Help with network configuration

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 04:52:15PM -0700, Bob R. Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-04-02 at 20:50, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > OTOH you are missing a default route which means that you do not have a
> > gateway.
> 
> I wound up deleting it. Could you give me the command to add a default
> route?

ip route (add|replace) default via ${GATEWAY} dev eth0

(in this case as you seem to have only eth0 and you need, of
course, to know what ${GATEWAY} is unless you communicate only
on LAN and which case your routing table is fine).

'man route' will show you another way.

> If I recall, 6.2 added this for me.

Unless something is seriously messed up 'service network start'
should have added  a default route for here as well _provided_
you recorded in a configuration what your GATEWAY happens to be.

In any case if you to find out what happens on a device startup
and what information is really used look through /sbin/ifup script.
In particular 

  grep 'route.*default' /sbin/ifup

should show you how default routes are established.

> > 
> > What for?  Presumably you are on 192.168.0.0/24 network and
> > 'ping localhost' works too (through an internal connection).
> 
> I'm comparing the output of route -n on my other computer running Red
> Hat 6.2.

A difference in a printout.  A supeflous stuff is not shown nowadays.

> I must add a book on the
> subject to my library.

Look into /usr/share/doc/iproute-*/.  There is likely there more than
enough. :-)  A general information is available on http://www.tldp.org/
In particular http://www.tldp.org/guides.html and look for
"The Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition" if you
are that ambitious. :-)

   Michal