Duel Ethernet card problems?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Quoting Doug Bronson <doug at bronson-tate.com>:

> After coming to the conclusion that IPChains was not going to do what I
> wanted it to do, I decided to not only upgrade to RH 8 (using IPtables)
> but to build a new machine.

Just out of curiosity, what are you using as a guide or reference for this 
project?  There are some very good HOWTO files at www.tldp.org, and books like 
Using Linux can be handy references as well.  There's also David Ranch's 
Trinity project for hardening Linux configurations, and some good books on 
building firewalls.

You may find that you're able to do everything you need using a GUI and 
configuration tools, but chances are they don't include all the options you 
might think of and will eventually bite you by not following a standard 
procedure for configuring your system.  When you get into a more advanced 
project where you have to drop back to working with the text configuration 
files, you may spend days hunting for various components that change system 
settings when they run.

The GUI tools are getting better about this, and about making changes by 
editing the standard text files instead of by running some live daemon or 
something.  Linuxconf was notorious for not following standards, so that your 
system would be configured differently depending on where Linuxconf hung during 
startup.

What you are encountering is typical of GUI tools - they're great for setting 
up a single-card workstation, and they have provisions for setting up a 
firewall, but they don't correctly configure a system with two identical 
network cards.

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the /etc/modules.conf file, where you 
need an "alias" entry for each of your cards.  Although some modules will 
automatically detect a second instance of the same card, not all will, and it's 
better to be explicit if you want the system to work all the time, every time.

As an example, one of my systems has:

alias eth0 3c509
alias eth1 3c59x

Another has:

alias eth0 3c59x
alias eth1 3c59x

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