[luau] debian + laptop + NATS ? (fwd)

[Eric Jeschke]

A member of our Big Island LUG has this question.  Thought I'd forward
it to LUAU for consideration.  Any ideas?  Please contact him directly
at 
   stickel at keck.hawaii.edu

Thanks!
--Eric

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 14:49:18 -1000
From: Terry Stickel <stickel at keck.hawaii.edu>
To: bilug at uhh.hawaii.edu
Subject: debian + laptop + NATS ?

Hi from Kona!
I've been trying to convert my NATS P133 tower unit (debian linux, 
kernel 2.2.10) to a laptop NATS. It seemed to go smoothly at first, but 
then I ran into a problem.
The hardware is a thinkpad 760E, P133, 80 MB. I'ts got a pair of pcmcia 
ethernet cards, an NE2000 compatible and a 3c589 compatible.
I installed linux kernel 2.4.18 on the laptop from source and compiled 
it with all the iptables options (the machine it replaced used 
ipchains). I installed a ruleset & I thought all was well - a machine 
inside the firewall could ping external machines. However it fails is 
trying to do anything other than ping. A browser running on a machine 
inside the firewall times out when contacting other sites or cannot 
contact them at all, even when I'm getting to them via IP address so it 
doesn't seem to be a DNS problem. the MTU on both eth0 & eth1 is set to 
1500 which the networking howto says is the right setting. Telneting 
from an "inside" machine to the  NATS laptop stalls after the "connected 
to 192.168.1.1" message. In desperation I swapped ethernet cards on the 
NATS - no fix. Finally I recompiled the kernel with ipchains and ran the 
setup script from the working NATS box. Same problem.
This is starting to drive me crazy. I suspect that there is an issue 
with having the ethernet connections on the pcmcia bus, but I don't know 
how to verify this. Does anyone on the bilug list have any helpfull 
suggestions? I've tried google, but I haven't been able to find anything 
about running a NATS on a laptop. Any help would be appreciated.

-terry s