Passing Bt Engineer scuppers network!
Ages ago i set up a nice little server running Arch Linux, with a custom compile of Samba, running very nicely thank you very much.
I set up Bind, DHCP, CUPS, and jut about everything else so that as far as the users running Windows were concerned they may well have been attached to a Windows server (except of course it is rock solid)
Not much bother there then.
Until one day the BT managed router connecting said network to the interweb thingy ceased to function (I presume it was involved in sexual intercourse).
So along came the BT man, with his nice shiny new router to put in place.
By the time he left you could either get on the Internet or the server, but not both.
What he had done was to make his router a DHCP server (as in giving out network addresses and configuration information) with different network information as well. The result was that if your PC got its information from one then it was on the Internet and if it got it from the other then it could get on the server.
All the BT engineer had to actually do is turn his brain on, and query any machine for it's network settings. That would have told him the IP address that he had to set his router to, and to turn DHCP off. Would have taken 2 minutes to find out, and anther 2 to set up the router, as opposed to the several hours he did spend going around in circles buggering things up.
Always remember when on an unfamiliar network, that it helps to check out some very basics before you try to unnecessarily try to reconfigure everything.
I set up Bind, DHCP, CUPS, and jut about everything else so that as far as the users running Windows were concerned they may well have been attached to a Windows server (except of course it is rock solid)
Not much bother there then.
Until one day the BT managed router connecting said network to the interweb thingy ceased to function (I presume it was involved in sexual intercourse).
So along came the BT man, with his nice shiny new router to put in place.
By the time he left you could either get on the Internet or the server, but not both.
What he had done was to make his router a DHCP server (as in giving out network addresses and configuration information) with different network information as well. The result was that if your PC got its information from one then it was on the Internet and if it got it from the other then it could get on the server.
All the BT engineer had to actually do is turn his brain on, and query any machine for it's network settings. That would have told him the IP address that he had to set his router to, and to turn DHCP off. Would have taken 2 minutes to find out, and anther 2 to set up the router, as opposed to the several hours he did spend going around in circles buggering things up.
Always remember when on an unfamiliar network, that it helps to check out some very basics before you try to unnecessarily try to reconfigure everything.
posted by Benedict White at 8:41 pm
7 Comments:
you're a brave man. I would've told them to leave the router and let an expert do it.
having said this, I don't use DHCP
Dizzy, I didn't let him do anything. It was a customer network we set up. They then had a BT managed router brake so called in BT to replace it.
I would not have had them do it on their own either.
Mind you I don't know ehy you don't use DHCP. It is a useful way to manage transient machines.
I don;t use DHCP because I'm an anal sysadmin who doesn;t like handing out IPs willynilly for entire subnets. I generally have a DMZ for DHCP addresses and then route traffic off into a different RFC 1918 address range with statics to segment.
I see. any windows servers about?
Windiows? As a server? Are you sick?
Bugger, did I say server?
Sheesh. That what you get for not checking what you typed!
No as clients I meant!
Sorry about that.
Win XP clients seem to prefer wins etc running and it helps to assign IP via DHCP and then do dynamic DNS.
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