Very Computer

I have RedHat 5.0 installed (for about a week) with a modem and NE*000
ethernet card . I notice that if I have eth0 active, then I can't access ppp
(I'm not sure about the other way around because I am still messing with
Samba). Do I need to set something to make them on different 'ports' or
similar thing?

Thanks in advance.

Wayne

The *only* commands I use to initialize the ethernet card are:

-----------------------------
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1 broadcast 10.255.255.255 netmask\
255.0.0.0
/sbin/route add -net 10.0.0.0 device eth0
-----------------------------

(these go in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 under Slackware, your mileage may vary
with other distributions or Unices).

Note that I am *not* setting a default gateway for this machine.  When
I start pppd, it uses the -defaultroute option, making it the default
gateway.

A bit of theory: the routing table (type route -n to see yours)
provides a list of 'destination' addresses, usually discrete networks,
and instructions to get to each of those destinations.  For example,
my own routing table has 10.0.0.0 as the first entry, with a listed
Iface of eth0.  The next line has a destination of 127.0.0.0 and an
interface of lo0 (the virtual loopback device).  This means every time
I try to access an IP address beginning with a 10, the system knows to
use ethernet to get to the destination; likewise if I ping or telnet
to 127.0.0.1, the routing table shows that's really just another way
of addressing the same machine (localhost), so it won't waste any time
looking on outside networks.

Most routing tables also have a 'default' entry, which just means "try
this way if you can't find an address explicitly listed elsewhere in
the table'.  Your default route is usually the gateway machine on your
LAN (typically yourip.yourip.yourip.1), but if you're intermittently
running PPP, you probably have a dynamically assigned IP every time
you connect, so you can't predict this...  but you don't have to,
since pppd will add the default route when you connect.  *Unless*
you've already set the eth0 interface as the default route, in which
case outgoing packets will always try (unsuccessfully) to find their
destination on the ethernet segment, and ignore ppp altogether.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm doing a good job of explaining this or
not, but it's all pretty easy once you've gotten it to work once or
twice.  :-)  You may also want to read the NET-3 Howto for more
information.