[svlug] Building a linux router.

[James Sparenberg]

All,


  Ran into an interesting one today.  Not a show stopper found the right 
way to make it all work.  But still strange.  

Dell 1850 with 2 3rd party Gigabyte Nics in additon to the 2 onboard 
nics. 

all 4 setup on various 10.0.0.0 nets.  The reason for this is that the 
1850 we had, and nics are less expensive than buying a Enterprise 
grade, GigE router used or new.   

Installed Debian etch and configured accordingly. (4 interfaces, 4 
static IP's)

Right now it's working great.  However what I had to do was  put eth0 as 
the last item in the /etc/network/interfaces file.  For unknown reasons 
when eth0 came first it would get stuck right after configuring the 
interface (eth0 is the only one with a default route and it will be the 
interface, facing, our DMZ)  

I moved eth0 to the last item and it all works as advertised.  Nice 
clean GigE router.  

Does anyone know why?  I've got the what and a working solution, just 
don't know why it would want eth0 to be the last card brought up. (BTW 
we tried it after removing  the default gateway, DHCP etc. )  for 
whatever reason it seems that the count is 1 2 3 0 

Has anyone else ever seen this?  I'm curious now as to the why this 
happens.

James