Dear Jim,
Yes, when using the crossover cable, the gateway is not needed.
Barring prior internet connections in the machine's distant
past, I have no clue how the gateways may have been obtained.
All I recognise is that from "/sbin/route -n -v", "doit" is
alias for 192.168.0.1, as found in /etc/hosts. I am yet to look
at gateway-related issues when I focus on installing the
wireless router. Then, I will try out the suggestions.

However, the thorny question now is why does one or the other of
the network cards on the machine not work. This happens whether
or not the cards have different or identical IP addresses! (It
seems to be a chance game!) Decoding the output of
"/sbin/ifconfig -a" is not yet obvious to me!


William. 

--- Jim McCarthy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> William --
> 
> You wrote:
> >
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I finally got the connection over the crossover cable! For
> > reasons that are beyond me, one of the two network cards (on
> > the desktop machine) becomes "inactive" shortly after
> activation
> > under system-network-config. After permuting IP addresses
> and
> > network cards, I finally got it working!
> > 
> > I am not sure if I had a configuration problem on the cards
> or
> > one of them is bad/unstable. However, since I also have
> Redhat
> > 9.0 on the machine, I am yet to secure an old card (that is
> > known to work under RH9) in order to find out.
> > 
> > Nonetheless, I would appreciate if anyone could let me know
> if
> > the above solution/problem could have been detected by
> > interpreting the /sbin/ifconfig -a and /sbin/route -v
> outputs.
> > 
> > For the router question, I will give feedback once I turn my
> > attention to it.
> > 
> > Many thanks to all for the assistance.
> > 
> > William.
> 
> I'm just catching up on this thread <sorry if this is old
> news>.
> In reviewing your output from /sbin/route on machine
> "tinys150":
> 
> >> [root@tinysl50 wss]#  /sbin/route -v
> >> Kernel IP routing table
> >> Destination  Gateway  Genmask     Flags Metric Ref Use
> Iface
> >> 192.168.0.0     *    255.255.255.0  U      0    0   0  eth0
> >> 169.254.0.0     *    255.255.0.0    U      0    0   0  eth0
> >> default       doit   0.0.0.0        UG     0    0   0  eth0
> >>
> 
> ...the gateway "doit" for the default route looks
> out-of-place,
> since with a direct network cable connectionn between two SL5
> machines, you do not have "Domain Name Service" (DNS) to
> identify
> an IP address (192.168.0.3) with the name "doit".  Hence I
> might
> suggest you try on tiny150:
> 
> % /sbin/route del default
> % /sbin/route add default gw 192.168.0.3 eth0
> % /sbin/route -v
> 
> and likewise on hps150 try:
> 
> % /sbin/route del default
> % /sbin/route add default gw 192.168.0.1 eth0
> % /sbin/route -v
> 
> ... and in the -v output, check that each machine is
> configured
> so that the other machine is its default gateway.  Maybe this 
> will help ensure that the two machines communicate reliably
> via
> the cross-over network cable ?
> 
> Good luck,
> 
>     -- Jim McCarthy
> 
> 


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