Topic: routing questions

[John Helms]

I have an E-Smith 3.1 server setup on a network thats has the following configuration. It currently is running a ADSL internet connection for a network. The internal ethernet address is 192.168.1.1 the external is 208.23.144.x. All the clients see the internet fine. The clients now have to be able to access a cisco router that is set to a gateway address of 192.168.1.150. This router provides another internet connection that is a secure connection to a web server that provides a very special service. Unfortunately I have yet to get Windows95/98 to be able to see both gateways. It will see one or the other both not both at the same time. I am thinking that Windows must be capable of it but I do not know the method or that E-Smith can be set to act as a router for both the 208.23.144.x and 192.168.1.150 with 192.168.1.1 as a single gateway address for all Windows clients. Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks
John

[Charlie Brady]

John Helms wrote:

> The internal ethernet
> address is 192.168.1.1 the external is 208.23.144.x. All the
> clients see the internet fine. The clients now have to be able
> to access a cisco router that is set to a gateway address of
> 192.168.1.150. This router provides another internet
> connection that is a secure connection to a web server that
> provides a very special service. Unfortunately I have yet to
> get Windows95/98 to be able to see both gateways. It will see
> one or the other both not both at the same time. I am
> thinking that Windows must be capable of it but I do not
> know the method or that E-Smith can be set to act as a
> router for both the 208.23.144.x and 192.168.1.150 with
> 192.168.1.1 as a single gateway address for all Windows
> clients.

You can probably do either. Machines can have only one default gateway, as you discovered. But you can add a host or network route to either all your Windows boxes (through a netlogon script, perhaps), or to your e-smith server. Probably easiest to do it on your e-smith server. You will need to set up a host route, using the Cisco router as the gateway, from the e-smith box to the "very special service". And you need to make sure that your e-smith box will forward the packets. Read the documentation at http://www.e-smith.org/custom/ for advice on how to change your e-smith server without breaking it, and read up on IPchains and IP masquerade to help you understand the existing setup.

Regards

Charlie

[John Helms]

Thanks Charlie for the reply. I got the problem solved. First I did some research on the web at various MS/Win sites trying to find info on how to do this. I found nothing there. I dug a little deeper and found the answers I needed at the following site:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/netpc/excerpt/ch06-06.htm

It figures I would find the info at a site related to Linux/Unix
Heres what I did.
Step 1. Create a bat file and place the following commands in it based on your addressing needs of course.

route add 210.x.x.x 192.168.new.gateway
route add 208.x.x.x 192.168.esmith.address

The first command is adding the IP address I need to get to thru the new gateway.
The second command is adding the IP address of the DNS server my e-smith uses for ADSL internet connectivity.
Save the bat file anywhere you like and place a shortcut in Windows Startup thats is set to "run minimized" and "close on exit".
The reason for doing this is that Windows will only keep the route commands as longs as the system is on and will lose them once it is rebooted. You can type these in at a Dos prompt using the same syntax as the bat file for initial testing.

Step 2. Create a "hosts" file in C:windows that has the IP address of the site you need to get to thru the new gateway. In my case it was:

210.x.x.x  blahblahnet
Save as hosts with no extension. Windows does us all a favor and hides the extensions by default so be sure to turn off that "feature".

Step 3. In network neighborhood properties on the tcp/ip properties for your network card be sure to have both gateways listed under "gateways".

Step 4. In the DNS section of the tcp/ip eyhernet properties in network neighborhood properties enable dns using the e-smith server for all the choices in the fields. Mine was already set that way before I tried this but when I tested on a client machine that had not been setup previously my access to the internet thru e-smith was unavailable until I added these settings. (oops!)

Well thats it, this worked for my customers network. Hope it helps someone in a similiar situation.

[Ian Pryor]

If I am reading John's situation correctly, I had a similar scenario to solve.

I am an absolute newbie at anything Linux ( I installed e-smith yesterday as my first Linux experience) but here is what I had and what I did.  If I did something incorrect I'd sure appreciate feedback from anyone.  

I have a dedicated ADSL connection for my office LAN as well as a Cisco router for our WAN.  There are five different subnets that the Cisco routes to.   I set the e-smith server as the default gateway in DHCP and added a static route for each WAN subnet to the e-smith server using the Cisco router as the default gateway for each route.  When a user tries to connect to anything it hits the e-smith server first and if the ip address is destined for a WAN subnet, it is rerouted to the Cisco router to do its job.  If it is destined for the internet it goes through the e-smith server to the internet.  It seems to be much simpler than John's ultimate solution and as a newbie I'm wondering, it works, but is it a bad plan?  
This is a temporary(?) situation until I can get our WAN managers to configure the Cisco router to do the work.

Thanks.