[ On Tuesday, September 25, 2001 at 21:46:25 (+0200), Manuel Bouyer wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: sysinst requires ping return from gateway
>
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 01:23:53AM -0400, Cannella, Michael (ISS Southfield) wrote:
> > 
> > I've got a laptop that, in its current state, can have either a CD-ROM or a
> > floppy, but not both simultaneously. The logical inference: do an ftp
> > install.
> > 
> > But, my local gateway is outside my control and drops traffic aimed directly
> > at it (e.g., icmp).

Sysinst only wants to know the gateway is alive in case routing is
needed to reach the FTP host.  A 'ping' is a fair test of aliveness, but
perhaps not the best (more below).

> > Since sysinst requires that my local gateway be pingable--and quits the
> > install if it isn't--I can't install, _even though I have both internet
> > connectivity and DNS resolution._

Is your FTP host (for the install sets) on the local net, or not?

> I know it's not a real solution, but I worked around this by specifying as
> a gateway another host of the LAN which was smart enouth to
> redirect traffic to the real gateway (a NetBSD machine with
> sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
> will do it).

That's a good idea, but it seems a bit of a stretch.  Why not just
download the sets to a host running FTP on the local subnet?

If you know the FTP host is on the local subnet then you can specify the
address or name of the FTP host, or even the host being installed, as
the gateway.

It still shouldn't be pinging the gateway -- the underlying networking
error messages should suffice.

Sysinst shouldn't even be trying the gateway if the FTP host is on the
local subnet.  This minor hassle could be eliminated if sysinst was
smart enough to do a netmask operation first to see whether or not the
FTP host was on the local network or not, but that might mean doing a
DNS lookup instead of leaving that to the ftp client code.....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>