Barry

main-request@lists.alug.org.uk wrote:

The laptop does gets an IP address from the wireless router via DHCP and he can traceroute to the router and his desktop. He cannot ping either the router or his desktop - there are no replies. He can, however, ping the laptop from his desktop and get replies. He cannot connect to any sites on the network using a browser.

If the laptop gets an address and can then reach locally connected devices, then networking is obviously up and running. The ICMP failure sounds to me like it could be a firewall issue. Try disabling the SUSE default firewall in YAST (SUSE's configuration tool) as a first step. Also fire up ethereal/wireshark and take a look at what is going where. And are you sure that the router and desktop are configured to respond to ICMP echo requests anyway? The ICMP behaviour may be a symptom of configuration elsewhere. Can he ping an external address (google) from 1) the desktop, 2) the laptop? Can the browser connect to a known web server's IP address (DNS issues?)

The router address is given as the default gateway on the laptop for wlan0 which is the wireless interface. SUSE is also using Network Manager to run things and complains about commands such as ifup or ifdown and ignores them.

That confirms that the DHCP server is correctly dishing out the necessary routing details and the laptop is responding appropriately. SUSE offers two ways of handling networking setup: the traditional ifup/ifdown method, or user controlled with network manager. It looks as if you have the latter configured so SUSE /will/ ignore ifup/ifdown directives and will complain with something like "network interface is managed from network manager" if you try otherwise.

Configuration files on SUSE are not where I'd expect to see them on Debian so I'm at a bit of a loss and I've run out of ideas.

Configuration files can be found in /etc/sysconfig/network. But I'd advise against manual edits because SUSE expects YAST to configure these (and other /etc/sysconfig files).

Which version of SUSE 10 are you running? I used to use SUSE regularly up until about 9.3. When 10.0 came out, Novell managed to completely cock up what had been a good configuration tool (YAST) and I stopped using it. I still have copies of 10.0, openSUSE 10.1 10.2 and 10.3 which I can fire up and play with if necessary. and you get back to me with further details.

Mick