| Are you are using public Internet addresses on all of your boxes? 

no, private. 10.0.0.x

| Or does alidoro perform NAT between a private IP address space and the
| Internet?  If so, then NAT could be the problem source?

the problem existed before I set up NAT/forwarding, actually.  I
wasn't going to bother with the outside 'net until I could get the
machines talking to each other, but went and set up the gateway anyway
just for more experimental evidence. didn't change anything.

| In any case, alidoro seems to be working as a router.  Did you
| enable IP forwarding on alidoro (you can set it with sysctl -w
| net.inet.ip.forwarding=1)?

yes.

| Well, you should be fine because you could ping the Internet from
| cerebus.

well, yes. but connections still hang (not just from cerebus to the outside,
but from alidoro to cerebus)...