Somebody **please help me!**

(I am going crazy here...)

Here is the problem:

I have 2 Slackware 9.0 machines, one of these is connected to a modem on /dev/modem. Both are also connected to a LAN through /dev/eth0. I also have a Windows 98 machine, attached to the LAN through its own ethernet card.

The LAN works great: I can ping, traceroute and ssh/sftp back and forth between the three machines. Absolutely no problem. My final goal is to have a Linux gateway for my LAN to the Internet, in such a way that all my machines can connect to the Internet, going through the gateway.

Using pppsetup, I created a script to connect to my ISP on the machine that has the modem.

The script works great, and I can connect to the ISP with no problem whatsoever.

BUT... the "ppp-go" script prints out a message saying "did not replace default route eth0" or some such. I can't connect to the Internet, even though the ppp0 interface is active.

Entering "route -e" or "route -n", I can see the different kernel routes... but not "ppp0". The default route through "/dev/eth0" is there.

If I try to add a default "route" through "ppp0", I still can't connect to the Internet, even though "ppp0" appears in the routing table.

But I can manually add a route to, for instance, www.google.com... and I can then connect to google, but not to the rest of the Internet.

A friend of mine has suggested adding a default route to the IP address of my ISP... Can anyone confirm this??

Please help me, people and many thanks in advance...

You need to run
route del default
route add default ppp0

There was a problem while replacing old default route (LAN). What you need to add in your scrip is:
route del default
before you start ppp0 (or after the script is finished, the two commands above).

Remember, that you need a short firewalling script - for masquarading, to allow other machines access the Net. There are many posted to this forum, just search and choose the one you like best.

Thanks Mara, that helped!

I also needed to remove some wrong gateway configuration from /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1, since the gateway was configured with its own IP address as... a gateway.

Entering the default route, as you mentioned, allowed me to have access to the Internet from the gateway.

As you mentioned, I am going to look carefully at this forum and at some others to get more information about NAT and firewall.

Thanks again!