Greetings folks. This week I undertook a project to replace my cheapo home broadband router with an old laptop running OpenBSD. Success appeared to have been achieved, but I've run into a snag in the final implementation.
I set up the OBSD router (more info below) to perform NAT and serve DHCP and DNS for my LAN. After a ridiculously small amount of tweaking, I got everything working just like I wanted it. Here was the arrangement: (Test hosts) -> (Switch) -> (OBSD router) -> (Cheapo router) -> (Cable Modem) The cheapo router was still in the loop because I didn't want to disconnect the rest of my LAN before I was ready. Yesterday I decided I was ready. I removed the cheapo router and plugged the OBSD router directly into the modem, there was some rebooting of devices involved, and my desktop could no longer access the internet. A little sleuthing revealed that the router was unable to retrieve an address from the modem. I've done some poking around and searched the list archives. There were a couple of threads with similar issues, but no definitive solutions that I found. There were references to cable modems only wanting to serve one hardware address, but I'm able to use it with either the cheapo router, or with my desktop plugged directly into it (and I verified that the modem saw them as two different hardware addresses... no weird proxying going on in the router). I powered the modem completely down for a few minutes and plugged only the OBSD router into it when I brought it back up, but still no luck. The hostname.ep1 file for that interface is a simple "dhcp NONE NONE NONE". The dhclient.conf file is the default, which includes "send host-name "hostname";", the only other helpful suggestion I saw in the list archives. I've tried multiple cables and NICs, to rule out hardware. I checked the dhclient.conf file on the Ubuntu desktop that pulls an address from the modem just fine (which is this one, so I'm sure it really works), and while not identical, it's only configured to send the hostname as well. I've hit dead ends with everything now, and so any further suggestions are quite welcome. More info on the OBSD box: It's an old Toshiba Satellite 330CDS. I installed OBSD 4.2 with just base42, etc42, and man42. The only non-stock program running is isc-dhcp-server-3.0.4p0.tgz, which I installed in order to get dynamic DNS going. The laptop has two PCMCIA NICs, ep1 (external) and ne3 (internal). The setup was done primarily by bending the following two guides to my setup: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/openbsd/networking/dynamic_dns_dhcp.php The former is just the sample home router from the PF guide, and the latter addresses DHCP and DNS. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. David Murphy ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
