DNS, routing and strange timeouts (not quite newbie)

[Steve Cox]

HI all,

I posted this the other day but I think the news server I used is playing up
so I'm trying again - sorry if you've seen it before...

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A recent ex-newbie here (I guess I've now sort of qualified now that
I've set up a home network and using ipchains with masquarading :-)
.........

Still managed to mess it up a bit though and I need some help.

I currently have two machines - my main box - 'linuxhost' and a more
basic router - 'linuxrouter'.

linuxhost (192.169.1.2) is running inetd, X etc. the router is
idetifiable via /etc/hosts (and networking is set up to use linuxrouter
as a nameserver.

linuxrouter (192.168.1.1) is a more basic install, running inetd, pppd,
named (bind8) etc. Ppp is running fine - currently being connected by
hand - diald is coming later. Again the other box is identifiable using
the hosts file but also through A records in DNS. (Both are set to use
hosts over DNS)

When the router is connected to the ISP via pppd, all is working fine. I
have set up DNS (named) on linuxrouter as per the howtos and the
'cached-namerserver' rpm with mods for the forwarding to my ISP DNS
boxes and reverse lookup. When connected, nslookup on loth linuxrouter
and linuxhost is fine - both forward and reverse lookups etc. (I'm using
ipchains MASQ to hide behind one IP number.

The problem is when pppd is not up - both after bootup and after a
disconnection. The obvious problem is that when netscape is started, it
hangs trying to load the homepage. The prob is that the homepage is
''file:/usr/doc/HTML/index.html' and by hanging I mean the program is
dead - just showing the window outline, the stop button, the URL and
NOTHING else. It will sit like this for minutes (and requiring a kill to
recover) until it eventually times-out and displays the file url
correctly (?).

The other symptom is that ftp FROM linuxrouter TO linuxhost will hang
with no ^C -   just kill-9    - for a similar amount of time before the
login prompt appears (in.ftpd has been started by inetd though). Telnet
works fine though. And if I bring up the ppp connection whilst waiting,
ftp spring immediately to life - as does netscape.

As a test, I disabled named on the router box and made linuxhost's
namerserver that of my ISP - the same thing still happened.

Any ideas VERY welcome....

Steve

Just a bit more, the linuxrouter /etc/resolve.conf uses 127.0.0.1 as the
nameserver (but was set to the IPs of the ISP dns servers when linuxhost
was using these namesservers itself - during the testing mentioned earlier)