[Mageia-discuss] home network using broadband router(Tony Blackwell)

[imnotpc]

On 03/07/2012 02:20 PM, Tony Blackwell wrote:
> Another brief contribution, a bit apart from the current sequence.  (I 
> am not a network expert, which may well show in what follows!)
>
> I have 2 ethernet ports in each PC, use the router DHCP-assigned 
> 192.168.x.x addresses for one network of ports which can see the 
> router, and a separate-wired network on the other set of ethernet 
> ports using a different numbering scheme which I assign manually, i.e. 
> hard-coded, to see each other.  Also have the printer on this second 
> network.  Keeps it isolated from the net, lets me have full security 
> on the ports with net connection and relaxed security on the internal 
> network.  The hard-coded addresses on my internal network are all in 
> /etc/hosts.
>
> One curious thing I found with pretty much every mandriva and mageia 
> distribution is that regardless of what I say during initial 
> installation, I need to fix up etc/hosts which usually has a double 
> entry for 127.0.0.1 "localdomain.localhost localhost" and another line 
> of "127.0.0.1 mypc.mynet.au mypc" rather than the hardcoded address I 
> assigned that 2nd port at installation.  Fixing this to the real 
> address I wanted that second port to have, and re-starting, fixes any 
> communication problems between each of my PC's
>
> Best of luck,
> tonyb

Since I'm not an expert either, I have refrained from adding my opinion 
to this thread. Well until now. I'd like to make a couple points because 
I think the common denominator here is dhcp which has it's limits, 
particularly when managed by a router.

@ e-letter - I read your original post and you indicated that you were 
having trouble setting up nfs using Mandriva/Mageia,  but that you were 
able to connect to the internet. Correct? Well if you're using dhcp to 
assign IP addresses, of course it's hard to set up nfs. For persistent 
connections an nfsv4 client uses an entry in fstab to mount a remote 
file system at boot. This requires a fixed server name or fixed server 
IP address, neither of which is provided by a default router dhcp setup. 
There may be ways to work around this, but why bother? Why not just 
assign fixed IPs and be done with it? It only takes a few minutes and 
your nfs connections will always survive reboots.

@ Tony - Same observation. You are adding additional NICs and creating a 
parallel fixed IP network when you can set your router to use fixed IPs. 
Why? Your boxes are already exposed to the internet though the router so 
you aren't gaining the security benefit of a firewall. Is there a reason 
you don't just use fixed IPs on the connection you share with your 
router? Perhaps you can't configure it?

Every type of cable/dsl/T1 router I've ever worked on allows the user to 
configure the LAN interface to use fixed IPs which would make things a 
whole lot easier for both of you. Just a thought.

@ Tony - I've also noticed that every entry in /etc/hosts is assigned to 
127.0.01 no matter what the actual NIC address is. This is different 
from every other distro and is probably a bug, but it should still work 
ok unless there are firewall rules that require a name to resolve to a 
specific IP address. Hmmm... this might be related to a problem I've 
been having...

Best wishes, Jeff