Lost external internet access during installation (Solved)

CliveHarris · Last edited by CliveHarris on Fri Dec 31, 2004 7:11 am; edited 1 time in total

This one's puzzling me, because I've installed Gentoo on at least half-a-dozen machines on this network without this happening.

OK. I'm updating a PC from Redhat 8 to Gentoo, using the 2004.3 universal installation disc. It's on a network, with external internet access through a gateway machine which provides a firewall, file server and proxy server.

The installation started fine. It logged onto the network, downloaded the necessary files and installed a base system without any problems. I then rebooted onto my new kernel (win4lin-2.6.9-r5) without any problems. The trouble started when I tried to emerge the rest of my system. The machine had lost all access to anything outside the local network, so the emerge ground to a halt as soon as it tried to download the distfiles. A ping (or any other kind of access) to anything within the network was fine, but a ping (or file download) anywhere else results in an indefinite wait, with no error messages. That's true whether I use a name (i.e. "ping google.com") or a number sequence (i.e. "ping 216.239.37.99"), so I don't think it's a DNS resolution problem.

I've temporarily been able to continue the Gentoo installation by doing an nfs mount from the fileserver's "/usr/portage" directory onto this machine. This enables it to find the distfiles it needs, but is unsatisfactory in the long term.

I think I've exhausted all the obvious causes. The "resolv.conf" file is correct (same as the other machines). The firewall must be OK because it worked fine when running on the install disc. One oddity I did notice is that "ifconfig" gave an extra "inet6 addr" line, which I hadn't seen before, so presumably it's trying to do some IPv6 accesses. Is that enough to cause the problem? If so, how do I tell it to stop?

The only other thing I can think of is that either some important service has failed to start, or there's some fault in the new kernel I've just compiled. Any idea where to look?

Thanks
Clive Harris

kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 2969

Are there any error messages while initialising eth0 during boot-up?

Does ifconfig show a IP address assigned to the machine?

I would also try restarting the net.eth0 service.

CliveHarris · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 8:08 am Post subject:

Hi,
Thanks for getting back to me.

<< Are there any error messages while initialising eth0 during boot-up?>>
I get the following messages from dmesg:
nfs warning: mount version older than kernel
NET: Registered protocol family 10
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

I think the "mount version older than kernel" is probably irrelevant, but the other messages may be more significant

<< Does ifconfig show a IP address assigned to the machine?>>

ifconfig shows an address of 192.168.0.2, which is what I wanted

<<I would also try restarting the net.eth0 service>>

Tried running "/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart", with no joy

Thanks
Clive Harris

addi · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 4:02 pm Post subject:

I don't have any experience in this particular area, so take my advice in context...

I would try reconfiguring your kernel to remove any IPv6 references from it and recompile. Try getting rid of tunnelling as well. The worst case scenario is that you will have to rebuild your kernel again to get those particular features back.

Good luck, and I hope this helps.
_________________
James Addison
http://www.pjsoft.ca

bgmncwj · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 13

You mentioned that any ping within the network works fine, so it sounds like maybe your routes are messed up? Try running 'route' and see if a default gateway address shows up. It should be listed with a destination of 'default'. If you don't have that line try running:

CliveHarris

Thanks very much for all your help everyone. I finally traced the problem to a stupid typo error in /etc/conf.d/net. I'd mistyped the default gateway address. The trouble was that the address I'd typed corresponded to a real machine, just the wrong one! I must have stared at that file a dozen times without seeing the mistake. I'd better get new glasses!

Of cource the install disc didn't have that problem because it was using dhcp, so it found the correct gateway automatically.

Thanks again, everyone