RH9 w/XP Wireless, Please Help Me !

[mesrob]

Hello. I'm a first-time poster, long time lurker.
I have a problem with my home network and I'm hoping
some of the gurus around here might be able to help me out.
Bear with me for a minute because I'm going to try to give
as much info as I can, so this may be a little long.
Okay, my current setup is as follows (hope this posts correctly):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISP
|
Cable Modem
|
PCI ETHERNET NIC
(IP ASSIGNED FROM ISP) on
RedHat Linux 9 Box
|
|
RH9 w/IP MASQUERADING
|
|
ISA ETHERNET NIC (192.168.1.1) on RH9 Box
|
|
|
LinkSys Wireless-G Router WRT54G (192.168.1.2)
|
|

PC 1:
WinXP Pro Compaq Presario Laptop Belkin54G PCMCIA Wireless Card

PC 2:
WinXP Pro HP Pavillion w/ Built-In Wireless

PC 3:

WinXP Home Gateway Desktop w/ LinkSys USB Adapter

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Okay, so that's my setup. I know having the router behind
the Linux Box is not standard. But it was easier for me to do that
than to figure out how to go modem->router->linux->network. I tried that,
no luck, I'm a total noob. And this way the Linux computer is always on
the Internet even if the XP boxes or the router go down, which is handy, because then I can still search for solutions on the Internet (like I'm doing right now).


Anyway, here's my problem. I can get on the Internet perfectly fine on the RedHat machine. I can not however reach the Internet on the XP boxes using the wireless cards.

I have disabled DHCP on the router, made sure the router was set to function as a router and not a gateway, and assigned each of the wireless cards/adapters individual IPs of 192.168.1.x where x>2 and <255, manually entered the DNS servers provided by ISP, and set the gateway as 192.168.1.1. I have also disabled NetBIOS and LMHOST lookup on all XP machines.


Now, the wireless cards can all access and pickup the wireless network
set on the router (SSID: homenetwork). Occassionally, they'll even show
packets being received. But for unknown reason(s) the XP machines can not access the Internet via said wireless adapters. I can, however, plug an Ethernet cable directly into the router and an XP box and enable that connection with a static IP of 192.168.1.x and all the other settings the same as the wireless settings (other than the wireless part) and it can access the internet perfectly fine. TCP/IP filtering is enabled on the Ethernet enabled connection and set to "Permit All".


I have tried setting everything on the wireless cards exactly the same as on the Ethernet connection and I still get nothing. And as I mentioned the wireless cards do pick up the network (homenetwork) and connect to it. All of this leads me to believe my router is configured incorrectly, but I'm not sure on that.

Oh, I also have the STRONGER rc.firewall script enabled on the Linux machine, in case that's relevant. I didn't change a thing in that script other than what it says to change, and only changed things to what
the script says to change whatever to. So basically, I just followed the steps for RH9 and set the appropriate IPs. If any of you would like to see the script anyway, let me know and I'll post it.

I don't think that's the issue because as I mentioned I can access the Internet from XP machines using the Ethernet cable. I'd like to get the wireless working (with Internet access) because the computers are scattered around the house. I've run a search on this site and browsed a few posts and have looked around on the Internet, including LinkSys homepage, and I can't figure this out.

I have a hunch this is a router configuration problem or an XP problem, but I don't know enough about Linux to know if it could be a Linux configuration problem too, so I figured this board would be a
good place for a noob like me to ask for help. The situation has become quite frustrating at this point and any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks in advance and I apologize for the long post.

P.S.

I didn't list the manufacturers of the NICs on the Linux box because I don't remember them off the top of my head but they work perfectly fine.
Thanks.

[happybunny]

yikes.

Can you ping the router and the linux box from the wireless xp box?

can you ping 216.109.117.107 from your wireless xp box?

I'm not sure 'bout the firewall, but does it list the wireless cards MAC address for permission to surf?

[mesrob]

Hi, thanks for responding. Well, right now my family has made getting online a necessity for right-this-minute, so I disconnected the Linux comp and set everything up as if it wasn't there. Of course I'm still having XP problems Microsoft-style but I've got it (mostly) working on the Microsoft side. But before I started to ignore the Linux PC I could ping it from the XP wireless-es. I didn't think of pinging outside addresses (slaps forehead), simply because I wasn't reaching the Internet but was reaching internal things including the router, honestly didn't think of it. And with everything disconnected I haven't been able to try that yet. I can tell you that nothing is set up in regards to the MAC addresses other than binding the IPs to the NICs on the Linux PC. I didn't see anything in the firewall script to set permissions for allowing to surf, but it's been a while since I've looked at it. Earlier, I saw the router does have allow/deny to surf options (disabled by default) and I tried setting those, nothing, so I set it back to out-of-the-box setup only with the IP changed and DHCP disabled. I probably won't be able to look at anything tonight, but I will give it another shot tomorrow. I'll remember to try pinging outside the network too (slaps forehead for good measure). I'll post here if any headway is made. Thanks.

[happybunny]

thats cool....and im in the same boat as you....if my sweety cant get on the net 'cause im monkeying with linux she gets upset. Crazy woman!

Anyway, that linksys is a nice one...why not let it handle all your internet routing?

Plug cable/dsl into its wan port and everything else into the other ports. Linux will get assigned an IP just like windows and you'll be all set.

You can still test and work with linux firewall, just keep a direct connection for the other machines for the family.