The Mepis Utilities tool fights back ! (Network)

The MEPIS OS Center has an annoying behavior - when you change any values on a tab you MUST click the APPLY button BEFORE you change to another tab.

You can, of course, bypass MOSC and set values in /etc/network/interface directly.
--
GreyGeek

At last! I got it figured out.

The problems here were a combination of the setup stumble described by GreyGeek (many thanks) and an intermittent hardware connection to the network. About one third of the time it was operational, twice when I was checking it out with Knoppix.

It was steadily driving me mad. There was a danger I would become more familiar with Debian a-la-Knoppix than via Mepis!

I also will now opt for editing /etc/network/interface.

The /etc/gateways file has a long geeky command in it commented out. I will leave well alone. There is also /etc/hosts/ and /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny

Some places I just should not go! Thanks folks.

I assume that this:

# /etc/gateways:<br />
#<br />
#<net | host> NAME1 gateway NAME2 metric VALUE<br />
<passive | active | external>

is what you're talking about. (Last commented line went and split on me. It's supposed to be all one line.)

Yeah...well....for those who may not know what that's all about...here ya go...

The general format of the entries contained within the /etc/gateways file is that of a single line of seven fields, following the form depicted above.

The seven fields have the following purposes:

<net | host>

Denotes the route destination field and indicates that one should specify the route to be to a network or specific host. In other words, "net" or "host" would go here.

NAME1

The name associated with the net or host destination. Name1 may be a dotted-decimal address, or a symbolic name; such as one would specify within the /etc/hosts or /etc/networks files.

gateway

Keyword. Indicating that the subsequent string is indicative of the gateway host.

NAME2

The name associated with the gateway host. Name2 may be a dotted-decimal address, or a symbolic name; such as one would specify within the /etc/hosts or /etc/networks files.

metric

Keyword. Indicating that the subsequent string is indicative of the "hop-count" to the destination host or network.

VALUE

Numeric. The number of gateways from the local network to the destination network.

<br />
<passive | active | external> 

The exchange of RIP information is not anticipated from a passive gateway.
An active gateway is handled like a network interface.
An external gateway is identified to inform the routed daemon that another routing process will install such a route and that alternative routes to that destination should not be installed.

We live to edify.

Home of the Point-N-Click Help Files
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Yes - thanks for the reply. I had thought that it looked like quite a powerful way of pointing too a final gateway through a network, maybe one where the box connected to a router/modem is itself serving other PCs.

So - if after using netcardconfig, the PC is already set up to know the gateway is the router/ADSL modem, usually with an address something like 192.168.x , and there are no other networks involved, we can leave the /etc/gateways file alone.