LAN question

[Paul Newell]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Paul Newell <pnewell at cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
>   
>> Fedora:
>>
>> Before I switched to F9, all my FC5 machines were happily chatting with each
>> other through a Linksys WRT54GL but none of them could see the net. I
>> upgraded one of them to F9 and it sees the net and can ssh to the others.
>> But the other two machines can no longer ssh into it F9 system. I tried to
>> play with things to fix it, but the best I could do was kill the network
>> connection so that the F9 system can't see the other machine or the net. In
>> other words, I screwed up. Since I can't figure out how to get the network
>> back alive by restoring prior conditions, I am resigned to yet another
>> re-install (the price of learning is lots of starting over...)
>>     
>
>
> For lack of time, I am abandoning the remaining information that you
> provided, sorry.
>
> Here is my suggestion...
>
> If you have GUI on that F9 box, install one of the many GUI firewall
> editing tools like firestarter, and use it to enable port forwarding,
> and likely network translation -- this assumes that the F9 box uses a
> different interface and IP to get to the internet than the one it uses
> to connect to the rest of the LAN, generally speaking you need two
> network cards for that.
>
> If you do not have GUI on that box, you'll have to read up on IPTABLES
> so you can set up the above manually.
>
> Have each of the other machines use than F9 box as their network gateway.
>
> This is a typical, relatively easy setup which should allow all the
> machines to have basic access to the internet and to each other.
>
> If this F9 machines happens to be a server, you may want to consider
> using Centos 5.2 on it instead
Arthur:

Once again, thanks for the reply earlier. I didn't get a chance to look 
into this until weekend. From what I can tell scanning the firestarter 
site, there is an assumption that one machine is providing the 
connection and all machines route through that one machine. Nice model 
but it isn't what I would like to get.

That being said, I may be asking for more than current technology allows 
(though I know I am a newbie on understanding that).

I have three Linux boxes which I want to bring up to F9 (the other two 
are on FC5). I want each one to be able to see the net and, if any one 
of the others are powered up, to see them (as in my original comment of 
"happily chatting"). No central machine, each one is independent.

I do note that my Linksys router is set to disable DCHP as that worked 
great when I couldn't get any of the three machines to see the net and I 
was happy with each one seeing each other. That being said, since a 
default F9 install has no problem with the net and seeing other 
machines, I have to think that this isn't a Linksys issue.

I tried manually installs of the network in which I forced an address 
for the machine being kicked to F9 and that did not good, the network 
connection never happened.

I've re-installed F9 on the one machine to get me to a state of network 
connectivity. I'd like to know what files / settings I need to send to 
this list to try to understand how to get the other machines to see it. 
My gut is that they just don't know the IP of the new machine and I have 
no idea how to give it to them.

I am prepared to kick a second machine to F9 to see if two F9 machines 
behave better, but don't know if this is a red herring.

I have two other replies form "Joel Rees" and "Nifty Fedora Mitch" that 
I am still working on.

Appreciate any advice, please assume that I near brain-dead on 
networking (smile)

Paul