STRANGE NETWORK PROBLEM

[Stratos Laspas]

Art Alexion wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 June 2006 09:39, Stratos Laspas wrote:
>   
>> Art Alexion wrote:
>>     
>>> On Wednesday 14 June 2006 03:53, Stratos Laspas wrote:
>>>       
>>>> 6) I use firestarter as firewall
>>>>         
>>> Most routers have built in firewalls.  Are they clashing?
>>>       
>> Thanks for the reply. Yes, the Zyxel has a built-in firewall. I will try
>> disabling it and check again. The thing is that there was never before a
>> clash between them. And how does this fit with the fact that when I
>> restart the network, I have access again, but then it fails again? I
>> can't figure this out.
>>     
>
> Just a thought, as I just got one of those things myself (Actiontec), and the 
> manual doesn't recommend running the internal firewall and a software 
> firewall on the client computers.  I turned off the Actiontec firewall as it 
> was less configurable than the one on my computer.
>
> As for why it takes some time for a problem to occur, it may be that it works 
> fine until something triggers both firewalls incompatibly.
>   
Actually, I first tried to see if it was an ip6 problem. I found a
thread at ubuntuforums (adding something like a bad_list file in the
modprobe directory).
No more ip6, but still that did not work.

Then I thought maybe it was a dns problem. I could not find anything
wrong with the network settings, but still I installed bind (providing
"named") to handle dns locally. That's because in Mandrake I remember I
used dns caching with bind and another package called
"caching-nameserver" which provided the config settings for caching only
(nice little package, I wish it existed in ubuntu).
That didn't work
(I would like to know however how to set up bind for caching only, it is
supposed to speed up network access. I installed webmin to see if I
could set it up more easily from there, but it still appeared
complicated to me)

Then I disabled both the router firewall and firestarter and everything
seemed to work. I uninstalled firestarter and enabled the router
firewall, which seemed wiser, since (a)  I have a local network with the
desktop pc and a laptop on wireless-wpa and (b) in any case (k)ubuntu
appears safe enough even without a firewall.
That seems to have worked.