UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

alright, this problem is a bit weird.

i rebuilt the kernel and included the parameters for the 2 AMD NIC's in
the system. now, ifconfig shows them to be pcn0 and pcn1. i assigned
them their ip addresses in rc.conf.

now, for some reason, i cannot ping the interface from another system and
i cannot ping another system from the FreeBSD box through either of the
NIC's. i can however ping the NIC's themselves from the FreeBSD box.

when i plug the cat5 cable into either jack and run "ifconfig" the status
changes from "no carrier" to "active".

what further confuses me is that there is no entry for either pcn0 or pcn1
in /dev. when i try "sh MAKEDEV pcn0" or "sh MAKEDEV pcn1" i get the
following message:

pcn0 (or pcn1) - no such device name.

i don't know if the two are related or unrelated.

can anyone help me out with this one?

if the entries for you network cards are not in /dev then i believe that is because the drivers for the cards are not loaded. but if ifconfig does show them as configured make sure that you are typing the device name correctly. make sure that your networking is set up right, check your gateway settings, mask, name resolution etc etc.

hmmm.... yeah the networking element is right... i erified it at least 5 times.

the thing though... is that on the same subnet, the gateway shouldn't really matter, since nothing needs to be routed. also the name resolution shouldn't matter, because i am pinging IP's.

any other suggestions?

You are more-than-likely having a problem with either your broadcasting address or your gateway as to why it can't be pinged from outside.

Having two interfaces on a machine and using both of them at once sometimes brings some difficulty into place. Basically there is one default route out, and by adding another interface, you are making your machine a router-

FreeBSD has a way of handeling this via a method called trunking. It's a bit of a read, but it's the right direction. If successful, you will also enjoy the speed/fall-back advantages of having twin interfaces.

And also- If it's freebsd 5.x it's the dev filesystem, so the devices won't actually be there because they are generated when you need it, so MAKEDEV will fail. To take a look, first do a find to see where it is- It will fail, and after that point, move to the /dev/ directory, and type 'ls {device}' where {device} is your device, i.e. psm0. It will then be there.. like magic.

i have two interfaces because i wanted to make this a proxy server. i thought it would be straight forward enough. is this going to be a huge read?

why will only one interface take the IP address?

also, if the devices are on the same subnet, there is no need for a router to route packets. so why would the default route need to matter?

as for the default route and the subnet mask, they are correct as well. but i don't see how the first one will impact anything within it's local subnet.

The default router will give you an interesting time of things. You will see traffic heading in through one interface, and going out what ever is attached to the default. This will always happen, unless some form of routing / packet shaping is going on- It is somewhat of a read, but well worth it.

The good news: What you are trying to do is doable, and there are many good writeups on how to do it- It almost sounds like you are in need of natting and proxy over that- A really good resource for you is defcon1.org- If memory serves me correctly, they have a walk through on it. Also, I think the online docs have something similar-

Cheers