[lug] RH 7.1 ppp/network setup

[D. Stimits]

I'm trying to upgrade a machine from RH 6.2 to 7.1, and coming up with
some sort of network configuration problem. Actually, a couple of
problems, possibly related, maybe not.

The setup: internal net ethernet card with non-routable 10.x.x.x
address, static, which works fine. 56k modem which connects fine also (I
use wvdial), but fails to be able to set default route, so I must do a
manual route add default ppp0 whenever it comes up. Related to this is
this /var/log/messages line:
pppd[16790]: not replacing existing default route to eth0
[10.255.255.254]

I tried adding to /etc/ppp/options the line "defaultroute", but no
effect. Further investigation leads to an interesting block of code in
the script at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/, file ifup-ppp:
if [ "${DEFROUTE}" != no ] ; then
  # pppd will no longer delete an existing default route
  # so we have to help it out a little here.
  route del default >/dev/null 2>&1
  opts="$opts defaultroute"
fi

Since adding "defaultroute" to /etc/ppp/options does not work, I wonder
if this block might be called correctly but still not work (I'm unsure
if it is being called and acted on as "true", or failing). I'm not sure
where DEFROUTE is being set from, since I grep'd a few places around
/etc/ and didn't find it anywhere else.

I haven't used dhcp before, but maybe this would be the answer? In the
past I've just let the ppp scripts handle route and ip address.
Suggestions on how to get the default route to work with ppp0 on RH 7.1?


Another issue might be related to machine naming, and I might have to
give up my attempt to rename things (this is a clean install, "rename"
is relative to the other hard drive). There is a very long delay after
starting Netscape 4.77 before it can even read a local file, named with
absolute file path. I turned off the "smart browsing" and other features
that I can think of which might try to do a dns lookup to the outside. I
own (rent?) the domain battlefieldlinux.com, which has full DNS in the
"real pseudo-world" of Internet, including www., ftp., and other
aliases, and am wondering if domain naming might be causing this slow
startup. My internal network did have machine names that were for
another domain that got snatched away a day before I tried to get the
domain (battlefieldlinux.com was a 2nd choice...I kind of like it better
than my first choice now), so the internal names were for machine names
on domains that actually exist on the Internet; I changed them to all be
battlefieldlinux.com now, and I'm not sure if this is causing DNS lookup
delays. So on the inside I have a scheme like "abc.battlefieldlinux.com"
and "xyz.battlefieldlinux.com", which don't exist on the outside.
However, my /etc/hosts file explicitly lists the internal net names, and
I am set to search /etc/hosts before DNS. I have tried this with and
without /etc/resolv.conf changes for various combinations of domain
search orders, with no change. I also tried variations in
/etc/host.conf, including with "trim .battlefieldlinux.com", which also
had no effect. Possibility 1 that I can think of is that somewhere it is
seeing a domain name (even though it is only reading a local directory
listing...the files in /usr/share/doc/) and trying to look it up before
it runs, and has to time out first. Possibility 2 is similar, but
instead of this being a problem due to domain name, it could be that it
is trying to look up something through the internal 10.x.x.x eth0, which
it should never do. Does anyone have a suggestion on browser delay fixes
or testing? (strace didn't show much, top and ps are also boring, almost
no cpu goes to it during the delay)

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com