So I'm pretty new to the realm of Linux and have run into a problem, hoping that someone more experienced and help me out.

Setup:
Firewall (2): Old Pentium box running IPC op v 1.4.2
3Com III NIC (Green interface)
Linksys NIC (Red interface)
Firewall (1): ActionTec 701g wireless router (wireless off)
Personal Comp: Dual boot XP Pro / Slackware 10
Linksys NIC

Problem:
I've been wading my way through trying to learn about firewalls / servers and all the fun that can be had with them. I've done the Debian firewall and worked a bit with the firewall scripts, but decided to use a distro firewall (IPCop). The set up on the Firewall (2) is that the Red interface takes a static internal IP that Firewall(1) is statically routing to it (192.168.0.xxx). That part works. Then the green interface is not doing DHCP (although I had it on and it didn't seem to make much difference). I statically route to my computer a different internal ip (192.168.24.xxx). I have set up XP to use a static IP (the same that is set on Firewall(2)) and to use Firewall(2) as its gateway & DNS. On XP everything works sweet, no problems.

I configured my Slackware using netconfig to also take the static IP and same gateway / DNS setup. My issue is when I try to access the Internet I get nothing, but if I ping Firewall(2) it'll show a connection and then I can get on the Internet. After a while I no longer have the net so I ping and get it back, and so on and so forth on and on (in fact I just had to do it to preview the post). I imagine there is some service that is supposed to be running but isn't. But that's where I'm lost. Any ideas?

in a terminal type
man route

ipcop has pretty good forum support as well

route comes up with the following:

Destination_____Gateway_____Genmask________Flags___Metri___Ref__Use_Iface
192.168.0.0____*_____________255.255.255.0___U_______0_______0____0____eth1
192.168.24.0___*_____________255.255.255.0___U_______0_______0____0____eth0
default_________192.168.0.1___0.0.0.0_________UG______0_______0____0____eth1

So it appears that there is a route to the 192.168.24.xxx network (right?). Good advise for checking an IPCop forum, I do that as well. Man that table looks terrible...sorry bout that.

I'm also using ipcop but it's a little simpler setup
Modem->IPCop->hub->computers
My route
Destination..........Gateway...............Genmask............Iface
192.168.0.0.......*..........................255.255.255.0.....eth0
loopback............*..........................255.0.0.0.............lo
default................ipcop.localdoma....0.0.0.0................eth0

Ok to close this one up I figured I'd let everyone know what I did.

First I talked to some Linux people at my work and finally found one person that had the same problem as me. What he did to fix the problem was to set up a cron job that ran every 5 minutes to let the router know that the computer exists. He explained the reason it was probably working on Windows was that XP was hitting the router with out me knowing (sure enough it was going out on port 138? one of them). So I suppose this would have worked.

Instead what I did was made my firewall 2 the gateway for my entire network and firewall 1 as the gateway for firewall 2 with an orange nic for my DMZ in firewall 2. Started up DHCP and the rest is history, it works, good times. Now I have to go and figure out my next problem. You'll probably see it soon

-RaPtOrSqUeAk-