resolve the warning that I was receiving. However, I still cannot ping.

This is the configuration of the LAN.

Box 1: HP Vectra VL running RH9 and WinXP (home). Eth0 is cabled to an Etherfast cable DSL router and then to the cable modem.

Box 2: Compaq Presario running WinXP (Home Ed) cabled to same Etherfast cable DSL router.

Using this, both machines obtain separate dynamic IP addresses and access to internet.

Both machines access the internet just fine with this arrangement.

Box 1: Eth1 is cabled separately to Netgear dual speed hub.
Box 2: separate NIC cabled to the same Netgear hub.

I am trying to preserve the separate links to the cable router, and have a separate LAN connecting the 2 computers.

When both machines are running WinXP, either can access the internet, and file sharing can be done between the two computers. The whole system works.

However, when I am running RH9, I cannot ping to my wife's WinXP box.. I can ping from the XP box to the RH9 box. There is no firewall currently running on the XP box.

I appreciate your help. I am probably using the wrong terminology. Both computers are cabled to an Etherfast cable DSL router. From there, only one cable runs to the cable modem. We have separate dynamic IP addresses.

When I run neat and select eth0, it says tht I automatically receive my IP address settings with dhcp. Selecting the DNS tab shows that I have a primary DNS: 24.153.22.67 and a Secondary DNS: 24.153.22.195.

When I select eth1 from the devices tab, I have placed a static IP address of: 192.168.0.1 and a submask of 255.255.255.0. Selecting the DNS tab shows the same primary and secondary DNS listings as for eth0.

Does this help? Clearly I am over my head as I am still only learning about setting up the LAN.