Hi Will, People,
I just wanted to say that I have had various strange DNS problems
with my NetBSD 1.5 gateway box for my home LAN also.
It all seemed to work in a basic sense but it would take ages to
resolve domain names outside of my home domain. Then when it
did resolve to get the IP address the connection would work in fits
and starts. ie It would start then stall for 15 seconds then start
again. This happened with ping or the web browser. I had checked
over my entire networking setup several times. And it used to
work when I had FreeBSD doing this job. Anyway I switched to
using the host file and the ISP nameserver and turned the local
DNS named off. ie the simple way. And everything burst to life,
that is the pings and web came steady and strong with no stalling.
Anyway I've had this and other strange DNS hassles with 1.5
over the past months. I didn't know if I should suspect 1.5 or if
it was just something in my DNS setup. If anyone else has similar
problems perhaps post them so we know. If it's just Will and I,
then it's probably our individual setups, else a bug?

Paul.
Bureau of Met. Aus.


Will Roberts wrote:

> At the recommendation of sever people, I intend to set up an old
> Sparc IPX with two ethernet interfaces as a NAT router and firewall
> using NetBSD.
>
> Several days ago, just to familiarize myself with NetBSD, I completed
> the installation of v 1.5.1 on a Sparc IPC.
>
> I am now trying to get the IPC connected to my home LAN which consists
> of about 10 miscellaneous machines running Redhat Linux on both Sparc
> and Intel platforms, Solaris on a Sparc platform, and several Windows95
> boxes of various flavors.  They are all behind a NAT server which is
> running NAT32 software on an Win95 Pentium-90 and is set up to use
> static addresses on the LAN side.  This arrangement has been in place
> for a couple of years and has been very, very stable with no problems
> configuring any of the various OS to use the 172.16.x.x LAN and the
> 172.16.2.100 machine as the gateway.
>
> Now I have NetBSD set up and have it working and able to ping machines
> both on the LAN and outside -- for a while.  After some period of time,
> say 30 minutes or so, I can no longer ping anything outside (even
> by numeric IP) and the problem is solved only when I stop and restart
> the NAT software on the gateway machine.
>
> I also notice that NetBSD sets itself up with IPv6 enabled and when
> I do >route show, I am able to get a IP routing table with everything
> looking OK followed by an IPv6 routing table which I do not fully
> understand.  When the NetBSD machine ceases to communicate through
> the gateway machine, this >route show command hangs after displaying
> just the IP routing table and the headings for the IPv6 portion.  It
> takes a ^C to get out of it.  Similarly, when this happens, >ping
> xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx hangs when attempting an outside IP but works fine
> with the IPs of other machines in the LAN -- including working fine
> pinging the 172.16.2.100 machine which is supposed to be the gateway.
>
> I do not get a "no route to host" message when this problem occurs.
> Ping just hangs and requires a ^C.  (If I delete the gateway from
> the routing table, ping returns the expected "no route to host"
> message.)
>
> I suspect that NetBSD is attempting some automated route discovery
> or some such and that is this is hanging its ability to deal with
> the NAT machine as gateway until the NAT software is stopped and
> restarted.  The problem well may be in the NAT software, but NetBSD
> is the only OS which is having this issue.
>
> Meanwhile, other machines on the LAN have no problem in continuing
> to use the NAT machine gateway, even when the Sparc NetBSD machine
> can't.  And other machines on the LAN can ping the Sparc at its
> IP of 172.16.2.114.
>
> What's going on here?  I can provide the results of >route show
> and >ifconfig le0, etc. if that would help in diagnosing this
> problem.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Will
> The Old Bear

--

____________________________________________

Paul  (pts@bom.gov.au)
National Climate Centre
Australian Bureau Of Meteorology
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