Fundamental Questions

[marshalx]

hi, can anyone tell me please,

(1) what does a subnet mask do ?

(2) what is "IP forwarding",

(3) "request broadcast response" ?

do we normally need 2 & 3 ?
[ im on a cable modem, into a wireless/ethernet router]

(4) whats an APIC ? tia

[Harry Kuhman]

hi, can anyone tell me please,

(1) what does a subnet mask do ?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...sk&btnG=Search

hi, can anyone tell me please,

(2) what is "IP forwarding",

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

hi, can anyone tell me please,

(3) "request broadcast response" ?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...se&btnG=Search

hi, can anyone tell me please,


(4) whats an APIC ? tia

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ix&btnG=Search

[marshalx]

thanks harry, i guess google is the place to go

didnt realise it knew *everything*

[Harry Kuhman]

I see I made my point.
Do a little reading, them come on back here and ask if anything isn't clear. Of course, I still reserve the right to answer with other links.

[marshalx]

***google has a pile of stuff (even copies of my own questions), but mostly its all a jumble.

wikipedia is far better on basic descriptions. im ok now on subnets and apic,

and thought i could see that ip-forwarding and request-bcast should be enabled,

but google showed some "experts" arguing either way. what dyou think harry ?

***incidentally have you heard of suse64 v9.2 having trouble finding inet ?

i cant get it online, and neither can some others. thanks

[gnarvaja]

Don't forget to always check The Linux Documentation Project, for this topic in particular: 4.4 Networking

--GN

[marshalx]

yes im looking at that now gnarvaja,
but i dont see anything about "request broadcast response"

i have Cable Modem into Wireless Router then out to the mobo
ABIT kv8pro onboard ethernet via rj45 (wLan not being used).

so as far as linux looking at eth0 is concerned,
does it think that is just dhcp ppp from doesnt_matter_where ?

[dont have to tell it Cable Modem nor Adsl nor anything
other than it auto-detects ppp on eth0 ?]

[Harry Kuhman]

but google showed some "experts" arguing either way. what dyou think harry ?

I've never had to deal with request broadcast response, so I don't know. I was going to write something on the first topic, what does a subnet mask do ?, but then I saw all of the other questions and realized if I wanted to at least start getting answers to them I would do a little poking around on Google and ask something more specific if I needed details. So I went ahead and got all of the links I posted rather than just write an explination of subnet masking that duplicated information that was already widely available.

[gnarvaja]

yes im looking at that now gnarvaja,
but i dont see anything about "request broadcast response"

i have Cable Modem into Wireless Router then out to the mobo
ABIT kv8pro onboard ethernet via rj45 (wLan not being used).

so as far as linux looking at eth0 is concerned,
does it think that is just dhcp ppp from doesnt_matter_where ?

[dont have to tell it Cable Modem nor Adsl nor anything
other than it auto-detects ppp on eth0 ?]

Ok, I'm not a guru on this issue, but the request broadcast response is usually associated with wLan/DHCP, and I understand you're not using wireless. I would guess that your problem is between the Router and you eth card configurations. I use a wireless router with 3 PCs connected to it: 2 over cable, 1 over WiFi with no problems, so it should work fine.

Usually pump takes care of the DHCP interface automatically. First make sure that pump is running

ps -ef | grep pump

If it is not, you'll have to figure out why. If it is, play with the configuration parameters to see if the problem goes away. The man pages are not very helpful for your particular problem, so you (or any other curious soul) may need to dig into the source code for clues. You may also want to look into the router's documentation for clues in the way it handles the DHCP protocol. Before modifying any configuration file, you may try using ifconfig and pump interactively as root.

Googling with the following string (include the "s) "request broadcast response" brings a lot of different messages in different forums on the subject. I didn't have time to browse all of them. It seems to me that this behaviour is tied to Windows DHCP clients and many Linux distributions have a hard time dealing with it by automatically. Googling with the string "DHCP protocol handshake" (do not include quotes this time) I found more technical information, but I'm not sure if you want to get your hands dirty with bits and bytes.

I hope this narrows the search,

--GN