[PLUG] Understanding Networking Components

John Meissen john at meissen.org
Sun Apr 1 21:43:58 UTC 2012


rshepard at appl-ecosys.com said:
>     When the system boots it connects automatically to the shop's wifi server.
> The ESSID is 'WEBbeans-Silk Espresso', 'ifconfig wlan0' returns the IP address
> 10.5.70.104, broadcast address 10.5.70.255, and netmask 255.255.255.0.

>     The kernel routing table (displayed in response to 'netstat -r') has 2
> pairs of entries (default and broadcast) for the eth0 and wlan0 interfaces.
> For wlan0, default		10.5.70.1 10.5.70.0	*

>     /etc/resolv.conf -- SET BY THE WIRELESS SERVER -- shows nameserver 8.8.8.8
> nameserver 8.8.4.4

You say 'netstat -r' has TWO pairs of entries. So you're not disabling the 
ethernet port? What's the full output of 'netstat -r'?

Most likely the ethernet port is being used as the prefered route, and so 
nothing that's not specifically on the wlan network is going out.

Seriously, you're making life way more difficult by trying to use hard-coded 
addresses with interfaces. You can still have fixed addresses, just serve them 
up by DHCP. Then interfaces and routing will "just work", no matter where you 
are.  For instance, what happens if you take your laptop someplace where you 
need to jack into a wired network?

Everything in my house has a fixed IP address, and corresponding entries in the 
bind config files. But nothing is hard-coded - it's all handled by DHCP. When I 
add a new system to the network all I do is find the MAC address and add it to 
dhcpd.conf with an IP address I've selected. I plug the system in and =poof= it 
has the IP address I want it to have.

john-





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