[ale] Smoothwall with DSL. was Speedfactory dropping USENET news

[Geoffrey]

William Bagwell wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 September 2005 11:14 am, Geoffrey wrote:
> 
>>William Bagwell wrote:
> 
> 
>>>Anything special involved? (Just DSL, not the voip.) Which one keeps
>>>the default IP address when they both want the same one?
>>
>>The firewall get's the ip, and I nat everything behind it.  It's quite
>>simple to setup.  You can do it during installation of smoothwall, or
>>you can configure it after you've installed it.  All you need is the
>>auth. info which the isp provides.
> 
> 
> So I just leave the DSL box un-configured and Smoothwall communicates 
> *through* it, not *to* it?

I'm confused I guess.  This is your connection:

phone line <-> dsl modem <-> smoothwall firewall

If you have a static ip, the dsl modem is going to expect to pass that 
up to the device on the other end, in this case, the smoothwall 
firewall. That is unless you have more then just a dsl modem.  If your 
dsl device is handling things like firewall and dhcp, then you don't 
configure pppoe on the smoothwall device. In either case you simply set 
up the firewall to retrieve it's ip, and very likely it's dns from the 
dsl modem.  A lot of this is dependent on the configuration interface of 
the dsl modem.  For example, can you tell it to specify an ip for your 
side of the network....

>>>snips
>>>Current (remaining?) problem is weird
>>>intermittent DNS issues that only effect *some* computers. Been pulling
>>>my hair out over this one for a few days, error message is too generic
>>>to be of any use as a search string.
>>
>>Differences in OSs?  Are they getting dynamic dns from the firewall?
> 
> Think so though other possibilities remain, a fully patched Mandriva 10.2 
> and an ancient Win 98SE box both work. Various other Mandrakes and a SUSE 
> time out on approximately 40% of all web sites. Including Google, which 
> will work with an IP address so I know this is a DNS issue. Other web sites 
> work first time.... Some sites (not Google) will eventually load if you 
> keep trying. My son reports that Knoppix works on one computer that nothing 
> else will.
> 
> In this case the DSL box is the DNS / firewall <cough>, and yes they all 
> have it listed second (after localhost) in resolv.conf.

In this case the dsl modem is doing pppoe for you and you wouldn't need 
to configure pppoe on the smoothwall device.  You simply tell smoothwall 
to get dns from the dsl device.

Why would you put localhost in resolve.conf?  Or do you mean:

search localhost

If you're not doing your own dns on each box, you don't want localhost 
in your resolv.conf file.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding you???

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey